Author: Bill O’Connell

www.sagepub.com

This second edition of Solution-Focused Therapy is a readable, open-minded overview of solution-focused therapy, which is ideal for beginners and students. While it is aimed at counsellors and therapists, it is also designed for use by other disciplines. This edition contains new sections on solution-focused supervision and reflecting teams for supervision and organizational work. Practice points to the end of each chapter.

O’Connell begins with an overview of the effectiveness of solution-focused and brief therapies, and a history of brief therapy, differentiating between it and solution-focused therapy. Intentionally brief therapy is uniquely structured and requires that the therapist think and work differently; solution-focused therapy happens to be well-suited for this structure, but many therapies can be offered briefly.

O’Connell discusses the epistemological position underlying SFT, defining social constructionism, and comparing constructionism to structuralism, and a focus on solutions to a focus on problems. He outlines the Mental Research Institute’s (MRI’s) problem-focused model, and highlights features of SFT. These include the establishment of a focal issue or goal, future-oriented questions, and an emphasis on skills and strengths. O’Connell notes that assessment and analysis can distract the counsellor from seeing the solutions that already exist, and he reviews principles that guide SFT, such as “small changes can lead to bigger changes” (p.31) and “if it’s working keep doing it” (p.32). Comparative charts and quotes are offered throughout the book, which add interest and understanding.

The book goes on to review all of the familiar tools and strategies, including the miracle question, scaling, exception-seeking, reframing and tasks. However, O’Connell provides succinct, varied examples, which do not always follow the normal ‘scripted’ client examples so often presented in books and training sessions. His examples do not leave you wishing your own clients would always respond as his do, and O’Connell offers many suggestions for what to do with seemingly unproductive responses.

O’Connell suggests a structure for traditional and peer supervision, mirroring the therapeutic process, and focusing on the supervisee in place of the client. His proposed five-stage model would be especially useful for a new supervisor, or in situations where the practitioner’s ability to feel vulnerable is an issue, such as with newly formed teams in any discipline, or those new to peer supervision.

Throughout the book, O’Connell emphasizes the importance of pacing, and of remaining with the problem for as long as necessary. The client needs to feel that the problem is not being trivialized, and that the counsellor is not being “oppressively optimistic” (p. 65). He is also clear that brief therapy is not for everyone, and that in some cases therapy should continue long-term. He promotes eclectic practice and devotes a chapter to integrating brief with other models, because “no therapy always works” (p. xv). The book is open and flexible as it addresses frequently asked questions, such as whether SFT ignores emotions, and the connection between its popularity and its cost. O’Connell really works to make SFT as accessible as possible.

Solution-Focused Therapy is a comfortable introduction to SFT, which is best suited for students or those new to the model, or to professionals in other fields. It supports the novice practitioner in feeling that providing good therapy is within their grasp. O’Connell’s presentation of solution-focused therapy encourages theoretical integration, practicality, and trust in the abilities of the client over purity. Hopefully, such an approach would appeal to all therapists.

Building Solutions In Child Protective Services-

Authors:Insoo Kim Berg & Susan Kelly

I would like to comment on a book that I recently finished authored by Insoo Kim Berg and Susan Kelly entitled, Building Solutions in Child Protective Services. Like many of you I have received ample training

over the years in various forms of family therapy from Strategic to Solution-Focused to Narrative Therapy, etc. However, what struck me about this book evoked more of my experience as a social worker in child protective services 20 years ago. I can clearly remember how worn down and disheartened I became with the child protection system. This book written by Berg and Kelly would have been a welcomed source of hope and inspiration for an uninspired system wrought with hopelessness. Ironically, I remember

finally leaving child welfare because of the system itself, not because of the clients. The clients were real people with real problems and if they were treated with respect we could usually find a way to work together. When I finally became so discouraged that I ran screaming to children's mental health I remember thinking, "you don't need to be a social worker to drive great distances, knock on doors, and blame people". Child protection became an environment that most of us worked in on our way to somewhere else.

Building Solutions in Child Protective Services offers a serious account of the historical development and present state of the child protection system in the United States. Berg and Kelly do not avoid the details, statistics or sugar coat the grave reality of the child protection environment. They do acknowledge that the system is broken, but also acknowledge that the people involved in the system, from the clients receiving the service to the front line workers and the administrators are not willful sinners.

However, they do challenge the typical thinking of child protective services and threaten a few sacred cows by asking some well thought out questions such as:

-Would the child's health or safety have been compromised by maintaining him/her at home?

-Was the service customized to meet the family's needs?

-What efforts did agencies make, to make services more available?

The authors challenge supervisors and managers to take the lead in making change happen. The remainder of the book strongly encourages a different more productive way to think about working in child welfare and then proceed to describe many useful ways to consider doing it from developing a more balanced view of positives and negatives to a detailed account of how to use investigation as intervention. They also address the inevitable, which is what to do when a child should be placed out of their home. They describe in detail how to work in cooperative and respectful ways with parents when their children must be removed. Finally, the book ends with an appendix that is brimming with exercises for front line workers, supervisors and they even manage to introduce a great team building exercise.

Years ago Steve de Shazer told me that he had a workshop participant who asked, "Is Solution-Focused Therapy like having Chinese food for dinner, you are hungry an hour later." Steve said he told him to "eat more rice". Building Solutions in Child Protective Services by Insoo Kim Berg and Susan Kelly is a whopping big bowl of rice and offers a challenge to child protection professionals and cynics of Brief Solution Focused Therapy alike to think differently. I am struck by the passion and perseverance of both Insoo and Susan to thoroughly take on such a controversial and difficult system. Insoo joined the front line workers in the trenches and became part of the action. Susan seemed to really stretch the thinking from inside the system, which certainly brought credibility and a glimmer of hope for change.

This book evoked many bittersweet memories of my experience in child welfare. For the sake of the children and families who need support and help and the front line workers who need support and help I hope child protection takes this book and this work seriously - Good work!

By: James Duvall

FAMILY THERAPY: AN INTIMATE HISTORY

Author: Lynn Hoffman

- A Book Review By John Walter

By involving herself in the cutting edge developments within the field of family therapy over the last forty years, Lynn Hoffman provides us with a personal and experiential narrative of the field's development. Her stated intention is a reflective conversation - a revisiting of experiences, ideas, and influential relationships that informed her journey as both a budding and mature family therapist. She does this from two vantage points - as she perceived them at the time and as she perceives them looking back.

The journey begins and ends with a Bateson, Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist and theoretician at the beginning, and Mary Catherine Bateson, his daughter at the end. In 1963, Ms. Hoffman became involved with the Mental Research Group in Palo Alto, California, where new work was evolving with Bateson's ideas and concepts from cybernetics and ecology. Working as an editor, she met and worked with Satir, Haley, and Jackson as they struggled to put their ideas in order and in print. Taking inspiration from this ground-breaking work, she followed her husband's career to New York where she initially felt adrift in the rather traditional atmosphere of New York's therapists. She then worked with Edgar Auerswald in his ecosystemic approach to community psychiatry and then Harry Aponte in Philadelphia in Structural Family Therapy.

What is enriching about these accounts is how she includes case stories along her journey that give you a full experience of what it was like to work with these innovators and how she experienced their ideas in the therapy room.

Ms. Hoffman then describes her experience with the Ackerman Group and how they were experimenting with the Milan Systemic Approach. In describing her using and witnessing this approach, she shares her doubts and questions as well as her excitement with her client's successes.

The next turn in development is her exposure to feminism which stirs doubt in the strategizing and expert stance of most family therapy approaches. Specifically, Carol Gilligan, calls into question the theory of a rational-oriented moral development and brings forth an ethic of caring and connectedness. This influence leads Hoffman into constructivism, then to social constructionism and the more collaborative approaches of the late Harry Goolishian and Harlene Anderson as well as the reflecting team of Tom Andersen.

The final chapters include her reflections on the new developments of Michael White and David Epston as well as the implications of John Shotter's "knowing of a third kind". This knowing Hoffman describes as a knowing from within a situation, group or social institution. Different from knowing that or knowing how, this knowing comes from sensed feelings and emotions. This latter knowing seems to fit Hoffman's preference for metaphor and poetics rather than strictly linear language. This advancement also allows her to conceptualize emotion as performance and interaction rather than as a state of an individual or one-way expression of something from within. Hoffman also cites her enthusiasm for the current concepts of "generous listening" from Lois Shawver, embracement in place of positive connotation, relational responsibility from Gergen and McNamee, and communal practice.

Comments:

As I said before, what makes this book an experience rather than an historical account is Lynn Hoffman's making this a personal narrative. The stories of her experiences working with different leaders of the field, as well as the stories of the differences new ideas brought to her cases makes the last forty years come alive. The changes in the field over the past forty years become not just an intellectual development but a personal change. As someone who early on became devoted to the Bateson's ideas and systemic thinking, I read her account as an exciting mystery to see how she struggled out of cybernetics and structuralism to new ways of describing her work. Unlike other personal recollections, Ms. Hoffman does not use her history to aggrandize herself. On the contrary, she cites her gratitude to so many others for their conversations along the way.

While the norm in commentaries is to come up with some negative critique, I cannot think of any. I heartily recommend this book. Feedback to www.johnlwalter.com