Licensed Professional Counselor

Home   |  Solution-Focused Therapy   |  Therapy Services   |  Seminars & Training   |  Articles   |  Contact

Solution-Focused Therapy: My Story

My Journey Towards Discovering SFT

The trick to accomplishing goals is realizing the journey is more important than the goal. Only then does the goal become within our grasps.

My original training was in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). At the time I entered graduate school I was working at a social service agency that used CBT as their exclusive mode of treatment. We received extensive training in CBT and we were taught that CBT was the "best" practice due to the large amount of research that supports this approach.

Because of this experience, I was unaware that therapists outside of this agency utilized other approaches when I entered graduate school. I will never forget the day that assumption was destroyed.

For the first year (two semesters) of the grad school program, we were taught basic things related to counseling: Research Methods, Human Development, etc. At the beginning of the third semester, a new professor entered the program and began to teach about the theories. She explained all of the theories related to counseling from Freudian theorists of the early twentieth century to the post-modern theories of today. I was shocked to learn that not only was CBT not the only theory being used in the field of psychotherapy, but part of my task as a student learning to do counseling was to locate the theory that was the best fit for me.

This professor explained that she did a form of therapy known as Solution-Focused Therapy (SFT). At the time, I was not sure what that meant and what the differences were between CBT and SFT. However, what was now acutely aware to me was that there were many other choices than just CBT and I had a lot of work to do.

As the semester ensued, we did more readings about theories and had more discussions about the details of each theory. The result was the beginnings of understanding the differences of each of these approaches. I began to notice that SFT was different in its assumptions about clients from any of the approaches we studied. I began to see that a therapist using this model focused on the presence of the solution and not merely the absence of the problem.

I also realized that a therapist such as this did not believe in "resistant" clients. This was so different for me because my employers and co-workers were constantly describing their clients as "resistant" and difficult. In fact, identifying resistant clients became a part of treatment as constant supervision hours were spent on how to handle these clients. But here was a professor that was saying that this "resistance" did not exist!

One day during class this professor demonstrated her work with clients by showing the class a session in which she worked with a family of four. I heard this professor asking the members of this family about their strengths and exceptions to the problem. I have truly never heard such respectfulness and productivity in a therapy session. The language used in this session was so different. The questions asked by the therapist were so curious and the answers given by the family members were so hopeful.

I also saw that each member of the family was engaged in the process. Each actively described what their ideal family would be like and what they could each do to begin to change the family into that ideal. This also was very unusual for me to see. That night, as I drove home from class, I continued to think about what I had observed. To this very day I can recall gripping the wheel tight to hold back tears. At that moment I knew. I knew that SFT was the model that fit me, I had found the way I wanted to work with clients!

Home   |  Solution-Focused Therapy   |  Therapy Services   |  Seminars & Training   |  Articles   |  Contact   |