Solution-focused brief therapy

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) was developed in the early eighties at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee, U.S.A., by a team led by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg. It followed the tradition of the brief strategic therapy created by John Weakland and his colleagues at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, U.S.A., but gave it a radical twist. Instead of focusing on the unhelpful attempted solutions that maintain a problem (for instance, when a husband´s attempts to cheer up his depressed wife make her feel less understood and more depressed), de Shazer and Berg began to focus on those occasions when exceptions to the rule of the problem occur (for instance, the times when the husband accepts his wife´s depressed mood, with the effect of making her feel more understood and less depressed). Once exceptions were identified, therapists helped clients to figure out how they had made them happen, to consolidate them and to amplify them step by step.