Solution-Focused Brief Therapy

A brief history on Solution-Focused Brief Therapy is given, followed by pragmatic assumptions, offering a new ‘lens’ for looking at clients. SFBT originated from social constructionism: reality is subjective and there are many realities, all equally correct. Outcome studies indicate that SFBT has a positive effect in less time and satisfies the client’s need for autonomy. Indications and differences between problem-focused psychotherapy and SFBT are outlined. SFBT can be seen as a form of cognitive behavior therapy. Instead of reducing problems, the solution-focused question is: ‘What would you rather have instead?’ A lot could change for the better for both clients and therapists.     

I'll Start My Diet Tomorrow: A Solution-Focused Approach to Weight Loss

This article illustrates through a personal case example how Solution-Focused Brief Therapy concepts can help people lose weight and keep it off.     

Tasteful Solutions: Solution-Focused Work with Groups of Immigrants

Solution-focused family therapy is well established as a method in the therapeutic field. Less is written regarding solution-focused thinking and practice in preventive work, providing health information. Informed by the work of Insoo Kim Berg and Steve de Shazer, a workshop of primary health care was established in an inner city area of Oslo, Norway in 1994 with a major task of developing methods for providing information about health issues for immigrants as well as the native population. Results from an evaluation of this work are presented and some issues are related to empowerment work and especially Paulo Freires' liberating dialogue.     

Clients Helping Therapists Find Solutions to their Therapy

This paper is offered as a beginning toward including client perspectives on treatment and client participation in supervision. Rather than see therapists as technical experts who do things to people, many of us now see therapists as nonexperts who create conversations with people (Goolishian & Anderson, 1992). This new shift challenges the traditional training positions of supervisor and supervisee, respectively. Including clients' voices the supervisor participate from a nonexpert position.     

An Application of Brief Therapy to Family Medicine

The Solution-Focused Brief Therapy model has been applied to support families with various problems commonly met at the department of family medicine in a large, urban teaching hospital in Seoul. Korea. Many cases there show a different distribution of problems when compared with a tertiary family therapy center. The majority involve psychosomatic problems, family distress around a chronically-ill member, the loss of a family member, and severe illness, only a few involving drinking problems, family violence, or abuse. The SFBT model meets the seven requirements of Doherty and Baird (1983) for a family therapy model to be useful in a medicine setting.     

Some Thoughts on Language Use in Therapy

Drawing on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his own experience as a therapist and educator/trainer, the author describes some of the issues involved in helping therapists to find their way out of various muddles and mazes that are deeply embedded in language.     

Small Acts of Living: Everyday Resistance to Violence and Other Forms of Oppression

The author describes an approach to therapy which is based on the observation that whenever persons are badly treated, they resist. Case illustrations are given in which individuals seeking therapy had been subjected to violence and oppression.     

What Do You Think About What the Team Said? The Solution-Focused Reflecting Team as a Virtual Therapeutic Community

The authors describe the use of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy with the use of a reflecting team and discuss the benefits they have found for the clients, the reflecting team, and the therapist.     

浸润后现代精神的心理治疗模式--焦点解决短期疗法述评

焦点解决短期治疗是近20年逐步发展成熟的心理治疗模式,在西方社会得到了广泛的应用.主要从焦点解决短期治疗的产生背景、基本理念、应用价值及其局限性这三个方面对这种新兴的心理治疗模式作出简单的述评.     

On the Ethics of Constructing Realities

The author describes the successful use of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy intervention with an 11-year-old female who had been hospitalized for two weeks because she could not walk. He raises some ethical questions about the use of diagnosis “if, or when, we know different and maybe faster and simpler ways to find out what can be helpful?”     

A Stark Examination of Prison Culture and Prison Ministry

Abstract : This article offers an insightful examination of prison ministry from the inside, from someone who has been involved with this ministry for over forty‐five years. The author discusses four major issues that are particularly costly, both in terms of personal human costs and also financial costs. First, society's misconceptions about prison violence, and the complex, varied ways prisoners experience violence. Second, the false sense of security the current practices of institutionalization create, and the consequences they have on the inmates. Third, the risk factors that can predispose children to ending up in prison, and the lack of care and attention those children often receive. And fourth, the way in which the criminalization of drug abuse has exacerbated many problems with the current prison system. The author concludes his article with some suggestions for reforming the prison system.     

焦点解决短期治疗(SFBT)的理论述评

焦点解决短期治疗是近二十年逐步发展成熟的心理治疗模式．在西方社会得到了广泛的应用。本文阐述了SFBT的产生背景、基本理念、基本流程与技术及其应用价值．并对这种新兴的心理治疗模式作了简要的评述。     

A Case Study of Solution-Focused Brief Family Therapy

Abstract

Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) was developed as a form of family therapy. Recently, these features have blurred. This case study explores how Insoo Kim Berg interacts with multiple family members in SFBT. The results indicate that she used a circular procedure to ensure that all the family members were involved in the process. The analysis demonstrates the importance of purposeful use of language and the influence of systems theory in SFBT. SFBT provides a useful framework that enables a family therapist to work together with families to help them make the changes they want with their own strengths and resources.     

NLP简快心理治疗方法的模式整合及其优势

NLP简快心理疗法于20世纪70年代创立于美国,80～90年代得到完善、发展和逐步推广。它吸取了精神分析、行为主义及人本主义流派的理论和治疗方法并加以整合优化,形成了以检定语言模式、思考与暗示语言模式、激发潜意识与自我暗示模式为优势和特点的心理咨询与治疗的方法,对心理咨询和治疗理论与实践的发展起到了积极的作用。     

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy and the Kingdom of God: A Cosmological Integration

The core cosmological dimension of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) and Christianity emphasizes a similar truth—the future is now. As humans live in their preferred realities, they experience the future, problem free solution for their lives from a SFBT perspective. The Christian tradition emphasizes the in-breaking Kingdom of God beginning with the Christ event. The end has entered the now. However, the final consummation of the end-times is still as yet in the future which means that sin and death are part of the world. This Christian understanding of sin and fallenness provides humility to SFBT’s inherently positive view of the world (Bidwell, D. R. Am J of Pastor Couns, 3:3–21, 1999), while SFBT encourages Christians to see the kingdom of God in the now instead of the future.     

Reconfiguring Older Bodies in the Prison Time Machine

It is by mapping an area that the geographer comes to understand the contours and formations of a place. The place in this case is the prison world. This article serves to map moments in prison demonstrating how old female bodies are performed under the prison gaze. In this article I will illustrate how older women subvert, negotiate, or invoke discourse as a means of reinscribing the normalizing discourses that serve to confine and define older women's experiences in prison. Female elders in prison become defined and confined by regimes of femininity and ageism. They have to endure symbolic and actual intrusions of physical privacy, which serve to remind them of what they were, where they are, and what they have become. This article will critically explore the complexity and contradictions of time use in prison and how they impact on embodied identities. By incorporating the voices of elders, I hope to draw out the contradictions and dilemmas which they experience, thereby illustrating the relationship between time, their involvement in doing time, and the performance of time in a total institution (see Goffman, 1961), and the relationship between temporality and existence. The stories of the women show how their identities are caught within the movement and motion of time and space, both in terms of the time of the real on the outside and within prison time. This is the in-between space of carceral time within which women live and which they negotiate. It is by being caught in this network of carceral time that they are constantly being remade as their body/performance of identities alters within it. While only a small percentage of the female prison population in the United Kingdom are in later life, one has to question why criminological and gerontological literature fail to address the needs of a growing significant minority.     

Prison Theology: A Theology of Liberation,Hope and Justice

Abstract : In our nation today, the number of prisons and prisoners continue to grow at rates that are out‐of‐control. One in 100 of our citizens is in jail or prison, the highest ratio in the world. Unlike the poor, homeless, critically ill, and elderly, those in prison are separated from us to the degree they are unseen. Unseen also, is the oppressiveness of the criminal justice system that oversees more than 6.5 million people either in confinement or on probation or parole. Liberation theology, which advocates and works toward freeing people from oppression, includes feminist, black, womanist and Latino/Hispanic movements. This article proposes prison theology as part of the liberation theology family and identifies a prison theology based on liberation, hope and justice. It encourages a prison theology movement led by the church to liberate those under the oppressiveness of the criminal justice system, especially those confined and to energize a passion for justice and compassion for the oppressed throughout the criminal justice system.     

Time and again: Intermittent Brief Dynamic Therapy

Abstract

The author notes that in many of the settings in which Brief Therapy takes place that a client may return after the ending for a further series of sessions. Time-limited therapy has placed an emphasis upon the termination phase of the therapy and linked this to the process of individuation and separation. Such an approach, as articulated by Mann (1973 Mann, J. 1973. Time-limited psychotherapy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  [Google Scholar]), which draws conceptually from the work of Winnicott (1965 Winnicott, D. W. 1965. The maturational processes and the facilitating environment, London: Hogarth Press.  [Google Scholar]) and the notion that the infant achieves unit status from the original undifferentiated merger with the mother, is not easily compatible with Intermittent Brief Dynamic Therapy. The work of attachment theorists and Stern (1985 Stern, D. N. 1985. The interpersonal world of the infant, New York: Basic Books.  [Google Scholar]) provide an alternative basis upon which to conceive of the development of the infant. While emphasizing the importance of attending to affects at points of separation and ending, as is evidenced in the work of Della Selva (2004 Della, Selva P. C. 2004. Intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy, London: Karnac.  [Google Scholar]), such a framework is more readily compatible with the development of Intermittent Therapy, and with the realities of the settings in which much brief work takes place. The author also comments upon the flexibility inherent in Winnicott's own practice of brief consultations, and the implications of this for the development of Intermittent Brief Dynamic Therapy. The paper includes a case study that illustrates this debate and which provides evidence for the therapeutic potency of a form of Brief Dynamic Intermittent Therapy where a dynamic focus maintains a structuring pattern to the narrative over a sequence of several periods of Brief Therapy, spread over a number of years.