Brief Therapy Practice

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‘Brief Therapy Practice’ is not a therapy in its own right. The term is an umbrella phrase, which refers to therapies like NLP, which can be administered quickly, with clients seeing fast results. At Alpha Waves it’s not uncommon for clients to seek advice on a long-standing, engrained fear or phobia yet manage to let go of that phobia in just one session.

The practice of ‘Brief Therapy’ focusses on the solution a client is seeking at the time, rather than first undertaking an extensive and lengthy examination of their past. For this reason, you may also come across the phrase ‘solution-focussed brief therapy’. However, given this, a certain amount of personal history will still need to be explored to enable the practitioner to build a picture of how the client manages his or her mind. For example, this could be around what kind of beliefs the client has around the work they are about to embark on with the practitioner. During the initial meeting the client will be encouraged to state what they want to achieve from the process. Each client is different, and all will have their own unconscious and automatic patterns of ‘managing their minds’. It is important for the practitioner to know and understand these patterns so that the communication will be meaningful and effective and will match the client’s values and beliefs.

Consequently, the first session is usually partly or totally exploratory. The system used by Antonia Boyle at Alpha Waves is Neuro Linguistic Programming. Within this system there is a belief that no matter how experienced practitioners are, they don’t really know what goes on inside the mind of the client. The practitioner is not the client, and statements like: ‘If I were you, I would do so and so’ do not belong in NLP. If NLP practitioners believed they did know what a client was thinking or should do, they would only be guessing and would then make assumptions based on their own experience, rather than the client’s.

Even though the initial session may be about fact-finding and looking back, clients usually begin to feel a positive impact on how they feel. This results from the way in which an experienced practitioner can encourage clients to view their issues from a different perspective. This shift in view point, helps the client to believe that change is possible. An experienced NLP practitioner will employ their skills conversationally as well as through using specific techniques and exercises with their clients.

Antonia works one to one with people of all ages, from young children and teenagers to adults, as well as with groups and organisations.

"I would like to thank you for helping me with my fear of flying. I have tested this once since our session on a return flight to NY. I felt different immediately after the session, much lighter and I felt like my old self, as in actually looking forward to the flight and feeling excited about it rather than the dread I had been feeling before." Linda Walker

"I first visited Antonia after my father had died and during a period when I was very stressed at work. Antonia enabled me to look at my life, create space in my mind and to address what was actually going on. She taught me to map out my life on a pie chart and I have used this tool continually ever since. A year after my father’s death I had one session with Antonia to come to terms with my father’s death and we did the ‘grief & loss model’, which helped me to move on with my life more positively. The model did not take away the pain of missing him, but it enabled me to lay my father to rest in peace. Antonia has never passed judgement on my problems and that made it much easier to deal with the issue at hand. She has great respect for her clients and does not look to install her own ideas on to them.

I feel that by having gone to Antonia I have realised that years of therapy are not necessary to get to the root of the problem. NLP seems to allow you to deal with huge problems in just a few sessions, and sometimes in one session. My sons will agree with this as they have both been to Antonia and dealt with issues they have wanted to resolve.

My 14-year-old son had been biting his nails and cuticles since he was seven years old. Recently my son went for 1 session and now he is so proud of his fingers and is truly grateful that Antonia helped him. My other son now aged 15 has visited Antonia on 2 occasions. When he was 11, we had a burglary, which frightened him and stopped him from sleeping. Antonia used a simple NLP technique, which helped him to view the burglary slightly differently, and hence enabled him to sleep soundly." N.T.