The First Ten Sessions: Why Clients Stay

Marketing gets someone into the room. After that, something else begins.

Someone sits three feet away from you and starts telling you why they came. And while you're trying to understand them, they're trying to understand you. Can I tell this person the truth? Will they understand me? Are they able to help me?

This course is about the first ten sessions. Not simply how to conduct them, but what to notice while the work is beginning, before things settle into simply how the two of you are. It's also about the question underneath every practice: what makes a treatment worth continuing?

Module 1: Introduction

Why a first appointment is not a practice, and why understanding a pattern isn't the same as being able to do something different.

Module 2: The Necessary Self

Meeting two people before naming anything, and asking who each of them had to become.

Module 3: What Happens Next

Listening for the exchange, not just the content: how two people end up somewhere neither of them chose.

Module 4: Who You Become With Them

The Expected Other, and what becomes easy between you.

Module 5: Inside the Hour

Seeing more doesn't relieve us of having to act. Asking why now, saying what you noticed, and deciding when to wait.

Module 6: The Things That Look Like Logistics

Fees, cancellations, lateness and time away, and the questions practical arrangements quietly begin to answer.

Module 7: The World You're Making

By the tenth session, the relationship feels ordinary. What kind of world have the two of you begun making together?

Bonus Materials

Concept cards for all five terms, a listening sheet to bring into session, a field guide for each module, case examples, and a final integration exercise.