Solution-Focused Therapy At Spring Hill

During the development of your personalized treatment plan at Spring Hill, your care team will discuss with you different treatment options based on your unique needs, goals, and personal preferences.

One of those may be solution-focused therapy (SFT), which involves examining what your strengths are and how you’re already applying them in your life successfully, and then determining how to use them in support of your recovery goals.

What Is Solution-Focused Therapy?

As its name implies, solution-focused therapy focuses on solutions rather than problems when helping people recover from behavioral and mental health issues. Also known as solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) or solution-centric therapy, the approach was developed primarily by psychotherapists Insoo Kim Berg and Steve de Shazer at their Milwaukee-based Brief Family Therapy Center. Berg and de Shazer believed that what the client brings with them to therapy in regard to their strengths, abilities, and resources is key to developing solutions for the problems in the client’s life. These solutions focus then on what the client can already do, whereas problems tend to focus on what the client can’t do.

SFT has been shown to have positive outcomes for people experiencing emotional, interpersonal, and behavioral health issues, including substance use disorder (SUD).

Key Elements Of SFT For Addiction Recovery

During SFT sessions, the clinician and client work together to identify the client’s strengths, abilities, and resources and how the client can use them to make changes for a happier, healthier life, free of substance use. Specific goals are largely determined by the client.

Finding Exceptions To The ‘Problem’

The therapist will help the client see that they already possess what they need to effect change in their life and achieve recovery. This happens primarily through discussing and examining times in the client’s life when substance use was not an issue, or less of an issue, and areas of the client’s life where they are currently seeing success and making healthy choices.

Formulating And Implementing Solutions

From there, the client and therapist will work together to develop solutions based on what is already working or has previously worked in the client’s life. The client shares the changes they would like to make, which typically involves what brought them to treatment in the first place, and why these changes would be beneficial. This includes areas of life often affected by addiction, such as school or work performance, relationships, overall physical and mental health, etc. As the client starts making these changes, they build on each other, empowering the client to keep moving forward in the direction of their goals.

Solution-Focused Therapy Techniques

Solution-focused therapy involves several techniques for helping people see that change is possible, and that they already have what it takes to make lasting, positive changes in their lives.

Asking Questions

Rather than selling a particular approach, clinicians ask different types of questions to open the door to setting goals and finding solutions.

Some of these include the following:

• Coping questions, such as “How do you manage, in the face of such difficulty, to fulfill your daily obligations?,” illustrating the client’s resiliency
• “Miracle question,” aka “best hopes” questions, such as “Imagine that a miracle has occurred and addiction is no longer part of your life; what does your life now look like?,” helping the client imagine what their life would look like without addiction and identify concrete steps for getting there
• Scaling questions, such as “On a scale of 0 to 10, how would you rate your progress in finding and implementing a solution to your problem?,” helping the therapist gauge the client’s progress and learn more about the client’s confidence in the solution

Reinforcing Positive Qualities

By focusing on what people already have and what they can do, not on what they can’t, SFT promotes self-worth and empowerment. This includes emphasizing current actions the client is taking in support of their long-term recovery, even when setbacks occur. Clients begin to see themselves as capable not only of effecting positive changes in their lives, but also of determining the direction of their lives.

Focusing On Solutions And The Future

In his research, de Shazer noted that the therapist doesn’t have to know every detail about the client’s problems in order to help the client solve them. And these solutions can take form rather quickly in comparison with the development of the problems. The speed at which progress can be made has many benefits for the client.

Contact Spring Hill To Learn More

If you are interested in learning more about the comprehensive services offered at Spring Hill to help people achieve lasting recovery, please call us today—we are here to help!