Two Approaches To Adlerian Brief Therapy - Buncombe County ...

Adlerian Brief Therapy 40
for more, the possibilities for change might generalize to other parts of her life
and thereby reinforce and reaffirm a shift in her underlying rules of interaction
and her motivations in living.
The flow of this session reflects many of the aspects of therapy along the
continuum that we prize. It starts by choosing a focus for the session, which is
also to say, a purpose for therapy. The initial pace is a slow, careful, tight
therapeutic sequence (Polster, 1987) in which the therapist follows the client as if
considering each stitch in a developing tapestry. Yet, even within these
sequences there are shifts that we have noted in the typescript that are chosen to
interrupt the deadening of experience, enhance awareness, and bring the client
into better contact with self and others. The movement from initial issue focus to
a focus on the person to getting a behavioral description is, perhaps, the most
common initiating process we use in Adlerian Brief Therapy.
Behavioral descriptions to be useful must be specific and concrete.
Concrete descriptions highlight interaction, movement, style, and patterns in the
person’s life. It is in her interactions with others, in the doing of life, that patterns
of pleasing, “goodness,” and perfectionism emerge. The immediacy of brief
therapy almost requires that there be some challenge to the usefulness of these
embedded rules of interaction. Humor in the form of delight and play has two
very useful dimensions: (a) It lightens the process by joining the client in
common human folly, and (b) it provides a process and context against which a