Ask a Psychologist: What is Short-Term and Long-Term Therapy? Who are they for?
When we speak to individuals who are interested in seeing a psychologist in Melbourne, one of the common questions is what type of therapy is suitable for them, whether it is short-term or long-term therapy. From experience, a lot of people expect therapy to be brief, relatively short term, and that a quick fix is usually sought. These are completely understandable expectations, as it’s natural for us to want to reduce our struggles and pain quickly. Nonetheless, psychological therapy and recovery doesn’t quite work this way.
What is short-term psychological therapy?
Short-term therapy can mean many things. It usually refers to therapy that aims to resolve or reduce symptoms, problems, or struggles within 6 – 12 sessions. They are often solution-focussed, strategy-heavy, and working towards usually one or two particular presenting issues. Examples of shorter-term therapy are:
- Solution-focussed therapy
- CBT
- ACT
- ISTDP
- Motivational Interviewing
- Skills coaching for a particular situation
While short-term therapy can be effective, some individuals do not find short term therapy has lasting impact. This is a valid outcome. While short-term therapy is solution-based, due to the time frame restrictions, it often doesn’t allow addressing the bigger picture of our psychopathology, issues, patterns, or factors that contribute to where we are at, and how an issue occurs (or re-occurs). If you find that your struggles are patterns of problematic emotional management, behaviours, or interpersonal issues, you may find that your problems may re-occur after completion of short-term therapy or resolution of the current stressor.
What is long-term psychological therapy?
As for short-term therapy, there are different meanings for long-term therapy. Long-term therapy often refers to therapy that lasts for more than 20 sessions, and for individuals who attend therapy consistently. For some clients, this may mean years of regular therapy.
In addition to providing strategies and a targeted focus on particular current issues, long-term therapy allows consistency and regularity for our longer standing patterns, and issues to be explored in a meaningful way. You can think about it as changing our system of thinking and emotional regulation, looking at the bigger scheme of our wellbeing, rather than one particular issue from one particular angle.
An example of what long term therapy looks like, would be to explore past and recent history, childhood, development, relationship patterns (with care givers, friends, intimate partners etc), relationships with ourself etc.
This way, long term therapy allows your psychologist, along with you, to have capacity to understand you, your emotional and cognitive world. By understanding (and changing or accepting) these patterns, we aim to reduce symptoms, as well as to prevent problems from reoccurring, and improving our overall functioning.
Long-term therapy often are suitable for individuals who experience long standing problems, such as trauma, complex / developmental trauma, painful emotions, dysfunctional interpersonal patterns, self-esteem, relationship with others etc.
Having said that, long-term therapy requires commitment and resources such as time, finances and motivation to attend therapy consistently, which may present barriers to attending regular appointments with a psychologist.
Some examples of long-term therapy are:
- Schema therapy
- Trauma-focussed therapy
- EMDR
- DBT
Seeing a psychologist in Melbourne
Whether it is helpful to receive short-term or long-term therapy depends on our current needs and resources. Balance of these is important as it predicts sustainability of the type of therapy that one is seeking.
Very often, an initial assessment and appointment with a psychologist is important to help you decide what to prioritise at a particular point in time. It is also important to note that, as your needs may change and evolve over time, some clients who may start off with doing short-term therapy, may continue to attend therapy for a longer term.