How long the work really takes

People who ask how long it takes are usually not asking for a figure. They are asking something else: whether they will come out of this, and what getting there will cost in time and money. Those are fair questions, and they deserve a better answer than "it depends".

Why there is no number

Two people with the same symptom can be facing very different work, because the symptom says little about what holds it up. A panic attack that appears in an overloaded period and a panic attack that arrives after twenty years of controlling everything are two different things, even though a clinic calls them by the same name.

Anyone promising results in a set number of sessions is describing a protocol, not your situation. For some conditions those protocols work and make sense; they do not work because the number is written down, they work when the problem really has that shape.

What can be said

There are orders of magnitude, and I give them willingly because they help people decide.

• A few weeks. When the question is bounded: a decision to make, a specific event to get through, a clarification that is enough to get moving again.
• Six months to a year. The most common case. A symptom that has been around a while, but a life around it that holds.
• Longer. When what wants to change is not an episode but a recurring way of being in things. Here the time is not a defect of the method: it is the measure of what is moving.

The signs that something is closing

It is not the disappearance of the symptom, which often comes earlier and is not enough on its own. It is more sideways than that: noticing the pattern while it happens rather than two days later; finding you decided something without the usual internal interrogation; arriving at a session with nothing to say because the week simply went by.

When that happens for several weeks running, the conversation about ending opens by itself. I do not spring it on you, and I do not keep it shut if you open it.

Stopping

You can, at any point, and no justification is needed. The only thing I ask is a last meeting rather than a message. That is not a formality: ending a relationship by saying so face to face is, for many people, exactly the kind of thing the work was about.