Therapy Training UK Space

What is Brief therapy?

Brief therapy works to generate new choices, new possibilities and new insights within six sessions. This can be achieved in four ways:

  • Overcoming problems
  • Achieving goals
  • Releasing symptoms
  • Reviewing perspectives
Overcoming problems

Used when clients repeatedly get stuck in the same behaviour.

Many problems such as depression, conflict and addictions can be overcome when people learn to focus their attention on their possibilities. Clients can change the way they see a problem, or feel about it, react to it, understand it, or get involved in it. Brief therapists ask about times when the problem was not experienced, or not noticed, and the differences between them.


Achieving goals

The therapist works to establish the state of affairs clients want to have instead of the problem. Important questions here include: What do you want? How will you know when you've got it? How will you do that? What's the first step? Sometimes the goal turns out to be unrealistic and therapists work with clients to distinguish between wishes that would be met in an ideal world, and the goals that are actually achievable in this one.


Releasing symptoms

For when clients report intrusive and upsetting emotions. The key here is to check the unconscious purposes served by the problem. By focusing on the messages given by the symptom, the background to its appearance, and what would be lost by its disappearance, the functional meaning of the problem soon appears. Instead of fighting them clients start to listen to what their emotions are telling them.


Reviewing perspectives

For when clients are limited by their beliefs about the past. The therapist engages in a dialogue in which multiple perspectives are explored. This has the double purpose of undermining pathological beliefs and searching for ones that open up new possibilities. This process is also known as reframing. It leads to a re-engagement with life on terms of deeper understanding.
BriefTherapyUK, Waterloo House, 158 London Rd,
Newbury, Berkshire, RG14 2AX, United Kingdom
tel: 01635 44444 fax: 01635 569289
email: info@brieftherapyuk.com
http://www.brieftherapyuk.com