Seth Bernstein – Solution Focused Therapy: Building on What Works to Create Change and Get Results

Outline

Do More of What’s Working: Integrate Solution-Focused Therapy Into Your Current Approach

• Redefine “successful outcome” in therapy
• Find the exception to the problem
• Who is the expert?
• Stay in the present
• Change language and interventions to be strengths-based
• A new perspective on goal setting
• Limitations of the research and potential risks

Quickly Engage Clients in Treatment: Get Buy-In and Instill Hope During the First Session

• Build the therapeutic alliance
• Decrease resistance and defensiveness
• Integrate Prochaska’s Stages of Change
• Emphasize client competence with the “Yes Set”
• Help clients recognize existing support
  • Exercises to identify personal VIPs
  • Relationship “deposits”
  • Utilize evidence-based compliments to reinforce strengths and coping skills

Behavior Management Plan Development

• A Comprehensive Step-By-Step Guide with Worksheets and Checklists
  • Explicitly describe the behavior
  • Assess impact of cognition, emotion, medical status, personal history on behavior
  • Identify the cause of the behavior
  • Interventions to address causes of behaviors
    • Environmental changes
    • Communication changes
    • Schedule changes
    • Medical changes
    • Staff changes
  • Write a thorough behavior intervention plan for the entire care team
  • Evaluate the success of the behavior management plan or reasons for failure

Gain Therapeutic Momentum: Activate Change Through Collaboration

• Gain a motivational edge by tapping into client values
• Interventions that emphasize client strengths and competencies
• Identify clients’ preferred future with variants of the “Miracle Question”
• Nurture clients’ sense of agency by highlighting:
  • Successes
  • Coping skills
  • Positive differences
  • Progress in treatment
• Elicit change with solution-focused goal setting

Putting It All Together: Combine Strengths and Skills to Create Lasting Change

• Strategies that facilitate therapeutic change
  • Incremental learning
  • Between session assignments
• Continue building on the positive
  • Resource activation
  • Expanding personal VIPs
• Utilize “scaling” as an outcome monitoring and motivational tool
• Work through transference issues that may impede progress
• Termination considerations