An Understandable Misunderstanding;

Many people have some misunderstanding about  Brief Therapy (BT) or Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT).

“Let me just clarify that BT or SFBT are NOT about setting limits on time or number of sessions.”

1. Brief Therapy is about setting small significant goals.
2. Working with current issues and not past difficulties – How does your past influence you today?
3. Creating a supportive yet challenging and collaborative relationship between the expert therapist and client.

This congruent, immediate and directive approach often leads to the decrease in number of sessions or shorter therapy time.

Brief Therapy is also about skill development and practice. Often clients will gain knowledge and skills and may take a break from therapy.

After using their new skills and knowledge, they can choose to come back to therapy to achieve additional goals.

- The average number of sessions per problem area is 6-8
-  The average length of treatment is less than 6 months

Solution focused brief therapy (SFBT), often referred to as simply ‘solution focused therapy’ or ‘brief therapy’, is a type of talking therapy that is based upon social constructionist philosophy.

Brief therapy focuses on what clients want to achieve through therapy rather than on the problem(s) that made them to seek help.

The approach does not focus on the past, but instead, focuses on the present and future.

Solution focused therapists believe that change is constant. By helping people identify the things that they wish to have changed in their life and also to attend to those things that are currently happening that they wish to continue to have happen.

SFBT therapists help their clients construct a concrete vision of a preferred future for themselves

The miracle question;

The miracle question is a method of questioning that a coach, therapist, or counselor uses to aid the client to envision how the future will be different when the problem is no longer present. Also, this may help to establish goals.

A traditional version of the miracle question would go something like this:

“Suppose our meeting is over, you go home, do whatever you planned to do for the rest of the day. And then, some time in the evening, you get tired and go to sleep. And in the middle of the night, when you are fast asleep, a miracle happens and all the problems that brought you here today are solved just like that. But since the miracle happened overnight nobody is telling you that the miracle happened.

When you wake up the next morning, how are you going to start discovering that the miracle happened? … What else are you going to notice? What else?”

Scaling Questions;

Scaling questions are tools that are used to identify useful differences for the client and may help to establish goals as well. The poles of a scale can be defined in a bespoke way each time the question is asked, but typically range from;

1.    What is the worst the problem has ever been? – (zero or one)
2.    What is the best things could ever possibly be? (ten).

The client is asked to rate their current position on the scale, and questions are then used to help the client identify resources (e.g. “what’s stopping you from slipping one point lower down the scale?”), exceptions (e.g. “on a day when you are one point higher on the scale, what would tell you that it was a ‘one point higher’ day?”) and to describe a preferred future (e.g. “where on the scale would be good enough? What would a day at that point on the scale look like?”)

Once the miracle day has been thoroughly explored the worker can follow this with scales, on a scale where 0 = worst things have every been and 10 = the miracle day where are you now? Where would it need to be for you to know that you didn’t need to see me any more?

Let me know if this was useful?

Dawn Pugh Expert therapist.

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The Truth about Men relationships and infidelity: Whether it is a casual relationship or a full blown affair. Betrayal affects trust relationships. One of the main ingredients for a good healthy relationship is to be open and honest, sadly this marriage communication is not priority for lots of unhappy couples. The average couple spends only 12 minutes a day in conversation. Couples could try improving things, by spending quality time together, talking about anything except money, work or children.

Gary Neuman, who has been a psychotherapist and marital therapist in the United States for 20 years, was determined to discover why men cheat. In his book ‘The Truth About Cheating’, Neuman interviewed 200 men from 48 states, including 100 men who had cheated and 100 who had not, and concluded that genetics had little to do with most marital breakdowns.

In fact,  Neuman reveals that, far from men seeking younger, prettier women, more men blame being under valued and unappreciated by their wives with an “emotional disconnect” in the home than a need to find a newer partner.

Why Men Cheat (M. Gary Neuman)