After getting an MA in psychology from Brandeis University in the early 1960s—a sort of consolation prize when I dropped out of a PhD program—and then teaching psychology for several years in a community college, I discovered Fritz Perls and Gestalt Therapy. The excitement of seeing change happen right before my eyes was a heady contrast to the other therapies that took months—or sometime years—to get anwhere. I became a “true believer,” and devoted all my spare time to learning how to do it, over a period of ten years, 1967-1977, when my name was John O. Stevens. (I took my wife’s last name when we married in 1981.) In 1969 I edited and published Perls’ Gestalt Therapy Verbatim and his autobiography In and Out the Garbage Pail, and the next year I wrote and published Awareness: exploring, experimenting, experiencing, a book that applied Gestalt principles in exercises that I was using in my college teaching.

During this time I was invited by an Air Force psychiatrist to come up to his base and make a presentation to his staff. Walking to my car after the talk, Bill told me about his dissatisfactions with life in the military. He talked about the salary and all the benefits that kept him there, and all the rules and restrictions that rankled him. At one point he said, “I pay a terrible price for all that security.” I said, “Well, I guess we all have our price,” meaning that we all make difficult choices and compromises in a less-than-perfect world, and that benefits never come to us without some kind of price.

Later I learned that my simple normalizing comment gave Bill permission to carefully examine the price he was paying, and he decided that he didn’t want to pay it any more. Since he had just signed up for a 3-year hitch, he couldn’t just quit. So he faked a psychotic depression, palmed and flushed the drugs they gave him, and was discharged soon after, free to find a new life with a different price. I wasn’t trying to “do therapy” with Bill, but my short comment, which couldn’t have taken longer than six seconds, had a literal life-changing effect, and ought to qualify for “briefest therapy.”

At that time, “brief therapy” typically meant 10-20 sessions, and psychoanalysis took years, often with little to show for it. Although I was used to fairly rapid changes in Gestalt sessions, this was one of my first clues that—at least sometimes—personal change could be even faster and gentler. Perhaps if I knew more about the internal structure of someone’s experience, I could be more systematic about helping them change quickly. I don’t know anyone who thinks that a complex motor skill like playing a violin, basketball, or brain surgery can be learned quickly, but changes in attitude, orientation, and belief can often occur in seconds.

Looking backward, Gestalt Therapy had some significant flaws, one of which was the “one size fits all” assumption that a single process will work for all kinds of different problems, an idea that is still quite pervasive in the field of therapy. In medicine, there are more than 13,000 distinctly different diseases, syndromes, and types of injury, most of which have a very specific intervention protocol. Contrast that with the current state of psychotherapy, in which there are over a thousand different named therapies (and how many unamed?) and nearly all of them assume that their one process will work with any and all difficulties.