Category: SFBT

How Don Jackson brought an interactional view to people seen as dysfunctional

27/11/2017

At the UKASFP conference, Dr Wendel Ray from the University of Louisiana at Monroe, reminded us about Don Jackson, one of the founding fathers of what’s become the solutions-focused approach to change.

Jackson took a view of people not as isolated individuals to be thought about or studied separately, but as part of the small or larger groups to which they belonged. Then any particular individual’s behaviour is seen as them adapting as well as they can to the way the group is operating.

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Hard problems, easy solutions

13/11/2017

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The problem might be hard, but the solution can be easy. That’s a central insight of a solutions-focused approach. If we get too tangled up in thinking about the problem, analysing it and talking about it, we might miss the simplicity of doing something different – which may well be unrelated to the problem in any obvious way, yet improve things quickly. A nice example here, in this Guardian Weekend column by Oliver Burkeman.

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Fifty Shades of Therapy | Paul

26/2/2015

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As I was reading volume 2 of the latest literary erotic sensation, Fifty Shades of Grey, I found a particularly arousing passage 79% of the way through. “SFBT - The latest therapy option,” one character recommends to our heroine.

The therapist himself, Dr John Flynn, is good enough to describe Solution Focused Brief Therapy: “Essentially, it’s goal-oriented. We concentrate on where Christian wants to be and how to get him there… There’s no point breast-beating about the past – all that’s been picked over by every physician, psychologist, and psychiatrist Christian’s ever seen…. It’s the future that’s important. Where Christian envisages himself, where he wants to be.”

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How do we know if it's Solutions Focus | Paul

28/9/2013

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This turned out to be a central question during the EBTA (European Brief Therapy Association) conference in Bern, Switzerland, this weekend.

Receiving his award for distinguished contribution to SF thinking, Luc Isabaert said, 'There is no orthodoxy in SF thinking. Steve de Shazer was a heterodox thinker, a man of science and philosophy. And Insoo was a practitioner.'

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7 Questions to ask your clients when they can’t put their feelings into words | Janine

6/9/2013

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Sometimes coaching will succeed only if your client can get to grips with aspects of their issues that are tricky to put into words. For example, one client was describing her goals, and mentioned a feeling that she said she wanted to experience more often - a feeling of intense connection to the universe.

She'd had this feeling, she recalled, once or twice over the previous few years, but she found it difficult to say more about it.

Getting this feeling described was important, as we shall see. Yet doing so was an intricate process; we were trying to pin down something subtle, elusive and frustratingly ephemeral.

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What your clients want – part 2 | Paul

31/10/2011

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In part one, we saw why 'What do you want?' can be considered the primary question in the solution-focused approach to change. Yet sometimes practitioners are reluctant to ask, because they suspect that they won’t be able to deliver what’s wanted.

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Positive Psychology and Solutions Focus - a start to compare and contrast | Paul

8/7/2011

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Positive Psychology (PP) and Solutions Focus (SF) are different enterprises. Their practitioners are aiming at different targets. The nature of PP is academic, the pursuit of understanding; SF is about the pragmatic application of a set of principles and tools, perhaps best described as finding the direct route to what works.

That may highlight a difference in disciplines, yet there is a great vista of common ground – particularly when you look at practitioners who label themselves as within the PP and SF camps. Many of each are professional coaches, which makes it possible to compare and contrast the approaches within that specific field. We can observe how each group is taught and how each practises, for example.

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How Don Jackson brought an interactional view to people seen as dysfunctional

Hard problems, easy solutions

Fifty Shades of Therapy | Paul

How do we know if it's Solutions Focus | Paul

7 Questions to ask your clients when they can’t put their feelings into words | Janine

What your clients want – part 2 | Paul

Positive Psychology and Solutions Focus - a start to compare and contrast | Paul

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