I am constantly working to understand how SFBT works and what it is about this approach that makes it effective. This is important to me because I want to passionately teach this approach in the most effective way, so attendees to my events and registrants to my courses can effectively use SFBT in their work. This pursuit has recently brought me to something called “Reflexive Practice”, this video is all about how I see this as relevant to those practicing SFBT.
It is great how you combined the two concepts, I love what you did in the session with the family from a different cultural background. Thank you for sharing 🙂 and looking forward to more!
Thank you Elliott, always great to follow your topics and examples on how you can help your clients and I am especially interested how to work with clients from different culture and used to a different language.
Hi Elliot, great point, and I recall you recently saying something like your outcomes improved when you stopped trying to be helpful. And of course we try to be helpful from the point of view of our own position or value base.
It also resonated in my mind with something in Tony Rousmaniere’s book Deliberate Practice for Psychotherapist: A Guide to Improving Clinical Outcomes (2017), very useful though not an SF book specifically (There is now a vast area on how ‘Deliberate Practice’ being used across sports, music, etc. to improve performance – by isolating key skills and practicing them repeatedly away from performance, in our case outside the therapy room). Rousamaniere describes spending time watching videos of his therapeutic work purely to monitor and note his experience of the client – emotions, responses, judgements, etc. which would include our ‘positioning’ in relation to what the client says. Your case example perfectly illustrates a capability to be aware of our own positioning and respond within our SF intention rather than react, and this is a skill we can choose to deliberately cultivate.
I really like you that you mention ‘reflexivity’. When I did my training in grad school and chaplaincy, I was and am exceedingly grateful for the often unpleasant diggings and questionings about my stance as the counselor in those many verbatims and process recording presentations of why I answered ‘this’ to a client instead of ‘blah blah”. What was I thinking and feeling when I said such and such? I find it extremely important to have my own therapist and support where I can share a particularly challenging session, Thank you for bring this awareness to us!!