Assessment
Intervention
Maintenance
Assessment
There are three phases of personal or relationship work. In the assessment phase, your therapist or coach will ask a lot of questions. Not only about the situation you’re facing, but about you. To develop an effective treatment plan, the helping professional needs to know about the situation and about the talents and experiences you can draw from in order to get better. This phase takes from one to three sessions—most often one or two.
Intervention
During the intervention phase recommendations are made that are likely to improve the situation or how it is impacting you. There are two main types of interventions: in-session interventions that happen during the session, and between-session interventions that you will do at home, at work, or wherever you and your therapist decide will most help you get the results you are looking for. Changing your life depends on changing something you regularly do as you are living: not just during sessions. Between-session interventions are designed to help you take changes into your daily life. These interventions are not scary or intimidating. Some examples might be logging when you have a thought that keeps you stuck, or using different words in a specific situation and noticing the result.
Maintenance
The final phase of psychotherapy involves making sure the changes last. It feels wonderful to put painful or difficult circumstances behind you or to learn to deal with them in ways to don’t cause undue stress, but effective change is lasting change. Maintenance means coming up with life-long strategies for monitoring and rewarding changes that were made during the intervention stage. A number of people do this by continuing to attend live or video sessions every month or two just to give a progress report to their therapist or coach and get ongoing encouragement. This gives them someone to be accountable to, and it helps them stay focused between sessions on what works to make their lives better. Other people can do their own progress reporting and self-validation.