Researcher: A number of studies have suggested that, on average, clients in short-term psychotherapy show similar levels of improvement regardless of the kind of psychotherapy they receive
So any client improvement in short-term psychotherapy must be the result of some aspect or aspects of therapy that are common to all psychotherapies -- for example, the presence of someone who listens and gives attention to the client
The methods by which the studies measured whether clients improved primarily concerned immediate symptom relief and failed to address other important kinds of improvement.