A GoodTherapy.org News Update

It’s no secret that a lot of modern insurance companies harbor a preference for what they view as the most cost-effective measures when it comes to addressing emotional well-being and health in general. In relation to therapy, this attitude has often lead to a hasty endorsement of short-term therapies, especially in conjunction with various medicines. But Falk Leichsenring, a professor of Psychotherapy Research at the University of Giessen in Germany, has long suspected that this hasty endorsement is a departure from understanding which types of therapy are most effective.

Based on the extensive review of a collection of twenty three in-depth studies involving over a thousand participants, Leichsenring set out to pinpoint the therapies that clients found most beneficial, and with which therapists themselves were most satisfied. What he found was that while short term therapies usually had some degree of impact on the lives and prosperity of clients, in-depth courses of therapy involving psychodynamic elements and techniques were responsible for greater rates of achievement. Over the course of several months or even a few years, long term therapy embracing the person as a whole and taking the time to look at their backgrounds, memories, relationships, and personal observations is capable of serving as the foundation for profound change, the study suggests, while less involved treatments can fail to address deep-rooted feelings and ideas. Read the rest of this entry

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A GoodTherapy.org News Update Presented by Daniel Brezenoff, LCSW

A review of 23 studies that looked at the results of long-term, psychodynamic talk therapy concluded that such therapy improved the symptoms of chronic mental problems, including anxiety and borderline personality disorder, better than some shorter-term therapies.

The studies included a total of 1,053 clients undergoing weekly, twice weekly, or three times weekly session for at least a year and often much longer. Most of the clients had 50 or more sessions, and all were followed closely by researchers in the original studies.

The authors, writing in the October 1 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, recommended that researchers focus more on psychodynamic therapy, noting that the managed care system has been loathe to pay for such treatment, citing other studies that seemed to show the superiority of cognitive behavioral, short term therapy. Read the rest of this entry

Written by Julie Simons, LCSW

Bioenergetics is a form of psychodynamic psychotherapy that combines work with the body and mind to help people result their emotional problems and realize more of their potential for pleasure injoy in living.

Bioenergetics psychotherapists believe that there is a correlation between the mind in the body.  What affects the body affects the mind; in what affects the mind affects the body.  The psychological defenses when uses to handle pain and stress of life are also anchored in the body.  They appear in the body as unique muscular patterns that inhibit self expression.  These patterns can be identified and understood by bioenergetics psychotherapists who knows how to look the structure, movement and breathing patterns in a person’s body.

Bioenergetics psychotherapists, like other psychotherapists, focus special attention on the muscular patterns and person’s body.  They are interested in these patterns and their relationship to movement, breath, posture and emotional expression.  Every physical expression of the body has meaning. Read the rest of this entry