WEEK 1: INTRODUCTION AND FOUNDATIONS TO
STRENGTHS-BASED THERAPY
Strengths-based therapy (SBT) is a client-directed approach that allows clients to work towards
personally meaningful goals
Key Figures and Influences
- Milton Erickson: proposed clients are inherently resourceful and capable of changing; the
main reason to discuss past problems is to discover current resources; clinicians should
tailor services to each client and effective therapy helps clients discover and apply their
natural strengths and resources.
- Social Work: A multitude of strengths-based ideas come from the writing s of social
workers in the mid-1900’s such as Bertha Reynolds who criticised the practice of
blaming the victim.
- Postmodern therapies: heavily influenced by postmodern approaches of the late twentieth
century, all of which share the following assumptions and features: there are many
possible meanings or stories, versus one objective truth that can be ascribed to a clients
problems; client’s personal meanings are shaped largely by social contexts and
conversations in which they participate; therapeutic dialogue invites clients to consider
alternate meanings and actions that help clients achieve their goals and therapists,
collaborative with clients by accomodating their strengths, goals and preferences.
- Solution-focused therapy: developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg on their
observation that clients could improve their lives without thoroughly understanding or
discussing their problems. Therapists help the clients by getting them to describe a
preferred future in which the problem is absent or less intrusive and increase “exceptions
to the problem”, referring to times when clients act in accordance with their preferred
future. Belief drawing clients’ attention to their success enhances hope and provides
tangible evidence that they can improve their lives.
- Narrative therapy: developed by Micheal White and David Epston in Australia and New
Zealand. Narrative therapies are guided by the notion that people are distinct from the
problems they experience. Therapists help clients rewrite their life stories by critiquing
the dominant social, cultural and political norms against which the client evaluates
themselves; externalising or reframing problems from internal pathologies to external
influences and entities, and helping clients change their relationship with problems and
reclaim their lives.
- Collaborative therapy: developed by Harlene Anderson, Tom Anderson and Harry
Goolishian. Collaborative therapy maintains that the meanings we ascribe to events,
experiences, and ourselves emerge largely from our social interactions and conversations.
Belief problems result from narrow, inflexible dialogues within oneself and between
oneself and others. Collaborative therapists adopt a position of “not knowing” in regard
, to clients. Like other post-modern therapies, this approach views clients as experts on
themselves and trusts them to apply therapeutic conversations in ways that are uniquely
useful to them.
- Pluralistic therapy: developed in the UK by Mick Cooper and John McLeod. Urges
clinicians to approach clients, treatment, methods, and therapeutic conversations with an
openness and flexibility that allows for tailoring therapy to each client rather than
imposing one’s pre-established beliefs and techniques onto clients by encountering clients
from a position of unknowing, pluralistic clinicians are willing to be challenged and
influenced by clients, and to employ a wide range of theoretical ideas and methods to
accommodate each client’s unique circumstances, goals, and response to treatment.
- Feminist-influenced therapies: view individuals within their sociocultural contexts based
on the notion that psychological problems, especially those experienced by women and
other marginalised groups, often reflect political and sociocultural injustices rather than
individual pathologies. Client problems frequently result from the lack of social power,
and clinicians promote egalitarian relationships in which clients assume active roles in
shaping therapeutic content and goals. We view these as important considerations for all
clients, not just women and other non-dominant groups.
- Client-directed, outcome-informed (CDOI) practice: integrates client resources into
treatment, collects systematic client feedback, and gives clients a central voice in therapy
(all of which are core aspects of SBT). CDOI practice is not another model of therapy but
a set of transtheoretical values that enable clinicians of all orientations to improve
services by putting clients first throughout the helping process.
- Recovery movement: consumer-led movement maintains all persons with mental health
challenges are capable of living dignified lives despite their diagnoses and difficulties.
Aims to build on people’s strengths and help them recruit local, natural support systems
such as family, friends and community resources.
SBT is a transtheoretical and value-added approach, meaning it can be applied to all clients by
practitioners of all theoretical orientations to benefit whatever else is done in therapy. Aim of
SBT is client involvement/engagement (I.e., the extent which clients contribute to therapy).
- Client directed: SBT privileges clients’ perspectives and involves them in every aspect of
therapy. Term coined to operationalise empirical findings on common factors of change,
which indicate that therapeutic success depends largely on the activation of common
elements of helping that operate regardless of the therapist’s specific treatment model or
theory. These elements include clients’ resources expectations, and perceptions of the
client/therapist alliance. Of all such elements, client factors are the most powerful by far.
Client factors consist of everything clients bring to therapy from their unique strengths,
wisdom, resilience, shops, life experiences, cultural heritage, values, social supports and
ideas about what might help them. The extent to which therapies incorporate these
elements into therapy strongly impacts outcomes.
, - Alliance minded: therapy is a relational process; research repeatedly points to clients,
therapists, and their alliance as the most important element of therapeutic outcomes.
Feedback enlists clients as partners in the change process and gives them an ongoing
voice in shaping services.
Misunderstandings of Strengths-Based Therapy
- SBT has been criticised for assuming clients have all the resources required to change;
lacking empirical support and rushing clients into discussing their strengths before
acknowledging their pain and problems.
What is a Strengths-Based Approach?
- Approach that emphasises our capacity for change.
- The outcome is an improved sense of wellbeing and quality of life and a higher degree of
interpersonal and social functioning.
- The approach aims to empower clients.
- SBT offers pathways to reduce pain and suffering, resolves conflict and cope more
effectively with their life stressors.
- Aims to help recognise and promote clients inner resources.
Theoretical Underpinnings
- Constructivism: clients make meaning of self and life through narrative.
- Social constructivism: reality is socially constructed through dominant discourses.
- Language/linguistics: reality/meaning is malleable and shaped largely by social and
cultural forces mediated by language and patterns of communication.
- Common factors: therapeutic alliance as a common element to effectiveness rather than
technique.
Three Waves
- First: intrapsychic, pathology and past-focused approaches.
- Second: modernist approaches; interactional and present focus.
- Third: post-modern approaches; strengths-based counselling, collaborative,
competency-based.
Goals
- Change is constant and inevitable
- Therapy developed based on clients hope for change
- To deconstruct clients narratives.
- To develop alternative identifies that are preferred.
- To be non-judgemental and accepting, meaningful eliciting language and reflecting
language.
STRENGTHS-BASED THERAPY
Strengths-based therapy (SBT) is a client-directed approach that allows clients to work towards
personally meaningful goals
Key Figures and Influences
- Milton Erickson: proposed clients are inherently resourceful and capable of changing; the
main reason to discuss past problems is to discover current resources; clinicians should
tailor services to each client and effective therapy helps clients discover and apply their
natural strengths and resources.
- Social Work: A multitude of strengths-based ideas come from the writing s of social
workers in the mid-1900’s such as Bertha Reynolds who criticised the practice of
blaming the victim.
- Postmodern therapies: heavily influenced by postmodern approaches of the late twentieth
century, all of which share the following assumptions and features: there are many
possible meanings or stories, versus one objective truth that can be ascribed to a clients
problems; client’s personal meanings are shaped largely by social contexts and
conversations in which they participate; therapeutic dialogue invites clients to consider
alternate meanings and actions that help clients achieve their goals and therapists,
collaborative with clients by accomodating their strengths, goals and preferences.
- Solution-focused therapy: developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg on their
observation that clients could improve their lives without thoroughly understanding or
discussing their problems. Therapists help the clients by getting them to describe a
preferred future in which the problem is absent or less intrusive and increase “exceptions
to the problem”, referring to times when clients act in accordance with their preferred
future. Belief drawing clients’ attention to their success enhances hope and provides
tangible evidence that they can improve their lives.
- Narrative therapy: developed by Micheal White and David Epston in Australia and New
Zealand. Narrative therapies are guided by the notion that people are distinct from the
problems they experience. Therapists help clients rewrite their life stories by critiquing
the dominant social, cultural and political norms against which the client evaluates
themselves; externalising or reframing problems from internal pathologies to external
influences and entities, and helping clients change their relationship with problems and
reclaim their lives.
- Collaborative therapy: developed by Harlene Anderson, Tom Anderson and Harry
Goolishian. Collaborative therapy maintains that the meanings we ascribe to events,
experiences, and ourselves emerge largely from our social interactions and conversations.
Belief problems result from narrow, inflexible dialogues within oneself and between
oneself and others. Collaborative therapists adopt a position of “not knowing” in regard
, to clients. Like other post-modern therapies, this approach views clients as experts on
themselves and trusts them to apply therapeutic conversations in ways that are uniquely
useful to them.
- Pluralistic therapy: developed in the UK by Mick Cooper and John McLeod. Urges
clinicians to approach clients, treatment, methods, and therapeutic conversations with an
openness and flexibility that allows for tailoring therapy to each client rather than
imposing one’s pre-established beliefs and techniques onto clients by encountering clients
from a position of unknowing, pluralistic clinicians are willing to be challenged and
influenced by clients, and to employ a wide range of theoretical ideas and methods to
accommodate each client’s unique circumstances, goals, and response to treatment.
- Feminist-influenced therapies: view individuals within their sociocultural contexts based
on the notion that psychological problems, especially those experienced by women and
other marginalised groups, often reflect political and sociocultural injustices rather than
individual pathologies. Client problems frequently result from the lack of social power,
and clinicians promote egalitarian relationships in which clients assume active roles in
shaping therapeutic content and goals. We view these as important considerations for all
clients, not just women and other non-dominant groups.
- Client-directed, outcome-informed (CDOI) practice: integrates client resources into
treatment, collects systematic client feedback, and gives clients a central voice in therapy
(all of which are core aspects of SBT). CDOI practice is not another model of therapy but
a set of transtheoretical values that enable clinicians of all orientations to improve
services by putting clients first throughout the helping process.
- Recovery movement: consumer-led movement maintains all persons with mental health
challenges are capable of living dignified lives despite their diagnoses and difficulties.
Aims to build on people’s strengths and help them recruit local, natural support systems
such as family, friends and community resources.
SBT is a transtheoretical and value-added approach, meaning it can be applied to all clients by
practitioners of all theoretical orientations to benefit whatever else is done in therapy. Aim of
SBT is client involvement/engagement (I.e., the extent which clients contribute to therapy).
- Client directed: SBT privileges clients’ perspectives and involves them in every aspect of
therapy. Term coined to operationalise empirical findings on common factors of change,
which indicate that therapeutic success depends largely on the activation of common
elements of helping that operate regardless of the therapist’s specific treatment model or
theory. These elements include clients’ resources expectations, and perceptions of the
client/therapist alliance. Of all such elements, client factors are the most powerful by far.
Client factors consist of everything clients bring to therapy from their unique strengths,
wisdom, resilience, shops, life experiences, cultural heritage, values, social supports and
ideas about what might help them. The extent to which therapies incorporate these
elements into therapy strongly impacts outcomes.
, - Alliance minded: therapy is a relational process; research repeatedly points to clients,
therapists, and their alliance as the most important element of therapeutic outcomes.
Feedback enlists clients as partners in the change process and gives them an ongoing
voice in shaping services.
Misunderstandings of Strengths-Based Therapy
- SBT has been criticised for assuming clients have all the resources required to change;
lacking empirical support and rushing clients into discussing their strengths before
acknowledging their pain and problems.
What is a Strengths-Based Approach?
- Approach that emphasises our capacity for change.
- The outcome is an improved sense of wellbeing and quality of life and a higher degree of
interpersonal and social functioning.
- The approach aims to empower clients.
- SBT offers pathways to reduce pain and suffering, resolves conflict and cope more
effectively with their life stressors.
- Aims to help recognise and promote clients inner resources.
Theoretical Underpinnings
- Constructivism: clients make meaning of self and life through narrative.
- Social constructivism: reality is socially constructed through dominant discourses.
- Language/linguistics: reality/meaning is malleable and shaped largely by social and
cultural forces mediated by language and patterns of communication.
- Common factors: therapeutic alliance as a common element to effectiveness rather than
technique.
Three Waves
- First: intrapsychic, pathology and past-focused approaches.
- Second: modernist approaches; interactional and present focus.
- Third: post-modern approaches; strengths-based counselling, collaborative,
competency-based.
Goals
- Change is constant and inevitable
- Therapy developed based on clients hope for change
- To deconstruct clients narratives.
- To develop alternative identifies that are preferred.
- To be non-judgemental and accepting, meaningful eliciting language and reflecting
language.
