How often do you have to go to the psychologist during therapy?

How often should you go to therapy, and what happens if you don't go for a while?

You probably already knew this, but going to psychotherapy is not like going to the doctor to get a prescription for a pill; the effect of the psychological intervention is felt after several sessions, not just one.

At the end of the day, going to psychological therapy is like a training process, where the real benefits of spending a few hours with the trainer accumulate until they become evident in a few weeks. However... how often should we go to the psychologist to overcome the problem that has led us to ask for professional support? Y... What happens if these sessions are interrupted for a while? Here we will answer these questions.

How often should you go to psychotherapy?

If you have the doubt about how often you should go to psychotherapy, it is normal, it is a common doubt among those who have not gone too much to the psychologist.

The first thing you should know is that you should not worry, because in all the cases the professionals of the psychological intervention will already indicate you when and how you should go to psychotherapy. will tell you when and how you should be going through these sessions, it is not something that you should just go to a psychologist.It is not something that you simply have to choose. But if you are curious and want to know the criteria followed to determine the frequency of therapy sessions, here you will find a summary of it.

The most common cases

The "default" option, the one that takes place in most cases of people who go to the psychologist, is the plan of one therapy session per week, always on the same day.

Why is it necessary to maintain this consistency? A summarized way of saying it is that the patient needs constant support to make changes in his/her life.. After all, psychotherapy is about embracing new habits of behavior, feeling and thinking, and this is not something that is achieved simply by sitting and talking with the therapist: between sessions there is work to be done, following the indications of the professional.

In this way, in the weekly sessions the patient's progress is monitored, his or her doubts are resolved so that he or she can continue to improve, new methods and techniques are taught to gradually overcome the problem, and new challenges are proposed that are a little more complex than those of the previous sessions. This logic of work requires constancy, and for this it is essential to have sessions with the psychologist on a regular basiswithout letting too much time pass between one consultation and the next.

What happens if weeks go by without going to therapy, despite the psychologist's recommendations? In these cases, normally, much of the progress will be lost, and it will be necessary to start again from a stage that had already been overcome. And that is if you go back to therapy, because many times the fact of not going to therapy for too long makes the patient throw in the towel, and no longer continue to treat.

Cases of crisis or in acute phase

In some cases, the symptoms that the person expresses are so severe, and their discomfort so intense, that it becomes necessary to go through psychotherapy sessions more than once a week.

For example, it is not uncommon for this to occur in hospital or other health care facilities where patients remain in where patients remain inpatients**, such as detoxification centers. This provides extra support to people who are in a particularly vulnerable situation.

Once every two, three or four weeks

There are also cases in which the patient sees the psychologist less than once a week. These are not as frequent as the occasions when a weekly session is held, but they are not rare either; they usually take place when the treatment is coming to an end, and in the follow-up phase.

At this stage the psychologist monitors the changes that have been taking place in the patient's life, in order to detect signs that he/she may be in a state of distress.In this stage, the psychologist monitors the changes that have been taking place in the patient's life, in order to detect signs that he/she may be relapsing into his/her problem and to react in time. In addition, he solves doubts, something very common in this phase, because as time goes by, situations arise that had not been discussed in the therapy sessions, and in cases like this the patient may feel confused, not knowing what to do.

If you cannot go to the psychology center... online therapy

Some time ago it was a problem not to be able to see the psychologist during some of the scheduled sessions; as we have seen, if we want to overcome a psychological disorder or solve some other emotional or behavioral problem, it is important to commit to the therapeutic process and bet on constancy.

Fortunately, nowadays it is not necessary to go to a psychologist's office to benefit from his or her support.. Online therapy, based on video calls, is as effective as face-to-face therapy, and even has some advantages that the "traditional format" does not have.

For example, it saves us travel timeand makes it possible to have professional help even in situations where we cannot leave our home, either because of an injury or in the context of a pandemic quarantine such as that of the coronavirus. And, of course, it helps to avoid interrupting therapy sessions.

That is why many psychology centers dedicate a good part of our work to online therapy, in addition to face-to-face therapy. If you are interested in this modality, we encourage you to get in touch with our team at Avance Psicólogosan organization with several decades of experience attending to patients and which has been offering online services for years. To see our contact information and read more about us, click here.

Bibliographical references:

• Cuijpers, P.; Huibers M.; Daniel Ebert, D.; Koole, S.L.; & Andersson, G. (2013). How much psychotherapy is needed to treat depression? A metaregression analysis. Journal of affective disorders, 149 (1-3): pp. 1 - 13.
• Spurgeon, J.A.; Wright, J.H. (2010). Computer-assisted cognitive-behavioral therapy. Current Psychiatry Reports. 12 (6): pp. 547 - 52.