by Gioele Cedro and Sharon Puccio
Psychologists
www.psicologitirreno.it
Never move the soul without the body, nor the body without the soul, so that by defending each other, these two parts maintain their balance and their health.
Plato (428 BC – 348 BC)
Today we know, through in-depth studies and research, that body and mind are connected and interact with each other. If one of the two suffers automatically the other suffers. This is why we at Exerens want to give you support that satisfies both body and mind.
We have a team of professionals ready to help you find your psychophysical balance.
But how to do it? Where to start? Giving the right importance to the mind is fundamental because, at times, it plays tricks on us by altering our well-being. Psychologists are professionals who specialize in helping people improve their emotional and behavioral health. Sometimes even a single meeting is enough to find useful tools to solve a recent or past problem or to overcome a momentary difficulty in order to reach a future goal.
Why can it help you improve your well-being and psychophysical balance?
As we will see better later in the article, single session therapy is a well-structured method of psychological intervention , through which the professional and the client collaborate in order to obtain the first and most useful tools to deal with the problem. Collaboration can also be oriented towards achieving a goal. It is called a single session because from the very first moments the psychologist and the client work to make the most of every moment and as if that were to be the only meeting they have available.
Single session therapy has a history dating back to the turn of the last century. It was first conceived and studied by Israeli psychologist Moshe Talmon in California in 1986. Talmon worked in a clinic that dealt with very difficult cases; during his work he often wondered why most people did not return to the clinic for a second session of psychotherapy. After studying the phenomenon in depth, Talmon decided to publish a research, in 1990, stating that many of the people who had come to the clinic, had only needed a single meeting to solve the problem.
Since the 1990s this method has been adopted by the most illustrious psychotherapy centers worldwide, in 2018 it arrived in Italy thanks to psychotherapist professionals from the Italian Center for Single Session Therapy (Cannistrà, Piccirilli, 2018). From 2018 to today, the single session therapy method has been widely appreciated both by the scientific community and by people who have experienced it firsthand.
The single session therapy is therefore an intervention that serves to help the person to take back their life in a natural way, through the acquisition of new strategies useful for overcoming the problem. The reason why often a drug or a phytotherapeutic supplement allows the person to improve his health and well-being is that these substances, acting on the brain, slightly modify its characteristics through the restructuring of neuronal connections.
Incredibly, however, psychotherapy and psychological therapy are also able to modify behavior by building new paths between the neurons of the brain (Carlson, 2002).
Before illustrating why single session therapy can be a useful tool for improving one’s well-being, in our opinion it may be interesting to know that psycho-physical balance is the best ally for a healthy and peaceful life .
More than two thousand years ago the ancients had already understood, albeit in a rudimentary form, the important role that the psychophysical, natural balance plays in a person’s life.
Although it was already known to Plato that the human being was made up of both body and mind and that to feel good one had to take care of both the body and the “spirit”, the philosopher and doctors of that time could not understand its exact connection.
Eg:
Between 1596 and 1650 René Descartes, known as Descartes, tried to explain how the mind and the body influence each other. He established that the parts that make up a single body perform different functions, one of the soul, the other of matter: the res cogitans (reality that thinks, abstract) and the res extensa (extended, physical reality).
The Cartesian theory of the mind-body relationship continued to be one of the most popular theories until 1944, the year in which Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, Portuguese psychologist and behavioral scholar, published his first work entitled: Descartes’ error .
He departs from what Descartes theorized and states that mind and body are interdependent and both act on the same person through reason, emotions and feelings.
It is precisely in this that Descartes’ error lies, in separating the res cogitans from the res extensa , the body from the mind.
Damasio’s basic assumption is that the human body must be studied taking into consideration the relationship that the individual establishes with his emotions, his rational thoughts, nutrition and everything related to the body, organs and chemicals.
Damasio therefore discovers that body and mind are “two sides of the same coin”, they influence each other and their well-being is constantly connected and interdependent .
For this reason, having good habits and proper nutrition serves to feel stronger and improve mood and well-being.
This also explains why being in a good mood, feeling capable and having confidence in oneself, serves to have a higher level of physical and mental energy!
Regardless of your physical and mental energy level, we at Exerens can help you feel better and achieve a 360 ° level of well-being.
The basic assumption of single session therapy is that in order to feel better with oneself and with others, it is necessary to optimize the times and, with a minimum intervention, produce a maximum result .
Unlike other methods of psychological intervention, from the very first minutes of the interview we try to understand how the problem works in the present , what feeds it and how it could be overcome. In the event that the person wants to reach a goal then you begin to understand how to unlock the situation to optimize the times and reach that goal.
This model, in practice, is an intervention that does not try to dig into the past looking for the cause of the problem, but rather seeks all those resources and strengths of the person and those around him, useful for overcoming the problem. In an accelerated society like ours, we too must go fast and psychology must adapt to modern rhythms. For this reason it is of fundamental importance to offer concrete and immediate help to those who are experiencing difficulties or are going through a complicated period.
Have you ever seen the domino board game? it is a sort of puzzle with which you try to draw a figure by balancing small vertical bricks side by side.
The beauty of the challenge lies in being able to create a path of bricks without letting them fall, but the goal of the game is precisely to make all the bricks fall in sequence at the right time: without interruptions and all at once.
This is done by gently knocking down only the first small brick; the others will in turn fall under the failure of the previous one, which will go over the next, thus continuing the chain until showing the form from another perspective.
The first goal of single session therapy is therefore to initiate this domino effect, that is, to create a first, small and minimally invasive change, which can lead the person to face and solve the problem in total autonomy.
The strength of this method lies in our awareness that the change and the experiences of each person take place outside the psychologist’s office.
From this point of view, single session therapy is configured as a type of intervention as needed .
A method that does not presuppose a predetermined number of meetings to do, but restores the person himself the freedom to decide when and how many times to return to the psychologist to face the same problem or other objectives.
This method is aimed at all people who would like to find a way to manage a problem or difficulty at a specific time in their life. It is not important how big, cumbersome or old the problem is, but how much motivation the person feels they can have in solving it. Single session therapy is also useful for people who for specific reasons cannot completely solve the problem, in these cases the psychologist and the client will try to find alternative strategies that will allow the person to change the point of view regarding the problem.
A specific case concerns children , pre-adolescents and some adolescents who are less willing to work on overcoming their own problem. The so-called indirect therapy is used with children and adolescents. The professional works directly with parents in an atmosphere of collaboration trying to find strategies to be implemented to indirectly help the child, without the latter necessarily passing through the psychologist’s office.
Trying to solve a big problem in one sitting does not mean facing things superficially, quite the contrary if the person deems it useful , make other meetings with the method of single session therapy that is carried out as if they were independent from each other , it can certainly serve to overcome the moment of difficulty with a few more encounters, but in any case in a short time.
Finding the mind-body balance is therefore essential for individual and social functioning and sometimes the people around us are affected by our behaviors both positively and negatively. Taking care of ourselves is also an act of selflessness towards our friends, family and the people around us. Single session therapy is undoubtedly a way to reach the desired energy level and serves to improve oneself to more easily reach a healthy psychophysical balance.
References
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by Dr. Eva Germanò - Researcher Medical Director, UOC of Child Neuropsychiatry - Department of…
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Article taken from a publication by Dr. Emanuela Malorgio National coordinator of the Sleep Study…