Solution Focused Therapy Case Study

Mrs. Johnson: Solution- Focused Approach for a domestic violence victim
Introduction
Mrs. Allison Johnson has been married to her abusive husband for fifteen years and she is working towards leaving him. Allison Johnson, Derek Johnson, Ashley, Larry, Lisa, John, and Nathan are pseudonyms names. Allison was admitted to The Bridgeway on Unit 5, the Adult Inpatient Psychiatric Unit for PSTD, depression, conversion disorder, substance abuse disorder and suicidal attempt by cutting her arm.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT), also known as Solution-Focused Therapy (SFT), was developed in the 1980’s by two social workers, Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, along with a team of interdisciplinary colleagues at the Brief Family Therapy Center in
The original team regularly met and observed therapy sessions using a one-way mirror. While observing the therapeutic dialogues and process, the team behind the mirror diligently attempted to identify, discover, and converse about what brought beneficial positive changes in clients and families. In other words, the early development of SBFT was antithetical to the modernist epistemology of understanding human behavior and change based on a presumed understanding of the observed phenomena. Instead of taking a positivistic, hierarchal, or expert stance, the understanding is accomplished by a bottom-up and grounded approach, which strives for a contextual and local understanding of what works in therapy (Lee, 2013, p.
Because change is constant and there is movement in any system, every problem pattern includes an exception to the pattern. For example, no matter how conflicted a relationship is, there must be times that the dyads (that is, a couple or two people) are not fighting or bickering. The time when the dyad is doing something else to handle its differences constitutes an exception to the problem pattern, which also contains potential solution to the problem of fighting. Underlying such a view is a belief in the inherent strengths and potentials of clients to engage in behavior that is outside the problem pattern. In other words, despite the multi-deficiencies and problems that clients may perceive that they have, there are times when clients handle their life situations in a more satisfying way or in a different manner. These exceptions provide the clues for solutions and represent the client’s “unnoticed” strengths and resources. The task for the solution-focused practitioner is to assist clients in noticing, amplifying, sustaining, and reinforcing these exceptions, regardless of how small or infrequent the exceptions may be. Once clients are engaged in non-problem behavior, they are on their way to a solution-building process (Lee, 2013, p.