Short-Form Therapy

Let's take a look at the mail bag again. What do we have?

Dear Dr. Lloyd, what is short-term, short-form therapy? And what are some quick tips that I can use to help get my head on straight?

Well, a shorter-term therapy would just be having some specific goals in mind. It could be within a few sessions. It could be within one session. So there's some crisis counselling that happens after a traumatic event, like a hurricane and other things, where people are brought in and provide counselling. That could be a short therapy.

And a brief intervention could be teaching somebody some skills, such as the skills of DPT, to regulate emotions, to better interact with your fellow humans, and perhaps training yourself to have better attention and distress tolerance, or getting through difficult moments without making it worse.

So short-form therapy is going to be more targeted. It's going to be more didactic in nature and involve less processing and less deeper work that you might be associated with longer, psychodynamic-type therapy.

So I hope that answers your questions. And we'll get back to you in the next video for some quick tips.