main ideas
Help clients appreciate how they construct their realities and how they author their own stories (help clients share stories and talk about issues from own perspective), therapists assume there are multiple truths, not just about behavior cognition or someone’s world, multiple ways of looking at issue and we only get a piece of it (we see things and clients say things to us and we hear it from their perspective, but there are also other perspectives in the room you are unaware of), sometimes therapists foreclose on things client is saying, but we have to recognize there may be different narratives, have to keep an open mind and understand there is always more
what do post modernists assume
- Postmodernists assume there are multiple truths
- Reality is subjective and is based on the use of language
- How things are said and what clients say and what it means to them
- Ex. There is no real world for love beyond romantic love, use love often
what do they strive for
- Postmodernists strive for a collaborative and consultative stance
- Learn and consult with client, they are seen as experts and will guide you in therapy process
what are the key concepts to solution focused therapy
- Therapy grounded on a positive orientation– people are healthy and competent
- Past is downplayed, while present and future are highlighted
- Therapy is concerned with looking for what is working
- Strength based approach
Therapists assist clients in finding exceptions to their problems
- Ex. Client says they are having relationship difficulty, you are trying to help them understand they do not ALWAYS have difficulty, times they have relationships that work out well
- Way to strengthen the skills they feel they are lacking
There is a shift from “problem-orientation” to “solution-focus”
Emphasis is on constructing solutions rather than problem solving
3 types of relationships (solution focused)
1) Customer-type relationship: client and therapist jointly identify a problem and a solution to work toward
2) Complainant relationship: a client who describes a problem, but is not able or willing to take an active role in constructing a solution
- Not taking responsibility
3) Visitors: clients who come to therapy because someone else thinks they have a problem
- Other people need to be in therapy, they are there because someone else told them to come in
techniques in solution focused therapy
Pre-therapy change
- (What have you done since you made the appointment that has made a difference in your problem?)
- What changes they have made since making the appointment
Exception questions
- (Direct clients to times in their lives when the problem did not exist)
- what helped then, what felt good about that, what contributed to not having problems
Miracle question
- (If a miracle happened and the problem you have was solved while you were asleep, what would be different in your life?)
- what would it feel like? What would you do?
- Trying to understand how issue and problem has impacted problem and in what ways they are dreaming about change/ how change would look for them
Scaling questions
-(On a scale of zero to 10, where zero is the worst you have been and 10 represents the problem being solved, where are you with respect to __________?)
what are the two main kinds of this therapy
solution focused and narrative therapy
main idea of solution focused
solution focused therapy as a way to get client to focus on what is present now and what is positive
key concepts of narrative therapy
Listen to clients with an open mind
-One of the reason it appeals to people
Encourage clients to share their stories
Listen to a problem-saturated story of a client without getting stuck
Therapists demonstrate respectful curiosity and persistence
The person is not the problem, but the problem is the problem
Style of therapy where you are listening to person’s experience and giving them a voice to share
what is externalizing
(one of main techniques)
- Person is not the problem, what else is going on
- Living life means relating to problems, not being fused with them
- Externalization is a process of separating the person from identifying with the problem
- Moving person to understanding where problem came from, not blaming but showing it comes from some place and it is not who you are / how you should be defined
- Externalizing conversations help people in freeing themselves from being identified with the problem
- Externalizing conversations can lead clients in recognizing times when they have dealt successfully with the problem
- Comes from a place not just who you are, if this problem were to continue what would this mean? To what extent has the problem influenced life?
- Individual can move forward
mapping in narrative therapy
asking client when problem first appeared, what was happening at that time
therapeutic process in narrative therapy
-Collaborate with the client in identifying (naming) the problem
-Separate the person from his or her problem
-Investigate how the problem has been disrupting or dominating the person
-Search for exceptions to the problem
-Ask clients to speculate about what kind of future they could
expect from the competent person that is emerging
-Create an audience to support the new story
-Help them find new people, resources, supports as they move forward
