"Can You Spare Three Minutes?" by Geoffrey Rovin, Ph.D.
Some years back, brief therapy guru Steve DeShazer proposed that therapy becomes brief when one finds and uses the psychotherapeutic "key," and that there are certain skeleton keys such as the "miracle question" that will serve very well. In Three Minute Therapy, authors Michael Edelstein and David Ramsay Steele suggest that therapy can likewise be extremely brief if those "keys"consist of reliable mainstays of REBT: "Three minute exercises" of A-B-C-D-E analysis and the rooting out and challenging of demanding "shoulds" and "musts" that generate unnecessary misery and counter-productive behavior. As Albert Ellis in his foreward and the authors in their preface indicate, three minutes won't do it all for you. The 200+ page book will likely take several hours to read and perhaps weeks to digest--and the three minute exercises had best be done several times per day.
Fortunately, the reading of three minute therapy will likely go easily because of its readable style and appealing organization. The authors present REBT fundamentals in 14 chapters, most focused on common symptom or clinical complaint areas including worry, marriage problems, procrastination, depression, overeating and smoking, panic attacks, compulsive drinking (in a powerful challenge to AA dogma) and social anxiety, along with topics readers generally usually don't notice to be a problem--self-esteem: the "feel good about yourself" trap, and secondary disturbance. This organization allows for eager self-help readers to go directly to their topic of interest and gain something from it then and there. Wise use of topic headings and sub-headings serve both to organize the presentation and provide summaries -- catchy phrases that can make a point and help the reader remember the point, e.g., "Your childhood is irrelevant to your present problem," or, "If you rate yourself, you'll berate yourself."
The book is pragmatic and practical. Chapters typically start with case examples of common problem experiences, followed by characteristic musts for each emotional problem, with the bulk of attention, fortunately, on what to do, in the form of three minute exercises (A-B-C-D-E-F) with sample disputes and alternative rational self-talk, and other selected techniques, for example "three minute imagery" (TMI), "three minute relaxation" (progressive), and the "three minute procrastination buster." This last method seems to suggest what implicitly may be the organizing premise for the book--that we "have a tendency to inertia," so we had best use it to our advantage and "simply decide you will spend three minutes working on something, even though three minutes seems not worth doing" and thereby engage "inertia" into moving us into possibly four, five or more minutes of activity. "Three minute therapy," "three minute exercises," and relatively short, to the point chapters are the expression of using this idea to get us to read and use the principles and methods which we might otherwise not. CBT therapists know that methods "work" only when a person works on them.
I highly endorse Three Minute Therapy for use in bibliotherapy but personally, as with most good self-help books, I find great potential use for it in helping me as a therapist review and refine therapeutic strategies and explain rational principles and methods in ways most convincing to clients in words and with examples they (and I) can easily understand (a quality frequently missing from "professional" articles and books). After reading Three Minute Therapy, I found myself using phrases and illustrations from the book in sessions with clients. But, I didn't stop there. Enticed by the idea of making three minute bargains with my clients (and myself), I bought some three minute egg timers and proposed three minutes of walking to my very reluctant to exercise client. Not long after, I received reports of using the timer three times per walk for a total of nine minutes and now 20 minutes to half-hour sessions with the timer. Maybe this three minute thing is a therapeutic "key?"
In summary, I think you'll find Three Minute Therapy an enjoyable read and a useful tool.
(From Rational News, Fall 1997, pp. 12,13.)
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Dr. Michael R. Edelstein
Clinical Psychologist, San Francisco
415-673-2848 (24 hours)
DrEdelstein@ThreeMinuteTherapy.com
www.ThreeMinuteTherapy.com