Coaching practices for Solution Focused Brief Therapy Building on What Works with My Partner

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Solution Focused Brief Therapy Building on What Works with My Partner, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • It feels like this is just how I am
  • All day my attention goes straight to what went wrong
  • I know everything I want to get away from, but if you asked me what "better" actually looks like
  • We both understand our pattern perfectly by now
  • I don’t believe I can actually pull this off, and the things I do that take real grit I just wave away as nothing

Practices that may help

  1. Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works
    Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT), developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, directs attention to what already works — client strengths, past successes, and desired futures — rather than to analyzing problems. Meta-analyses report small-to-moderate positive effects across a range of presenting issues, with particular strength in behavioral problems and depression in adult populations.
  2. Exception Finding: When Is the Problem Already Less Severe?
    Identify times when the problem was absent or less severe — these are evidence that solutions already exist.
    Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works
  3. The Formula First-Session Task and Between-Session Noticing
    Assign between-session observation tasks that direct attention toward what’s already working.
    Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works
  4. Emotionally Focused Therapy: Sue Johnson's Framework for Lasting Bond Repair
    Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), developed by Sue Johnson, is a couples intervention grounded in attachment theory: it treats distress in close relationships as an attachment injury, and focuses on creating new emotional experiences that rebuild the sense of safe, reliable connection. EFT has one of the stronger evidence bases in couples therapy, with multiple randomized controlled trials showing sustained improvement -- though findings are not uniformly positive and many studies are small.
  5. Preferred Future: Describing Life When the Problem Is Solved
    Ask the person to describe in concrete, behavioral detail what life looks like when things are better.
    Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works
  6. Create corrective emotional experiences together
    The goal is not to understand the pattern intellectually -- it is to have a new emotional experience of safety within it.
    Emotionally Focused Therapy: Sue Johnson's Framework for Lasting Bond Repair
  7. Complimenting Strengths Throughout the Session
    Deliberately name real strengths, efforts, and resources the person displays — not as praise but as information.
    Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works
  8. Identify and name your negative cycle
    Every stuck couple has a predictable escalation pattern -- naming it lets you step outside it.
    Emotionally Focused Therapy: Sue Johnson's Framework for Lasting Bond Repair
  9. Practice being a secure base for your partner
    A secure base means: be accessible, responsive, and emotionally engaged -- especially when it is hard.
    Emotionally Focused Therapy: Sue Johnson's Framework for Lasting Bond Repair
  10. Have a Hold Me Tight conversation
    Sue Johnson's structured conversation for reaching past defensiveness to the attachment need underneath.
    Emotionally Focused Therapy: Sue Johnson's Framework for Lasting Bond Repair

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