People’s lives are increasingly busy. Life is filled with meetings, travel for work, vacations, kids, and partners. Days race by into weeks, leaving less and less time for self care. With work, children, caring for sick family members, working out, buying healthy groceries, attending school meetings, how do you find time for therapy?
Sometimes everyone feels overwhelmed and needs to talk to someone who is objective. Someone who is not a friend or even family member. Yet, calling a therapist may feel like it requires you to schedule yet another appointment. Brief focused therapy is the best type of therapy for busy people because it is short-term and can even be done from a distance.
Living in the Present
Many people don’t have time to spend years in therapy rehashing and analyzing their past. Brief therapy is for those people who want to put the spotlight on the present and future, with less emphasis on the past, making it briefer than most traditional therapies.
Where do you want to be and what is keeping you from reaching your goals? Whether communication problems, relationship issues, addictions, organizational conflicts, or your children’s behavioral problems, this therapy focuses on the here and now but also how to improve your life right away. It is positive and solution focused.
How Brief Therapy Works
In brief therapy your resources, strengths, and passions are identified. During sessions, barriers are identified while your therapist provides accountability and support as you redesign your life one step at a time. As you improve one area of your life — such as your health by improving your sleep patterns and initiating exercise or a lost hobby in your life — you will see a positive change in other areas like self-esteem and interest in socializing (relationships). Improvement in the relationship area with your partner may have a positive effect on your work productivity and increase your confidence to make a change in your work or career as needed. Change brings about more change and it continues until your aspirations are met.
If barriers or self-sabotaging behaviors arise in therapy, other types of therapy such as EMDR or hypnosis can be used as an adjunct to brief therapy. Brief therapy continues until you are more satisfied in all areas of your life.
Traditional therapies focus on the past and the reasons for your problems; brief therapy focuses on your current situation, your resources, and accomplishments. In partnership, you and your therapist create an individualized personalized plan for the future you desire.
According to Wikipedia, the concept of brief therapy was independently discovered by several therapists in their own practices over several decades. By the 1950s, psychologists such as Milton Erickson and Haley began writing about brief therapy, but it became popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Richard Bandler, John Grinder, and Stephen Lankton have also been credited, at least in part, with the inspiration for and popularization of brief therapy, particularly through their work with Milton Erickson.
Brief therapy occurs in the present and is about your learning to appreciate being in the moment. The fact that you are breathing means that you are alive and change is ongoing. A brief focused therapist helps you to live your life now, moment by moment. This is a core trait of positive psychology and one of reasons I practice it along with brief focused therapy.
Learn more at www.emdrcoach.com.
We offer a FREE 15 minute session to new clients. Contact Us to schedule it today. These sessions are only available via phone, email, text and Skype.
Copyright *Jean Pollack