This paper summarizes a session I had with a patient in which I employed solution focused brief therapy (SFBT). The patient in question is a 46-year old female who is a marketing executive at a local arts center. She has been struggling with insomnia after a stressful event at her work. This meeting was the first as I had not met the client before. Since that was the first meeting, I had no earlier set goals, but after the first session, the main goal was to restore the client’s wellbeing (avert insomnia).
The engineers of SFBT developed this theory initially in an inner city circle setting in which outpatient mental health patients were served without prior screening. SBT is a goal-centered collaborative approach that involves observation of a client’s reaction to a set of specific questions. This approach helps the client achieve their set goal by analyzing the history, as well as provenance of the problems at hand. In essence, the focus is on the present and the future during SFBT. The past, in this approach, is only examined in order to understand the client’s problem, but the focus is on the present and the future. Since we had not before, I only familiarized myself with the essentials of SFBT.
As noted earlier, that session was the first meeting I had with the client. Therefore, I sought to understand the cause of the psychological problem at hand (insomnia). The patient narrated that in the past few weeks, she was not herself. She had trouble finding sleep and had contemplated on taking sleeping peels, but she decided to seek counseling first. According to the client, she had encountered challenging events at her place of work. As a marketing executive, she was under pressure to deliver set goals. Her organization’s executives had tasked her with the role of lifting the organization to its desired sales volume. In the past event, she had a host of responsibilities on her hands that pushed her to the limits. She believes that failure to attain the expected target is her mistake, and this has been giving her sleepless nights.
Bannink (2007) posits SFBT does not champion the reduction of the problem at hand; instead, clients need to focus on what they ought to have. This strategy empowers clients with optimism to see solutions, as well as possibilities. In other words, this helps in detaching patients from their troubled past, and concentrating on the future that has possibilities and opportunities. Therefore, the role of the therapist here is to help the client see possibilities and opportunities. During this session, I inquired from the client if anything had changed from the time we had arranged a session. Surprisingly, she said that there was a positive transformation that she felt some relief knowing that she was going to be able to talk me about the difficulty she was having. I found it surprising that the client was able to list several possible solutions to the problem at hand without any suggestion from me.
Most clients seek psychotherapy and expect a miracle during. The miracle question is employed by therapists to set the goals of the therapy. In this case, I asked the client what she thinks her bright future looks like. I asked the client explain what she thinks would have changed if she woke up the next morning and found that her life had changed for the better. This technique has a significant impact on the course of the therapy. It helps clients to depart from the problem saturated context and move to a possibility saturated context where they have some form of freedom.
Consequently, the miracle question played a vital role in addressing what the client wants. After that, I developed a plan that would scale up the client’s goal. In other words, the client had to undertake simple tasks on a daily basis as this would assist her depart from her troubled past steadily. She was expected to take a break from her work, participate in part-time activities and focus on her hobbies. I challenged her to take advantage of her positive attributes as a source of inspiration.
Since that was the first session with the client and my first ever therapy session, I felt uncomfortable and nervous providing that it was being recorded. I was not relaxed during that session as a therapist should be; I kept on looking at my referral sheet most of the time in search for every detail, and this made the entire session not flow as required.
In summary, this paper has analyzed my first session with a client. In that session, I employed SFBT. This form of therapy helps in detaching patients their troubled past, and concentrating on the future that has possibilities and opportunities. Therefore, the role of the therapist here is to help the client see possibilities and opportunities. I successfully used the miracle question, scaling up and compliments. The client embraced the concept of focusing on possibilities and opportunities. However, the session was a bit challenging for me because I felt nervous.
Reference
Bannink, F.B. (2007). Solution-Focused Brief Therapy. J Contemp Psychother, pp. 1-5. DOI 10.1007/s10879-006-9040-y
