preview

Solutions-Focused Therapy Essay

Decent Essays

Solutions-focused therapy is a relatively new and welcomed therapy developed by Steve de Shazer and his wife Insoo Kim Berg, in 1979 at their institute, the “ Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin” (Guterman, 2010, p. 350). Shazer was interested in how to “influence change” (Nichols, 2008, p. 346). Solution-focused therapy deals in solutions as opposed to dwelling on problems. Increasingly stringent budgeting constraints emphasize the need to develop shorter and more focused therapy sessions without sacrificing successful outcomes (Nichols, 2008). The drawback to solution-focused therapy would be that for those not experienced, therapists may be unable to decipher what real underlying issues are involved (Guterman, 2010). …show more content…

Clients in working with their therapists learn to rethink their situations. They learn to look at their life as the glass half-full, instead of almost empty. Showing clients how to spot the flowers in a sea of weeds enables them to face adversity or misfortune with an attitude of, “yes, that was a bad hit, but how do we move on from here? Where do I want to go tomorrow? How am I going to get there?” Solutions-focused therapy enables a client to multiply a smidgen of courage into enough to conquer a problem. Assisting clients to re-set their thinking stays with clients long after the therapy session has ended, and is another excellent benefit of solutions-focused therapy. Not surprisingly, Iveson (2002) found that solutions-focused therapy was effective in a severe phobia case, while he was working with a client experiencing agoraphobia. According to the Mayo Clinic ( 2009) agoraphobia can severely limit your ability to socialize, work, attend important events and even manage the details of daily life, such as running errands” (para. 1). In working with his client, Iveson discovered that the client did go up and down stairs in her home that ran right beside the front door. Some days, the client had to sit on the top step and talk herself into making the descent, but after time had passed, she could make the trip down and back up. Once the client had remembered what she was able to do, Iveson concentrated on that success, which was then followed by

Get Access