John M. Shlien

Interesting perspectives on how to be effective with person-centred counselling in brief and time-limited settings.

Being a novice counsellor, my initial stance in relation to brief counselling was an unaccepting one as it did not fit my conception of the person-centred approach, being one that gives autonomy and power to the client. Therefore, the duration of counselling should, insofar as reasonably possible, be determined by the client and not imposed by the counsellor or (much worse!) an organisation or agency. However, one of my placements is in an NHS, time-limited clinic and I now have experience of the therapeutic change a client can achieve in a relatively short time (notwithstanding that some would have preferred to extend the number of sessions). I found of great help Isabel Gibbard's insightful comparison of the limited resources available within the health care to that faced by the human race on a global scale, the world's resources being finite and cannot be exploited as if they are limitless. Also, Keith Tudor's pointed reminder that life itself is time-limited.

So, with a new-found preparedness towards acceptance of time-limited therapy, I found much to inform my practice in this book. Much of it relates to experiential therapies, and piques my interest in reading more about Gendlin's Focusing-Oriented Therapy. There's a couple of chapters on Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR), which I found very interesting from a training perspective, but somehow still too directive for me (at this stage) to comfortably use with clients.

Much of the book is in the form of practitioners relating how they apply brief therapy in specific settings, such as primary care, a Young Offenders' Institution, student counselling, employee assistance programmes, etc. Being able to see how brief therapy works in real-life settings was, I found, very helpful.

So, not an integrated approach to brief person-centred counselling, but an examination of how some of the tribes making up the PC nation work in a time-limited setting.… (meer)