Somerset, Hunterdon, and Warren Psychological Association (SHWPA)
David Krauss, Ph.D., NJ Licensed Psychologist
NJ Lic#35SI-00283200
In-person only: Solution-Focused Therapy: Integrating Strengths, Competencies, and
Resilience Focused Approaches into Your Practice.
Friday May 2, 2025
Courtyard Lebanon 300 Corporate Drive Lebanon, NJ 08833
Registration 8:30AM – 9:00AM. Presentation 9:00AM-12:15PM
Includes 15-minute mid-morning break and buffet breakfast-snacks
3 Continuing Education Credits (via NJPA)
Program Narrative:
Almost all modern-day therapist-clinicians have learned the importance of identifying, highlighting, and using client strengths, resources, and competencies. We may, though, struggle to consistently put these intentions into practice. We, like our clients, have been wired by evolution, and perhaps by some of our training, to focus our attention quickly-and-automatically on client weaknesses, deficits, and pathology. It can take much deliberate effort to consistently respect and use our clients’ skills and talents, their natural problem-solving abilities and solution patterns. Solution-focused therapy interventions can help us do better - and can be readily integrated into the work of clinicians practicing from a wide range of orientations, perhaps especially cognitive-behavioral, accelerated experiential dynamic (AEDP), adaptive information processing (EMDR), and family therapies. This workshop will first review some of key principles underlying this collaborative, client directed, strengths-based approach. It will then teach strategies and techniques for eliciting and amplifying exceptions to problems and individualizing solutions while enhancing clients’ sense of agency and self-efficacy. This in-person workshop will include demonstrations and small group practice.
Learning Objectives. This workshop is designed to help participants:
- Summarize what solution-focused therapists mean when they say ‘leading from behind‘, ‘a vision of a preferred future’, ‘treasure hunting for exceptions’, ‘if it works do more of it’, ‘a difference that makes a difference’, and ‘make it interactional’; as well as be able to apply these solution-focused principles in their practice.
- Understand how seeing the client as (a) an expert (on themselves, their situation), and (b) likely already having the strengths and skills upon which to build solutions; can (c) help generate solutions that are more likely to fit the client and their situation (compared to therapist generated solutions), and (d) that this might be especially true for clients whose ethnic, racial, and/or socioeconomic background differs from their own.
- Describe how the times and places the problem does not manifest, or manifests less, especially what the client themselves is thinking and doing at those times, is important information – data that can be used to build on exceptions and other resources and generate individualized solutions.
- Be able to list five questions that can elicit exceptions (to the problem), five that can identify competencies and mastery experiences, five that can develop a sense of agency and self-efficacy, and five that can instill hope; and know ways to integrate these into their work with clients in their practice.
- Know ways to integrate these questions (exceptions, competencies, agency, hope) into work with clients who have experienced trauma.
- Know ways to integrate these questions (exceptions, competencies, agency, hope) into their work with children (e.g., neurodivergent) and their parents (e.g., parent management training).
David Krauss, Ph.D. has been working for over 35 years with neuro-developmentally atypical children, adolescents, and adults along with their parents and families. He trained at Yale’s Bush Center for Child Development and Social Policy, the Yale Child Study Center, in the New Haven Public Schools, and at The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ). Dr. Krauss worked in UMDNJ’s adolescent inpatient unit and School Based Youth Services program at New Brunswick High School before moving to independent practice. He was a clinical field supervisor at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP) and Adjunct Professor of Psychology at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) for many years. He is a past-president and long-time board member of the Mercer County Psychological Association. Dr. Krauss has an independent practice in Hopewell, NJ and writes the “Atypical Children-Extraordinary Parenting” blog at Psychology Today.
Dr. Krauss does not have any commercial support and/or conflict of interest.
This program’s level of learning is introductory, and the target audience is psychologists and other mental health professionals.
ADA Accommodations available upon written request by emailing Virginia Walters, Psy.D. at virginiawaltersm4@gmail.com no later than April 25, 2025.
SHWPA Program Fee: SHWPA Member $75, Non–SHWPA Member $85, Students $15. Online registration & payment can be made at shwpa.org OR by mailing a check payable to SHWPA to Tracy Menzie P.O. Box 644 Lebanon, NJ 08833. Please note – registration for this program will close on April 25, 2025.
NJPA CE Credits/ Administrative Fee for 3 CE Credits (A separate fee paid to NJPA) must be paid online BEFORE the start of the program. An NJPA payment link will be sent after registration and prior to the workshop. NJPA administrative fees: Sustaining Member – Free, NJPA Member-$15, Non-NJPA Member- $25. Note: if you are not an NJPA member you may create a non-member account at no charge. A program evaluation must be completed within seven days of the program date in order to earn CE credits. A program evaluation link will be provided at or around the time of the program.