Individual psychotherapy

Individual psychotherapy is you and one psychologist, for fifty minutes, working on something you have decided together is worth working on. It is the format most therapy at PHC takes, and it is described here on its own page because the format is a real question for people — who will be in the room, what will they ask, what am I supposed to say — and it usually gets answered nowhere.

A first session is mostly listening. You are asked what has been going on, for how long, and what it is costing you. You are not asked to have it organised, and you are not asked to arrive with a diagnosis. Sessions after that have more shape: something to work on, a way of working on it, and a review of whether it is doing what it was supposed to.

What happens inside those fifty minutes depends on which therapy is indicated for you — and that is the point of the next section, because the format is constant and the method is not.

What it is not: it is not advice, it is not a friend who has trained for it, and it is not a place where you will be told what to do with your life. It is also not something you choose from a menu. Which therapy you are offered inside the one-to-one format is a clinical decision made after an initial session.

PHC is an assessment-first practice. The one-to-one format is where most of the work happens; what happens inside it follows from the assessment.

1. An initial session.We ask what has been going on, for how long, and what it is costing you. Nothing is administered before this conversation. Where the picture needs more than a conversation, emotional assessment and symptom screening decides which further tests, if any, are clinically warranted — and a written report follows where testing is done. See every assessment.
2. A psychologist matched to what that found.Psychologists at PHC are not assigned on availability. Assignment is based on speciality, your presenting needs and clinical fit. Preferred psychologist gender is one of the six details we ask for when you book, and it is used in the matching. If the fit is not right, tell us and we will move you to someone else — that request costs you nothing and is not taken personally.
3. 50-minute sessions, in clinic or online.A standard session is 50 minutes. If it runs beyond that and your psychologist has the time, you can extend by an hour at an extra fee — you are told what that is before it happens. Minor overruns of one to five minutes are not charged. Fees vary by psychologist and by service: how fees and booking work.
4. Reviewed as it goes.What you are working on is revisited rather than assumed, and the therapy used can change as the picture does. Where the difficulty is really between people, your psychologist may propose couples or family work alongside or instead.

PHC's clinicians are trained in a wide range of approaches, and the one used with you is chosen rather than defaulted to. The named modalities each have a page: CBT, DBT, EMDR, trauma therapy and clinical hypnotherapy.

Others do not have a page of their own and are not being hidden from you. Across the team, our clinicians' own supplied credentials name humanistic and client-centred therapy, psychodynamic- and attachment-informed approaches, Gestalt therapy, art and creative approaches, mindfulness-based techniques, behavioural therapy, Applied Behaviour Analysis, and eidetic therapy.

That last one is unusual enough to be worth a plain sentence. Eidetic therapy works through the vivid mental images a person already carries — a remembered scene, a face, a room — using the image itself as the material of the session rather than talking about it in the abstract. It is much less widely practised in Pakistan than CBT or DBT, one PHC clinician names it among the modalities they are a specialist in, and if it is proposed to you your psychologist will explain what it involves before anything begins.

Which clinician is trained in what is set out on their own profile: see every psychologist at PHC.

Individual sessions are the format most of PHC's work takes, across nearly every presentation on this site — so rather than pick a handful to list here, the whole list is one click away, each with its own page explaining what PHC does about it.

See every condition we work with · See every therapy.

Every psychologist at PHC delivers one-to-one sessions. No individual card appears on this page, because one-to-one is the format the whole practice works in rather than a modality any one clinician's bio singles out — and naming three people here would imply the others do something else.

What is true of all of them: a minimum postgraduate qualification in clinical psychology, and over 800 supervised clinical hours completed before joining PHC. Who you would see is decided at the initial session. See every psychologist at PHC.