Solution-Focused Brief Therapy

Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT), also called solution-focused therapy or solution-building practice therapy, was developed by Steven de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg, and their colleagues. As the name suggests, SFBT is future-focused and goal-directed, and focuses on solutions rather than on the problems that brought clients to seek therapy.

De Shazar, Berg, and their collaborators established the Brief Family Therapy Center (BFTC) in 1978 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as a training and research institution.

The entire solution-focused approach was developed inductively in the inner-city outpatient mental health service setting associated with the BFTC, in which clients were accepted without previous screening. The developers of SFBT spent hundreds of hours observing therapy sessions over the course of several years, carefully noting the therapists' questions, behaviors, and emotions that occurred during the session and how the various activities of the therapists affected the clients and the therapeutic outcome of the sessions. Questions and activities related to clients' report of progress were preserved and incorporated into the SFBT approach. The developers of SFBT were also strongly influenced by Milton Erickson's use of language and metaphor and the work at the Mental Research Institute in California focusing on communication patterns in families of people diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Since that early development, SFBT has become an important school of brief therapy. It has become a major influence in such diverse fields as business, social policy, education, criminal justice services, child welfare, and domestic violence offenders treatment. Described as a practical, goal-driven model, a hallmark of SFBT is its emphasis on clear, concise, realistic goal negotiations. The SFBT approach assumes that all clients have some knowledge of what would make their life better, even though they may need some (at times, considerable) help in describing the details of their better life. SFBT also assumes that everyone who seeks help already possesses at least the minimal skills necessary to create solutions.