7 Benefits of Couples Therapy That Lead to A Better Relationship
7 Benefits of Couples Therapy That Lead to A Better Relationship
Arguments and disagreements in a relationship happen. You aren’t always going to see eye-to-eye on everything. Relationships can all benefit from having a safe space for both to just talk and get to understand each other better. While it’s normal to have arguments in a relationship, improving communication, understanding each other’s perspectives and coming to appreciate your own worth in the relationship all contribute towards finding resolutions faster.
Couples therapy benefits couples in all manner of situations. There doesn’t have to be a crisis point in a relationship to need the help of a counsellor. Below are some of the benefits that couples therapy can bring;
Understand Each Other Better
Part of couples counselling involves building on empathy in the relationship. Understanding your partner’s perspective and viewpoints helps you to rationalise their reactions to things you say and do. Their responses will make more sense and you’ll be in a better position to help. This helps resolve any misunderstandings which lead to friction in the relationship..
Resolve Disputes With A Neutral Party
Sometimes, you need a neutral mediator to get through a dispute that is really impacting your relationship. Friends and family can struggle to act impartially when it’s a personal matter that affects you both. Your counsellor is well placed to listen to both sides and help with a fresh perspective with what’s happening . Some disputes are much more serious than others and will take time to work out. Having someone neutral available to control the narrative away from cyclical arguments will get you closer to solving the conflict without fear of things escalating. As a result, you both understand each other’s sides of the conflict and develop further understanding.
Improve Communication
When you admit to friends and family that you’re having a disagreement with your partner, very often you get told to ‘just talk to them about it’. If only that was so simple. Communicating our feelings doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Couples therapy helps you to learn and feel comfortable with expressing how you feel.
More than that, however, couples therapy also helps you learn how to listen. Communication is a two-way street. While you learn how to talk openly about your opinions and wishes, your partner learns how to listen. Conversation becomes more of an enjoyable practice for you both, leading to fewer disagreements as you can both communicate comfortably around each other.
Restore Trust
Trust is essential for any healthy relationship. Rebuilding trust takes time and a lot of commitment from both parties. Feelings such as rejection, abandonment, betrayal and guilt are hard to work through, but with enough patience, understanding and forgiveness, trust can be reestablished over time. Whatever the cause for the fracture or distress in the relationship , we can work together to heal wounds and help to build on feelings of mutual respect in a relationship. We encourage open communication to work through any future mistrust and fears, reinforcing transparency and a commitment towards the relationship.
Good for Self-Awareness
Couples therapy doesn’t just focus on the relationship. It also focuses on you and helps you understand your own needs and what you’d like out of the relationship. In therapy, you’ll have the freedom to explore your feelings and discuss them openly. What you come to learn about yourself may surprise even you and learning why you feel a certain way helps to validate why you become hurt in particular situations. Understanding your triggers and behaviours will also help your partner to understand.
Deal With Roadblocks In The Relationship
Couples therapy works through issues that you may struggle to work through on your own, or might be avoiding as they’re difficult to talk about. These roadblocks stop you from moving forwards or cause you to feel stuck or even cause you to consider giving up on the relationship entirely. These can be major life-changing decisions that neither of you can agree on or it could just be an impasse. Your counsellor can help unpick the situation and work with you on exploring the underlying emotions.
Improve Intimacy
Reigniting your passions for each other and rekindling your attraction can help reconnect a relationship that is drifting apart. Common for long-term relationships within a marriage, the spark can feel as if its dimmed. Couples therapy helps you both to talk openly about what you miss about each other. Intimacy doesn’t just mean the physical aspect of the relationship, but an emotional one. You can take comfort from each other through physical contact, but you can also reconnect by letting your partner in when you feel vulnerable. Feeling loved and appreciated goes a long way in a relationship.
Don’t let things fester between you and reach out to a couples counsellor
While many individuals are able to admit that they need therapy when struggling, couples are less likely to admit that their relationship needs the same help. Couples therapy is for relationships in any stage. If you’re both unhappy and unable to resolve the tension between you on your own, couples therapy is that safe space for you to work through your problems and come away as a stronger couple as a result.
Couples therapy isn’t just about resolving conflicts and moving past them. It’s about nurturing a bond that’s built on communication and understanding.
If you would like to arrange an initial appointment with one of our couples counsellors, email us at admin@therapyclinicbrighton.com. We will then be in touch with the next steps.
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How does couples therapy work?
How does Couples Therapy Work?
Society has progressed in leaps and bounds when it comes to embracing taking care of one’s mental health. The plethora of therapies and counselling available to people has become normalised as healthcare. Loving ourselves before loving anyone else is a common adage. So what if a couple needs help within their relationship and how they relate to each other?
Couples therapy can sometimes feel intimidating. Hopefully after this article, you will have some reassurance about your decision to incorporate couples therapy into your relationship and feel equipped with some knowledge of what to expect from it. We’ve asked Kate West, one of our therapists at The Therapy Clinic, some common questions about couples therapy.
What is the most common problem addressed in couples therapy?
You might be wondering if you’re experiencing the same issue or issues in your relationship as other people. Therefore, it might be helpful to know the common issues people go to couples therapy with. Here’s what Kate has observed:
“A feeling of disconnection – usually it’s an emotional disconnection that brings couples to therapy but this typically impacts a couple’s physical connection too. Conflict is probably the most common reason for the disconnection, feeling stuck in a pattern of blame. Or a sense
the other partner doesn’t notice them, is not accessible, responsive and engaged.
This creates a feeling of loneliness in a relationship and triggers our core fears around rejection and abandonment – we then move to often maladaptive ways of managing in turn creating further distress. Couples work really hard to resolve their struggles, but typically these ways of attempting to resolve can actually contribute to the problem, so couples go round and round in the same pattern.”
Disconnection often stems from misunderstanding each other. Did you know that people have different attachment styles and this can cause many of the communication problems in relationships? Check out our blog post on attachment theory and see if any of these resonate with you.
What anxieties do people have about approaching couples therapy?
It’s natural to feel nervous initially about taking this step in your relationship. Hopefully Kate’s answer makes you feel your anxieties are validated:
“Couples feel anxious coming into a space where they anticipate blame and judgement – no one wants to be labelled as the problem in the relationship. This is not what couples therapy is about and we work hard to move partners away from judgement and blame to look at what the emotions are underneath this.
“No one wants to be labelled as the problem in the relationship”
Couples therapy is usually the last port of call – typically couples wait an average of 6 years after identifying they need help to actually seek help, during which time the distress usually intensifies. So by the time they come into the space they feel like it’s all hanging in the balance. This is understandably anxiety inducing for couples who fear feeling they’ll need to make a decision as to the direction of the relationship. Again we steer couples away from this pressure and instead suggest just taking some time to make sense of how they’ve got to this place.
A contributing factor to the resistance in seeking help is a feeling of ‘we should be able to sort this out ourselves’ and/or ‘we don’t need someone else involved in our relationship’. All couples get stuck and it’s very hard to move out of these stuck places without some outside help.”
Feeling stuck in a cycle? Our services can help.
How should I approach the topic of couples therapy with my partner?
Couples therapy can help at any stage of a relationship, so rather than it feel like a communication of a distressed relationship/dissatisfaction/unhappiness/blame – i.e. ‘I’m really not happy with you, I think we need some help’, then approach it from a positive place of ‘couples therapy could help us feel more connected, I’d like to feel closer to you’, or ‘I think we’re a bit stuck, we keep playing out the same pattern of communication that’s not working for us, we should get some help with this’.
In this way, the partner is more likely to hear it as a reach for connection rather than an attack that can be experienced as a danger. It’s important to approach it from a place of both partner’s needing the help and support rather than one feeling like the problem. No one wants to come into a space where they feel they’ll be attacked, criticised or blamed.
It might also help to suggest it as ‘let’s just go for a meeting and see how we feel’. We appreciate that couples need to feel comfortable and that their therapist is a good fit. Plus that initial session will give you a much better idea of what the process will look like and you’ll be better able to decide how you’d like to proceed following that.”
“Approach it from a positive place of ‘couples therapy could help us feel more connected, I’d like to feel closer to you”
It’s not a weakness to need external help. Learn more about our couples therapy approach.
What can I expect from couples therapy at The Therapy Clinic?
Hopefully this blog post has helped you to feel prepared for couples therapy in general. Are you local to Brighton on Hove? Read on to learn what to expect from our therapy clinic:
“In the initial session we’ll work to get an understanding of what’s led you to seek help, how it feels for each partner in the relationship and what each partner would like from the process. We’ll also talk to you about how we work and what to expect as the work progresses.
From there, typically we’d work to all build an understanding of how you’re getting stuck in your communication and why, and help you to send clear coherent and direct communications around your emotions and your needs from your partner.
This builds trust, safety and intimacy. There is no one size fits all, though, so it really does depend on the individual couple. It might be that there’s been an injury to the relationship that’s completely eroded the feeling of trust, or a couple is struggling to agree on a specific aspect of their lives together, or they might be looking for help separating. You can expect that we’ll tailor our approach according to your relationship needs.”
To label or not to label? The impact of diagnosis
To label or not to label? The impact of diagnosis
In medicine, diagnosis is the process of identifying a condition based on a set of signs and symptoms. This is a key step in the treatment of the condition. This can be a double-edged sword in psychiatry. We’ll explore the pros and cons of obtaining a mental health diagnosis.
What does it mean to have a mental health diagnosis?
An evaluation of mental health is meant to:
- Identify anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, postnatal depression, eating disorders, and psychotic illnesses
- Distinguish between mental and physical health issues
- Examine a person who has been referred due to difficulties at school, work, or at home
Having a mental health diagnosis means you have filled the criteria for a mental health condition as determined by your mental health team.
Who can diagnose a mental illness?
The first port of call for a mental health related diagnosis is a GP. They may be able to diagnose you within a couple of appointments for common mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. For other mental illnesses, it may require referral to a psychiatrist.
Therapy clinics such as The Therapy Clinic Brighton can provide talking therapies and support you in your journey through diagnosis and treatment.
What are the pros and cons of a mental health diagnosis?
Many people find that obtaining a diagnosis is an important step in their mental health journey. The reasons for this can include:
- Having more of a vocabulary to communicate their struggles
- Getting the right support at school or in the workplace
- Understanding their mental health better and demystifying their symptoms
Rose Gardner, founder and Clinical Director at The Therapy Clinic, says the following about diagnosis:
“For some people, a diagnosis can offer important validation and a clear way to describe their experience as well as a potential pathway to accessing help.”
If you feel that you could start to learn how to improve your mental health once you have clear terms for it, diagnosis might be a path for you.
What are the drawbacks of a mental health diagnosis?
There are occasions when diagnosis is not necessarily helpful. According to Rose:
“For some people, a diagnosis can represent almost the opposite of validation – a feeling of being put into a box on the basis of a list of symptoms rather than being seen as a whole person.”
Going to therapy should mean being treated as a whole person, rather than the sum of how many boxes one ticks. Therefore, a human-centred approach is required which supports and empowers the patient.
Conclusion
Rose goes on to summarise TTC’s approach to diagnosis:
“At The Therapy Clinic, we recognise that people have very different views and experiences of diagnosis. It often comes down to how it feels to have a label. For some people, a diagnosis can offer important validation and a clear way to describe their experience as well as a potential pathway to accessing help.
Our focus is on supporting individual clients to find their own way through the process. Whether someone has an existing diagnosis, is contemplating the possibility of getting one or is struggling with the whole idea, the important thing is that we enable them to reach the best possible understanding of themselves and decide what is most helpful for them.”
It’s important to consider whether a diagnosis will be useful for you or hinder you. If a label would be useful for you to communicate your thoughts and feelings about your condition, pursuing a diagnosis may be a good idea. On the other hand, if you feel a label would be oppressive, it’s important to know that mental health is just one aspect of what makes you you.
What is attachment theory?
Attachment theory is an important idea explored in connection to relationships. But what is attachment theory, and why is understanding it important for our relationships with others?
What is attachment theory?
Attachment theory originated with John Bowlby in the 1960s. Together with Mary Ainsworth, he looked at infants reuniting with their mothers after being separated. From this, they were able to formulate 4 main attachment styles. These aim to examine how people’s attachment styles influence them to interact in their relationships.
What are the 4 theories of attachment?
Bowlby theorised that the 4 types of attachment are:
- Secure
- Anxious
- Avoidant
- Fearful-avoidant
Bowlby argued that humans are innately wired for connection. First and foremost, we are a social, relational and bonding species. He defined attachment as ‘a lasting psychological connectedness between human beings’. Attachment is concerned with emotion and the regulation of emotion.
Secure attachment
Ideally, with loving and attuned caregiving, we grow up to be securely attached. This means we’re able to attend to or stay engaged with distressing emotions without fear of losing control or being overwhelmed. We don’t need to alter, block or deny those emotions and so can use them to orient our world. Securely attached people recover faster from negative feelings and have more empathic responsiveness. Amongst other things, they have a reduced susceptibility to anxiety and depression.
Anxious attachment
If someone perceives others as inaccessible, unresponsive or even threatening, they may adopt secondary models and strategies. These can take the form of vigilant, hyper-activated, anxious ways of engaging with others. They can also take the form of avoidant, dismissing and deactivated strategies. Hyper-activated behaviour can include being pushy, demanding or angry. Deactivated behaviour can include numbing and withdrawal.
We all use fight or flight as a survival instinct. It can become a problem when it becomes habitual. This ends in constraining a person’s awareness and choices and limiting his or her ability to engage constructively with others.
Anxious attachment is characterised by sensitivity to any negative messages coming from significant figures. ‘Fight’ responses are designed to protest distance and get an attachment figure to provide attention and/or reassurance. Anxiously attached are generally preoccupied with others and their relationship. They can also be preoccupied with managing their own distress and they offer care that does not fit the needs of the other. They are desperate to feel loved and wanted. This can look clingy, possessive or paranoid when they fear attachment loss.
Avoidant attachment
Avoidant, deactivating strategies are flight responses. These are designed to minimise frustration and distress through distancing oneself from loved ones seen as hostile, dangerous or uncaring.
Attachment needs are then minimised and compulsive self reliance becomes the order of the day. Vulnerability in the self or perceived vulnerability in others then triggers distancing behaviours. Avoidant attachers take pride in their independence and see attachment as weakness. They tend to pull away when they need help most. They are not as attentive as their partners because they worry they will become too codependent, and this will take away their independence. They also can shut down emotionally during arguments or close themselves off from feelings.
Fearful-avoidant or ‘disorganised’ attachment
A third type of behaviour arises when a person has been traumatised by an attachment figure. He or she is then in a paradoxical situation in which loved ones are both the source of and the solution to fear. Under these circumstances this person often vacillates between longing and fear, demanding connection and then distancing and even attacking when connection is offered.
Why is attachment theory important?
It’s important to recognise that these adaptive strategies of flight, flight freeze in the face of attachment loss are protective strategies and therefore make complete sense. It’s not that a person is defective. It’s also important to recognise that around 50% of the population are insecurely attached, adopting either an anxious or avoidant strategy of managing their relationships.
Lastly, the most important part to understanding attachment theory is that it’s not set in stone. With some help, we can move towards secure attachment, or more transparent signalling of our distress. One which would invite a caregiving validating response to our vulnerability.
How do you move toward secure attachment?
Love was once impossible to define and was generally thought of as a strange mixture of sex and sentiment. We’re now able to apply the revolutionary science of attachment to understanding love and couple relationships. However, attachment style is not deterministic. Working models of attachment can change. Models of ‘self’ and ‘other’ can change. Using attachment theory, therapists see clients as stuck in self-limiting ways of perceiving and responding, rather than defective.
We understand that what keeps people stuck is not what happened in the past. It’s their way of dealing with it now that causes past messages and triggers to be confirmed all the time. The way we deal with it in the present is keeping the relevance, confirming and maintaining the centrality of traumatic experience.
Bowlby didn’t have enough time in his life to translate his work into a theory of intervention. But, he believed that if therapy can be successful, the change process can culminate in a more effective dependency. The client’s working model of self and other would be clarified. This makes it more coherent and adaptive. Then, their potential for positive relationships with others can be enhanced.
For a well-encapsulated visual of why attachment style matters and how understanding it can help us, have a look at this video.
Couples’ therapy is one of the many services we offer at The Therapy Clinic and we offer both short and long term models of therapy. To see how we can help you, please book a free initial consultation.
Placement Opportunities
Work and Placement Opportunities at The Therapy Clinic Brighton
Be Part of the Team at The Therapy Clinic
Good news – we are offering placements to qualified and trainee therapists to come and work at the Therapy Clinic. Our placement opportunities are open to therapists at all
stages of their career from trainee level through to qualified, accredited and senior accredited
status.
The Therapy Clinic Brighton are committed to providing high quality accessible therapy services and are looking for you to join our team of psychotherapists,
counsellors and psychologists.
We’re offering both trainee and post qualification placements for psychotherapists, counsellors and counselling psychologists.
If you would like to be considered for a placement, read the attached document The Therapy Clinic_ Placements and apply.
Follow us on social media at Facebook, X, Instagram, or Linkedin.
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Covid-19
How The Therapy Clinic are working to support people during the Covid-19 / Coronavirus Pandemic
How’s everyone holding up?
The Therapy Clinic team have been working hard to transition our ‘business as usual’ over to online since social distancing and lockdown began in March 2020. We are continuing to offer regular therapy sessions, and consultations using video link and have been able to continue to support many clients this way.
In addition, we are launching new services specifically designed to offer affordable, high quality, support to individuals affected by Covid-19.
The first of these is Covid-19 online counselling and support.
We are offering short term online counselling for individuals and couples who need help in dealing with the impact of Covid-19, including:
- Dealing with loneliness and isolation
- Managing anxiety
- Managing uncertainty
- Helping with relationship stress / conflict
- Adjusting to working from home
- Looking after your own mental health when you are focussed on helping others
- Dealing with grief and loss
Members of our therapy team are offering a free initial consultation and up to 5 further sessions at a reduced rate of £35 for individuals and £50 for couples
You can book an initial assessment through our website.
You can find out more about us;
On our website: www.therapyclinicbrighton.com
By emailing: info@therapyclinicbrighton.com
Or following us on social media at facebook, twitter, instagram, or linkedin.
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TTC Talks @ 1: DBT and Distress Tolerance
TTC Talks @ 1 - Informal Lunchtime CPD Sessions Introducing Therapeutic Approaches & Promoting Cross Modality Conversations
Happy New Year from The Therapy Clinic team!
Going in to 2020 we have a new cycle of Talks at 1. These are talks held at The Therapy Clinic over lunchtimes where practitioners are able to come together, share knowledge and learn about different therapeutic models from each other.
At the end of 2019, Rachel Singh and Jacqui Paterson facilitated the third instalment of our introduction to DBT. Kate West summarised the experience:
“The third instalment of our introduction to DBT began with us grounding ourselves with the use of mindfulness. Having never been asked to focus on the space between our eyes, the space between our ears, the feeling of the soles of our feet, the feeling of breath behind our eyes, it was a fascinating albeit brief experience. For the majority of us it worked to start to slow/refocus our thoughts and begin to shut out the noise in our heads that plagues us all. This is one of the valuable tools of Distress Tolerance that make up the third module in the DBT programme, and that everyone could surely benefit from.
We learnt that the core thinking behind distress tolerance is the ability to accept reality, and to tolerate it, which is very different to trying to change it. If able to do this, we’re much better able to ‘survive’ a crisis. It’s the power of being able to tolerate the emotions that come up, without feeling totally flooded or overwhelmed, being able to keep a sense of ‘wise self’ which requires a degree of both cognitive self and emotional self.
The ways to do this include STOP (Stop, Take a step back, Observe, Proceed mindfully), TIP skills to change body chemistry (splashing face with cold water, intense exercise, paced breathing, paired muscle relaxation), Improving the moment (with imagery, with meaning, with prayer, with relaxing actions, with encouragement) and perhaps the most important skill of all: Radical Acceptance.
Radical Acceptance is not to be confused with approving of reality, it’s simply an acknowledgement of reality, not fighting (and intensify our emotional reaction, causing more suffering), but accepting the pain in our lives. Once we do this we can better start to find a way out of it. The key seems to be in the word radical – it really is far-reaching and fundamental.
We look forward to the next in this series of DBT introductory talks to further equip ourselves with the knowledge of this immensely effective toolkit.”
If you would like to begin your own therapy journey, you can book an initial assessment through our website.
You can find out more about us;
On our website: www.therapyclinicbrighton.com
By emailing: info@therapyclinicbrighton.com
Or following us on social media at facebook, twitter, instagram, or linkedin.
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TTC Talks @ 1: The New Analysts Guide to the Galaxy
TTC Talks @ 1 - Informal Lunchtime CPD Sessions Introducing Therapeutic Approaches & Promoting Cross Modality Conversations
This month’s TTC Talks@1 was presented by Paul Salvage, a Therapy Clinic affiliated practitioner. Here, Kate West Therapy Clinic Associate, summarises what we learnt.
“Therapists at The Therapy Clinic are welcoming TTC Talks @1 as a now regular part of clinic life, as well as the lively discussion that ensues. And this week’s talk with Paul Salvage on Psychoanalysis was no different.
Taking an interesting angle to his talk (and not one we’ve had before) Paul presented as a sort of book club, taking us through some of the key ideas in The New Analysts Guide to the Galaxy (by Antonino Ferro) as a springboard in to cross modality discussion and an opportunity to question some of the assumptions we all hold about analysis. Paul favours the book for what he says is an undogmatic and unstuffy tone, and it’s presentation as a conversation between a new and older analyst.
From the brief intro we had to the book, it appears Ferro has taken the analysis ‘rule book’ (if there ever was one) and thrown it in the bin, allowing much more space for the thinking around and development of psychoanalytic practice. He approaches subjects such as silence in the session, payment of sessions, projective identification, side effects for the therapist, touch, common sense, endings and analytic tools with a fresh perspective and one that arguably brings analytic practice much closer to other modalities.
Many therapists may well welcome Ferro’s argument that ‘Psychoanalysis is a simple thing, that we psychoanalysts for a long time have been trying to make as complicated and obscure as possible.’
As a team of therapists from different backgrounds drawing from varying models of therapy we realise there is much more that unites us in practice than divides us. Whether you’d interpret a client’s complaint of being cold with something about the chill of the therapeutic relationship, or simply turn the heater up, in our discussion we seemed to agree with Ferro that at the core of Analysis is a process that allows the working through of reality, and this idea is not unique to analysis but core to all our practice. But is it as simple as Ferro argues it to be? Perhaps it really is once we can turn the volume down on our theoretical models and our own anxieties.
Doing this leaves us more capacity ‘to dream the patient’s communications, to deconstruct them’ and to construct together with the patient ‘worlds which, before that were neither thinkable nor perhaps even existing, to help us transform mental blocks into thinkable thoughts and liveable emotions’. Freud may well be turning in his grave at the idea his invention is simple but we felt in our discussion that if we can sit with a client alongside their difficulties, with no agenda, no pressure for the ‘right thing to say now’ and really be with them, we’re definitely on the right path – whether it be analytical work or not.”
If you would like to begin your own therapy journey, you can book an initial assessment through our website.
You can find out more about us;
On our website: www.therapyclinicbrighton.com
By emailing: info@therapyclinicbrighton.com
Or following us on social media at facebook, twitter, instagram, or linkedin.
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TTC Talks @ 1: Couples Therapy
TTC Talks @ 1 - Informal Lunchtime CPD Sessions Introducing Therapeutic Approaches & Promoting Cross Modality Conversations
The 3rd in our Wednesday series of TTC Talks@1 was an introduction to Couples Therapy presented by Kate West. Here Rose Gardner, Therapy Clinic Director, summarises what we learnt.
“In a little over a quarter of an hour Kate managed to synthesise the key elements of her work with couples – in particular giving us a comprehensive introduction to the Emotionally Focussed Therapy approach (EFT).
Starting with inviting us to consider the question ‘What is Love?’ Kate went on to give a synopsis of attachment theory as the ‘science of love’ which underpins EFT and provides the theoretical framework guiding the therapeutic work. Kate explained the way in which the EFT model takes the basic human need for emotional proximity and a safe haven as being at the heart of all intimate relationships and how understanding the basic strategies we adopt in response to the threat of loss and separation is at the heart of the EFT therapeutic approach.
The aim is to enable couples to move beyond conflict or impasse and blame towards a deeper understanding of how their own and their partner’s different emotional responses are both attempts to deal with the same basic fear – ie of emotional isolation. Kate explained how working to enable each partner to identify and express their underlying emotions is the key to therapeutic change – and how in this respect in-vivo work in the sessions is often incredibly powerful and moving as couples come to hear each other in a very different way.”
To see if couples therapy is right for you, please email info@therapyclinicbrighton.com to arrange an assessment with one of our specialised team.
You can find out more about us;
On our website: www.therapyclinicbrighton.com
By emailing: info@therapyclinicbrighton.com
Or following us on social media at facebook, twitter, instagram, or linkedin.
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TTC Talks @ 1: Short-Term Therapy
TTC Talks @ 1 - Informal Lunchtime CPD Sessions Introducing Therapeutic Approaches & Promoting Cross Modality Conversations
Members of The Therapy Clinic enjoyed another TTC Talks @ 1 session where Ellie Carn presented on Short-Term or Brief Therapy.
This is an instalment of a series of monthly lunchtime CPD sessions, introducing members to the diverse range of therapy models we offer at The Therapy Clinic.
Kate West, Associate, reflects on this talk:
“Our second TTC Talks @1 session with Ellie Carn last week led to a lively discussion about the merits of short term therapy. Ellie is specifically experienced and trained in short-term therapy models and presented to a room full of therapists working mainly in open ended, longer term models.
Ellie Emphasised the following key factors of success for short term therapy:
- Clarity and transparency, short term work must be treated as such from the outset. With a select focus in the work on the issues the client brings.
- Focus in the work is essential to the success of the intervention, and may require a benign neglect of other issues not central to the work.
- Other key factors include the necessity of identifying key themes, or goals, or needs, with immediacy and formulating these in to the focus of the work.
- The idea of SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely) can be helpful in effective short-term work, for therapist and client.
As with any therapy a lot of the success of the work rests on a good formulation at the outset (the ability to make sense of a client’s story, link past with present and hone in on where the difficulties and hence the focus of the work lie) the strength of the therapeutic relationship/alliance – key for any corrective emotional experience, and lastly, and perhaps most importantly with short term work, a continuous awareness of the ending.
Perhaps too often therapists fall back on an assumption that long term therapy is the most successful premise for a corrective emotional experience but if done well, significant benefit can be attained in even 12 weeks. Providing the intervention is appropriate for the presenting problem.
Part of our Ethos at The Therapy Clinic is to make therapy accessible to as many people as possible, short-term approaches can lighten the financial burden of therapy and increase accessibility, as well as being an effective intervention in its own right. Our work now is to weave this thinking more solidly in to our offerings for clients and more explicitly assess at the outset for the appropriateness of short term work so watch this space!”
Next up in the series of TTC Talks @1 is Kate West‘s introduction to working with couples, in June 2019.
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