Training and Consultancy in Solution Focused Brief Therapy (deShazer '85)

July 2009

The Consultants:

Eileen Murphy	Mawuli Amesu	Kevin Foley
Leonard Jason Lloyd	Miller Thompson	Terry Braithwaite

Welcome to Eileen Murphy Consultants, practitioners and providers of Training and Consultancy in the Solution Focused Brief Therapy model (de Shazer '85) and The Examine, Repair & Move On Approach (Murphy '93).

The Solution Focused Brief Therapy approach is a future-oriented, competency-based approach that owes its origins to Milton Erickson. Erickson was known for his innovative approaches to helping people. Holding no theory of pathology Erickson was interested in what helped people to change and believed in the innate abilities of each person to bring about the desired changes they invisioned. He was known for his hypnotic techniques that helped people to access their resources and competencies.

Steve de Shazer, Kim Insoo Berg harnessed Erickson's work and developed Solution Focused Brief Therapy

The approach allows for future-focused, strengths based conversations to help individuals and groups to create change

Our own experience, as practitioners, is that people are more attracted to talking about the start of new behaviour rather than talking about the stopping of old behaviour.

Simple conversations can often be instrumental in helping people move on – who, what, where and when are not only good journalistic skills, they are extremely effective therapeutic skills.

The focus of our work is always that of collaboration with the client. The client is the expert on what works for them; what worked a little in the past; what might work a little in the future - my colleagues and I strive to harness that expertise in the work towards repair and change.

An addition to our use of Steve de Shazer's Solution Focused Brief Therapy, we use the visuals of the Examine, Repair & Move On Approach (Murphy ’93) which I first devised to keep young people focused during sessions. These simple effective tools offer the client the opportunity to identify the change that needs to happen and who can do what to help change take place.

Our practitioner work includes the private and public sector, giving us a great deal of experience spanning work with individuals to working with a family referred through Social Services.

Brief TherapyPLUS is a programme we originally devised for working with families who are in conflict.

Elements of it are included in all our training but the whole programme is implemented in our Prevention & Intervention Programme - a whole-team training and project set-up programme, providing a positive and collaborative framework to reduce the numbers of young people and children coming into the care system under Section 20 of The Children Act 1989. Eighteen Local Authorities to date have implemented our Prevention & Intervention Programme as a front line, gatekeeping resource.

Our training courses are provided across the UK as primarily as an inhouse provision. We run only one or two public courses every year.

For details of our training courses, please either explore the website or contact us direct at info@brief-therapy-uk.com
or Telephone us at 0208 542 9310.

If you would like to engage in discussion or have questions that you would like to ask - then we would be delighted to hear from you - our email is info@brief-therapy-uk.com

Brief, supportive interventions are exciting to implement and exciting to discuss and we are always happy to do so.

Eileen Murphy

"If you always do what you've always done
- you'll always get what you always got"
Anon

"If you put one foot in front of the other - that's walking. A couple more steps and you're dancing"
Eileen Murphy