This innovative and highly practical text provides an introduction to solution and narrative approaches to brief counselling and demonstrates how they may successfully be combined to create solution talk with clients. Solution talk is a highly flexible and effective way of empowering people to use their own potential for positive change, for coping with what they cannot change, and for re-creating their lives and even their identities.

Judith Milner and Patrick O'Byrne compare and contrast solution talk with other more traditional or problem-oriented approaches to illustrate how a collaborative, co-constructive and empowering way of working may help clients to meet their goals quickly, painlessly and with long-lasting effects. They outline the philosophy, practice principles and specific techniques of solution talk and discuss what to do if no immediate progress is apparent. Through detailed case examples, they illustrate how the approach may be used in client work with a wide range of issues connected to family life, school and work, health, personal safety and leisure.

Brief Counselling: Narratives and Solutions will be an essential text for all trainees and practitioners in counselling, psychotherapy and other health-related professions interested in brief therapeutic approaches and working creatively with clients.

JUDITH MILNER is a freelance counsellor and works mainly with adults who wish to change their violent behaviour and young people who have experienced violence. She also provides training in solution and narrative approaches to counselling for a wide variety of professionals.

PATRICK O'BYRNE is a freelance counsellor, supervisor and family mediator. He works as a mediator with the West Yorkshire Family Mediation service and was formerly a senior lecturer in the School of Human and Health Sciences at the University of Huddersfield.