Introductory Phone Calls... (12.5.25)

 

Introductory Phone Calls... (12.5.25)

12 May 2025|2025 posts

A note about requests for introductory phone calls.

People get in touch to ask about therapy services in a few ways.  The percentages are something like 80% via email, 10% text, 10% phone call.  I tend to leave my phone on ‘do not disturb’, so those who call will almost always be routed to voicemail.   This minimizes disruptions - important most days.  

Emails are nearly always quicker to see and respond to.  You can read/reply in smaller pockets of time – e.g. between client sessions, while at lunch, on a morning dog walk etc - whereas voicemails are picked up at the end of the day.  This is often when away from my office and doing something like trying to eat dinner or going to bed!  This means a delay in responding until, at the earliest, the next day.  It's often longer, as the diary for the following day may already be full, and the voicemail will not be 'front of mind', as it would if in the email inbox.

When people do leave a phone message, it is often to ask for a callback and a chance to talk.  For five years now I've replied by text, with apologies, saying no to a callback, and asking for an email address to send details and offer times for a consultation. 

Many therapists do offer a callback, and of course it is absolutely fine to ask!  These tend to be for somewhere between 15-20 minutes.  If you simply must speak to a therapist before meeting them, you’ve got many options.  But for my practice I've decided not to offer this.

On the therapy end of things, holding short intro calls doesn't have a particularly deep rationale that I can see.  Other than arranging a time to meet (which can be done with a clearer audit trail via email), I think there is an element of group-think at play e.g. “most-therapists-do-this-so-I-will-too”.   If the rationale for therapists is to ‘see if we are a good fit for therapy’, then surely this can be much better done, in person, in a consultation lasting 50 minutes?  A therapy hour - 40 to 50 mins - is about the smallest unit of time to helpfully talk about anything important and leave time to talk about the process of therapy.

Here is the rationale for my way of working.  There’s no special order, some relate to logistics for me as a therapist, others to the experience of someone interested in therapy:

• Are very brief conversations helpful? – can a therapist really judge either the connection with a potential client, or get a good sense of whether they can help in, say, fifteen minutes?   Can a client even begin to explain complex problems?  With such a time limit, there are serious implications around what can be discussed, and for how long. 
• Calls take longer than planned – quite understandably, people want to talk about important and emotional things in initial calls.  For some, this talk may be the first time they have spoken about something deeply upsetting.  A short call can mean stopping people and ‘moving the conversation on’ in ways that are unhelpful and may not be a brilliant therapeutic start, or, running the call for longer and accepting the impact (e.g. for the therapist, the loss of the only available ‘admin’ hour of the day, working until very late to catch up etc).  This can have implications over the years for the therapist, where emotional stamina is called for.
• Serious or overwhelming issues arise - more than once a potential client has begun to discuss difficulties with great emotion after five or ten minutes, requiring far longer than the remaining few minutes to handle sensitively.  Occasionally there are other more serious risk factors that are shared.  There is the risk that a person in difficulty is left emotionally ‘unpacked’ as, however skilled the therapist, there won’t be adequate time to address this.  It is preferable, by far, to have a full amount of time and be together in person should this occur.
• Diary logistics – even a quick call must be diarised on my end (an agreed time, a private space for confidentiality etc – just the same as any session), and a time has to be found outside of committed client hours during the week (these may already be long), and at a social time of day. Callbacks come on top of other admin aspects of running a practice.  If you arrange an intro call during office hours, then even if the call lasts five minutes you cannot then see a client during that hour, as to do so would throw out your diary timings for the rest of the day.
• Capacity issues / personal feelings! – I’ve been working close to (or at) full capacity for lots of years – while that’s the privilege of my life, I recognised intro calls were not a good protection of my own energies!  Offering this option began to take its toll, and I actively started to not look forward to the ‘hit/miss’ aspect of them.  I noticed that people who had arranged a consultation almost always came on time, but with arranged telephone calls there were more aborted meetings – e.g. ‘telephone tennis’ missing each other, bad connections, people being stuck in a meetings, not picking up, “I’m running fifteen mins late!” etc – often leading to some stress, and requiring waiting or rearranging (with the loss of another, second working hour at a sociable time, and often knock on commercial and family-time impacts).
• Finally, virtually always, I found the result of initial calls was to agree to meet for a full consultation in any case.  And so the call itself was likely a sub-optimal and unnecessary step.

So, in my practice I don’t offer telephone callbacks, instead I offer full length consultations to clients who are thinking of therapy with me (fee is currently set at £40).  

This gives us a proper chance to talk about what is going on and an opportunity to see if we both feel comfortable going ahead.  This is easier to diarise and manage and is a much more helpful experience for potential clients.  I think it’s a responsible approach.  Even if the decision is not to take therapy with me, it is quite likely something useful will emerge from the conversation.