Permission to Feel Sadness During The Holidays: A Brief Therapy Center Perspective Regarding the Holiday Season.
(And an Invitation to a Complimentary Workshop on This Topic) By: Karin Schlanger and Esther Krohner At the Brief Therapy Center, we’ve always maintained that the Holiday Season isn’t for everyone. For some, the holidays may carry with it a dark side that often goes unmentioned. This can make it tougher for those who already […]
Do you dare use paradoxes in your practice?
Can you use Paradoxes in Problem Solving Brief Therapy? For us, the answer is “yes, when indicated”, like any other intervention. For some reason, the word Paradox is heard as a bad one when used in psychotherapy. Psychotherapists usually believe that there are several considerations and potential reasons why they might use paradoxes cautiously. When […]
Debunking the Therapy Stigma: Improving Mental Health in America One Grain of Sand at a Time
Have you had conversations with people who were hesitant to seek therapy due to the stigma of mental health treatment? As a therapist or mental health practitioner, chances are you’ve had some of them in a session. It’s essential to understand why the therapy stigma exists and how to overcome it to help clients effectively. […]
How to improve the Mental Health Crisis in America: make treatments more effective
The United States is grappling with a crisis in mental health, one that has far-reaching implications for individuals, families and communities. In recent years, the prevalence of mental health issues has escalated to alarming levels, posing a significant challenge to the nation’s well-being and stability. One of the causes, we suggest is that the prevalent […]
AI for Eating Disorders. Come find out what we are about
A few weeks ago on the radio, while driving from one place to another, I heard an interesting and scary program. The National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) had to suspend its helpline for people suffering from eating disorders because, when they called, the chatbot powered by Artificial Intelligence was offering advice on how to go […]
How we see the world: Politics through a Brief Therapy Lense.
People often say everything is connected, when referring to interwoven events, people and movements. It’s because we cannot avoid looking at the world through a lens, through a particular window. We have chosen the Problem-Solving Brief Therapy lens because we find it useful and we wanted to share a perspective that even applies to everyday […]
Problem Solving Brief Therapy: the trunk of the tree
Problem Solving Brief Therapy (PSBT) is the trunk of the tree in the family of different modalities of postmodern therapies. Solution Focused, Narrative, Motivational Interviewing , to name just a few. There are many advantages to working from the original model, that extend to knowing when to implement what tools, working firmly from a non […]
How therapists see the client determines the reality they will construct
This morning I was talking with my colleague Sara, whom I supervise. She is in Spain. The case presentation went something along the lines of: I am working with a young adult who is 20, we’ll call him Martin. He is the oldest of four kids whose parents are immigrants. When he was 10, […]
Problem-solving Brief Therapy: a model applied to schools in the 21st Century
The Problem Solving Brief Therapy (BTC) is applied to all systems of human interactions. The definition of a system in Pragmatics of Human Communication by Watzlawick, Beavin-Bavelas, and Jackson is: “A set of objects together with relationships between the objects and between their attributes, in which objects are the components or parts of the system, attributes are the properties of the objects, […]
Help! How do we help our son to help himself?
Difficulties are part of life and it would be idealistic to think that there are people who don’t have them. These difficulties become problems for people who ask us for help when said difficulties are maintained over time through bad management and the application of apparent common sense which, with the best of intentions, does […]
