This article describes the form of brief therapy developed at the Brief Family Therapy Center. We have chosen a title similar to Weakland, Fisch, Watzlawick, and Bodin's classic paper, "Brief Therapy: Focused Problem Resolution" (20) to emphasize our view that there is a conceptual relationship and a developmental connection between the points of view expressed in the two papers.
This paper reports the authors' “accidental” discovery that change in the problem situation frequently occurs prior to the first session, and that clients can often recall and describe such changes, if prompted. The authors describe one technique for eliciting reports of pretreatment change from clients, and discuss the results of an informal survey of 30 families who responded to this intervention. Rather than discounting pretreatment change as a “flight into health,” it can be framed in Batesonian terms as a “difference that makes a difference.”
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