Partners for Collaborative Solutions
Solutions Edge: Tools and Strategies for Change
Solutions Edge: Tools and Strategies for Change is our new online resource for mental health and addictions professionals seeking a wide range of effective therapeutic tools and strategies to employ with your most challenging clients and to use when feeling stuck and seeking something novel to try. For each of the therapeutic tools and strategies presented, we will discuss what specific clinical situations and the when in the therapeutic process is best to try them out.
Solutions Edge will cover empirically supported alliance building strategies, interviewing for change, creative uses of self, major therapeutic experiments and rituals which tap the clients’ imagination powers for co-constructing solutions and for strengthening the parent-child/adolescent bond, and goal maintenance and family relapse prevention tools and strategies. Additionally, we will present our recommendations for how to approach therapeutically and resolve common treatment dilemmas we often face in our practice settings. Finally, we will be regularly updating our therapeutic tools and strategies, so come back often and have your colleagues check out Solutions Edge!
CO-DESIGNING AND TAILOR-FITTING THERAPEUTIC EXPERIMENTS AND RITUALS WITH COUPLES AND FAMILIES
One effective way we can utilize to the maximum degree client extra-therapeutic factors, such as: their metaphors, language, key strengths, life passions, and what and who resonates with them the most from pop culture, literature, theater, movies, TV, art, and music, is by incorporating this important information into co-designing with our clients’ therapeutic experiments and […]
CHOREOGRAPHING COMPELLING FUTURE REALITIES WITH COUPLES AND FAMILIES
The use of couple and family choreography, sculpting, and enactments strategies are not new and were masterfully used for decades by such family therapy pioneers as Peggy Papp (Papp, 1994), Virginia Satir (Satir, 1988), and Salvador Minuchin (Minuchin & Fishman, 1981). However, they used these experiential techniques to underscore problem-maintaining patterns of interaction and rigid […]
ADOLESCENT MENTORING HIS OR HER PARENTS
With clinical situations where the adolescent is longing to get closer to one of his or her disengaged or more peripheral parents, the adolescent mentoring his or her parents is a fun and highly effective ritual for strengthening their relational bond. While meeting alone with the adolescent, he or she takes the lead in determining […]
BEYOND ALL OF YOUR WILDEST DREAMS QUESTION
There is an old adage, “If you don’t know where you are going you will end up somewhere else.” Therefore, it is critical that we gain a clear picture from our clients of what will be hard signs of dramatic changes in their thinking, feeling, and doing in their successful treatment outcome. A great goal-setting […]
RELATIONAL QUESTIONS TO ELICIT THE NOT YET SAID
With families of adolescents that have had longstanding difficulties, there may be certain systemic constraints that have blocked family members from revealing the following: what specific past events or negative interactions are truly fueling their conflicts; are contributing to maintaining their distance in their relationships; or what specifically they strongly desire from a parent but […]