Couples Counselling Team in Malmö, Sweden and Solution Focused Counselling
Solution Focused Counselling in Domestic Violence Cases:
The last couple of years Domestic Violence have been in focus in Sweden. Severe cases and murders challenged the authorities and much effort have been made to provide individuals and families with professional help.
In Sweden the individual view on domestic violence still dominates – abuser and abused are treated individualy by most professionals working with domestic violence. In our Couple Counselling Team in Malmö we see a lot of couples every year and many of them are in conflicts they can´t handle. 25% of the couples are in hard conflicts where one or both cross the other persons bounderies by humiliations and physical abuse. Most of the couples we meet can be categorizad as situational violence, we don´t see the most severe cases (intimate terror cases).
We are interested in and will focus more on how to use Solution Focused Brief Therapy in our couples sessions. We want to challenge the dominating idea in our field and develop a relational model for working with domestic violence couples. Solution Focused Brief Therapy focuses couples goals and exceptions and there are interesting research being done pointing in direction of the importance of mutual agreement (couples and therapists) on goals and the goals described in specific details.
In Malmö there is also a team working individually with severe domestic cases and our plan is to collaborate with them to develop different options for individuals, couples and families struggling with hard conflicts, violence and abuse.
In our team we are also working with Single Session, a very brief model for counselling, with all couples who choose that when they schedule a session. In Single Session work we evaluate the sessions by using two scales before and efter the sessions – a stress scale and a handle the problem scale and we also use SRS.