Guiding Self-Change: A new model for brief psychotherapy

The authors summarize the essential ingredients of contemporary Brief Therapy (BT), the features that distinguish BT from longer-term therapies, and BT's core assumptions about personal change and influence. They then describe “Guided Self-Change” (GSC), an explicitly value-driven approach to personal change based on modern principles of adult education. GSC places primary responsibility for change with the patient as early as practicable. Inherent in this approach is an emphasis on efficient, limited utilization of counseling sessions to mentor patients' real life attitude and behavior experiments. Advantages of a highly proactive, value-driven educational orientation over the traditional therapeutic paradigm are enumerated, especially given current pressures for therapeutic efficiency.