Home | Resume  | Office Location & Directions | Contact Ms. Scharff

Center for Relationships in Transition

Psychotherapy Practice

Upcoming Events

IPI Metro Washington

Therapy Demystified

Individual Therapy

I work with individual therapy patients in 50 minute sessions, with a frequency of one to three sessions per week. Taking into account your treatment goals as well as practical concerns (such as time and finances), you and I will collaborate to develop a therapy schedule that makes sense for you. And remember, nothing is ever cast in stone. As our work together progresses we can always make changes—individual therapy can become couple or family therapy, once per week therapy can become twice, a Tuesday appointment can be moved to Thursday. The important thing is that you and I maintain an open dialogue about how best to facilitate your ongoing growth and develop in therapy.

When to consider individual therapy:

• You suffer with a specific symptom (i.e. anxiety, depression, phobia) from which you want relief
• You’re troubled by ineffective or self-defeating patterns of behavior in one or more areas of your life
• You want one-on-one support from your therapist
• You feel your problems originate within you
• You feel you need couple or family therapy, but your partner or family refuses to go

Limitations to individual therapy:

When there are difficulties in relationships, it’s common for those problems to be mistakenly viewed as existing within one person. For example, a family that’s having a lot of trouble with intimacy among and between its members may experience itself as having one very difficult child, say an acting-out adolescent. When this happens we say that one person, the “identified patient,” is “containing” the problems of the whole family, because it’s more difficult for the family to face the complexities of its problems than to think of itself as having one troubled member. If you or another person in your family is “containing” problems that are really shared by everyone, then individual therapy will only reinforce the problem. If you seek individual therapy, but during the course of our work together we come to understand that your problem is really a shared one, I will recommend couple or family therapy—either instead of, or as a complement to your individual therapy. We will then work together to decide whether it makes sense for me to become your couple or family therapist, or whether I should offer you an appropriate outside referral.