How is therapy effective when you (typically) only talk for one hour per week?
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It gives you time to observe yourself between appointments and practice some of what you learned.
People often have patterns in life that used to work, but now don’t anymore, or the patterns have bad effects that outweigh whatever good there is. Thoughts, feelings, acts, combinations…
Say, you’re smoking and want to quit. You observe when and why you smoke. Is it a social thing, or something you do to get a break at work, is it an attempt to calm down when under stress, something you do at certain moments during the day,…
You share those observations, talk about what might be going on there and where to start practicing something else. You do that for a week, come back, what went well, what didn’t, figure out why it didn’t, what needs to be changed to make this work, which aspect of the problem to tackle next. And back you go to your everyday life, practice some more.
If appointments are too close together you don’t have time to let whatever you worked on sink in and see how you (re-)act.
Sometimes people aren’t stable enough to go a whole week without the support of someone who is neutral but also completely on their side, so they might have appointments spaced closer together. Or do inpatient therapy, which is helpful when they’re either not stable, or their surroundings aren’t and they need to get away from everything first before having the headspace to work on anything.
When things are going better, appointments can be spaced further apart and just used to check in, see whether anything still needs some changes.
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