Solution-Focused Family Therapy: Case Study of Don
This paper presents a comprehensive case conceptualization for Don, a 25-year-old graduate student living at home whose religious upbringing has created significant conflict around sexuality, relationships, and emerging adulthood. The paper outlines the rationale for selecting solution-focused therapy over narrative therapy, describing how interventions such as the miracle question, scaling, and goal setting can help Don and his parents navigate a stalled family life-cycle transition. A structured two-month collaborative treatment plan is detailed, including session-by-session examples of scaling questions and miracle question prompts tailored to both Don and his parents. Cultural and ethical considerations, including religious identity and counselor bias, are also addressed.
- Presenting Problem: Don's religious conflict around sex and relationships
- Rationale for Using Solution-Focused Therapy: Why solution-focused therapy fits better than narrative
- Collaborative Treatment Plan: Goals and Interventions: Goals, scaling, and miracle question interventions explained
- Applying the Interventions: Don and His Parents: Session-level questions tailored to client and parents
- Cultural Components of the Family System: Religion as cultural backdrop for counseling sessions
- Ethical and Legal Issues in Family Counseling: Bias, confidentiality, and licensing requirements
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What makes this paper effective
- Clearly justifies the choice of solution-focused therapy over narrative therapy by directly comparing their respective intervention techniques and explaining why the former better fits the client's needs.
- Provides concrete, client-specific examples of scaling questions and the miracle question prompt, making the treatment plan actionable rather than abstract.
- Addresses the full family system — not just the identified client — by tailoring interventions to both Don and his parents, demonstrating a genuinely systemic approach.
- Integrates cultural and ethical considerations as distinct analytical sections, showing awareness of the broader professional and contextual dimensions of family counseling practice.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates applied case conceptualization: it moves from a clinical problem description to theory selection, then to a structured treatment plan, and finally to session-level implementation examples. This layered structure — from rationale to operationalization — is the hallmark of graduate-level clinical writing in counseling and family therapy.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a presenting problem that establishes the client's context and the systemic nature of the issue. It then argues for solution-focused therapy over narrative therapy before outlining a collaborative treatment plan organized around three core interventions. A detailed implementation section supplies verbatim sample questions for both the client and his parents. Two closing sections address cultural context and ethical/legal obligations, rounding out the professional case conceptualization format.
Presenting Problem
Don is a 25-year-old male working on his MBA while living at home with his parents. Don is sensitive about sex and sexuality as a result of his religious upbringing, from which he learned that premarital sex is wrong. This presents problems whenever he begins dating, because sex inevitably becomes a topic and Don does not know how to navigate it in a way that allows him to uphold his religious principles while also maintaining a healthy relationship. His lack of a girlfriend troubles his parents, who want to see him in a serious relationship — an outcome they believe would signify that he is maturing and ready to enter the next phase of life. To them, Don currently seems stuck in a kind of extended adolescence. Even though he is excelling academically, he is not succeeding in the adult world in the sense that he still lives at home, does not exhibit much independence, and has no steady girlfriend and therefore no clear path toward marriage and family.
Don's parents are worried about him; meanwhile, Don is worried about his own sexuality, feeling conflicted because he senses he could be attracted to men as well as women. He is thoroughly uncomfortable with the subject of sex and does not know how to reconcile his sexuality with his religious upbringing, so he avoids the issue altogether by abandoning relationships as soon as they become serious — that is, as soon as sexuality arises.
From a family counseling perspective, the presenting problem is two-fold. First, Don needs to understand that he can have a meaningful, healthy, and sexual relationship while still maintaining his religious dignity. The pressure he feels to engage in premarital sex is largely psychological: in reality, many people still wait until marriage to engage in sexual activity, and this remains a traditional norm for many communities. Don needs to feel more confident about his own beliefs, and for that to happen he needs a better understanding of how sexuality is a normal part of life — including the possibility of feeling attraction to both men and women. He must also decide whether he wants to maintain his religious beliefs and whether he wants a family of his own someday. These two decisions will help to shape a plan moving forward.
For their part, Don's parents need to understand that he is confused about sex and sexuality in relation to his religious teachings. They need to recognize that what he is experiencing is entirely normal, and that the best thing they can do to help him transition into the next stage of the family life cycle is to be supportive and empathetic, and to allow him the freedom to explore his own path (Hanline, 1991; Ballard, 2012; Settles, 2016). Through genuine support, family members can help one another navigate important life transitions.
Rationale for Using Solution-Focused Therapy
Two models of therapy that could be applied to this case are solution-focused therapy and narrative therapy. However, solution-focused therapy is the better fit because Don needs to identify concrete goals and work toward them by altering his behavioral patterns, whereas narrative therapy focuses more on separating the problem from the person by allowing family members to articulate their perspectives and experiences (Gonçalves, Ribeiro, Silva, Mendes, & Sousa, 2016). While narrative therapy can be helpful in many contexts, it would not provide Don with a clear sense of direction or a vision of how he might like to behave if his anxieties and stresses were resolved.
One of the most powerful techniques in solution-focused therapy is the "miracle question," which invites the client to imagine waking up one day to find that all his problems have been solved and then to describe how he would communicate this to others (Franklin, Biever, Moore, Clemons, & Scamardo, 2001). Additional techniques available through the solution-focused approach include scaling and goal setting, both of which help the client rank the seriousness of issues he faces in order to see them more objectively, assess their impact, and clarify what he values most: "in solution-focused advising the advisor does not provide the goal but can facilitate a semi-structured conversation that leads the student toward a goal" (Burg & Mayhall, 2002, p. 80). Narrative interventions — such as storytelling, externalization, and deconstruction — may not be as effective for Don, given his need for a more direct approach. His meandering approach to life and his stalling in the current stage of the life cycle suggest that practical solutions are what is needed. He has most likely already spent considerable time in introspective activities; now it is time to make decisions and move forward, making solution-focused therapy the logical choice.
References
Ballard, M. B. (2012). The family life cycle and critical transitions: Utilizing cinematherapy to facilitate understanding and increase communication. Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, 7(2), 141–152.
Burg, J., & Mayhall, J. (2002). Techniques and interventions of solution-focused advising. NACADA Journal, 22(2), 79–85.
Franklin, C., Biever, J., Moore, K., Clemons, D., & Scamardo, M. (2001). The effectiveness of solution-focused therapy with children in a school setting. Research on Social Work Practice, 11(4), 411–434.
Gonçalves, M. M., Ribeiro, A. P., Silva, J. R., Mendes, I., & Sousa, I. (2016). Narrative innovations predict symptom improvement: Studying innovative moments in narrative therapy of depression. Psychotherapy Research, 26(4), 425–435.
Hanline, M. F. (1991). Transitions and critical events in the family life cycle: Implications for providing support to families of children with disabilities. Psychology in the Schools, 28(1), 53–59.
Settles, B. H. (2016). Family theories: An introduction. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 8(4), 523–531.
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