Benefits of Brief Therapy

Main benefits and advantages of strategic brief therapy

The qualities of strategic brief therapy that make this approach especially valuable are as follows.

1. It is a therapeutic intervention of short duration

The first benefit is quite obvious: as its name suggests, strategic brief therapy is of short duration. This form of psychological intervention was conceived from the beginning as a process that can be carried out in a few weeks, to avoid patients becoming frustrated as time goes by (something that, unfortunately, causes some patients to stop seeing the psychologist and retrace all the steps they have taken with the therapist).

On the other hand, strategic brief therapy is at the antipodes of those who see therapy as practically a lifestyle, attending their weekly session for years (often without really needing to go to the psychologist), something that has to do with what we will see below.

2. Therapy always focuses on the problem

Another feature of strategic brief therapy that makes it interesting for many people is that it places great emphasis on narrowing down the problem to be addressed, the origin of the person's discomfort. In other words, it does not focus on the symptoms or on the different manifestations of what is negatively affecting the patient, but on what has triggered the general situation from which the person wants to get out.

Simplicity makes it easy to follow.

In the psychotherapy process, patients do not need to face a large number of challenges or memorize many theoretical aspects of what happens to them or what they should do, which makes the experience more bearable and the chances of becoming frustrated decrease.

4. Therapy focuses on the present

Strategic brief therapy is based on the idea that most of the problems that bring the person to the psychologist's office are there because the person, without realizing it, keeps active in the present behavioral dynamics that keep afloat the cause of their discomfort (although it is not to blame for the emotional pain they suffer). Therefore, this type of psychotherapy focuses on the present, from the idea that it is not necessary to know the past origin of the problem, but its manifestation in the here and now. This makes the process easier and more accessible, since not everyone is in a position to understand exactly how everything originated.