A workshop offered at the Frost Center in Aspen Hill may give public school guidance counselors an additional tool to help the students who visit their office every day.

Harriet K. Breslow, a licensed certified social worker who has her own private practice in Potomac, presented a workshop last month that focused on "solution focused therapy."

"We think of this therapy as a way to start solutions rather than stopping a problem," Breslow said. "You don't have to stop people from doing something bad when you start to get them to do something good. And, of course, we assume they already have the skills to do that, and we just help them to find the bits and pieces of what they're already doing that's good, and help them to build on that."

The workshop was sponsored by the Frost Center and the guidance unit of Montgomery County Public Schools.

The brief-therapy model was developed by Steve de Shazer of the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee, and focuses on identifying the strengths of the person seeking counseling rather than their weaknesses, Breslow said.

Too often, Breslow said, counseling focuses on the problem at hand rather than what can be done to solve it. She said it is very important that counselors focus on what does work, not what doesn't work, in their patients' lives.

She said that asking people what's wrong and why it's wrong is just not effective.

Breslow said that no matter how troubling a problem is -- whether it is a relationship conflict or an adjustment problem -- something in the past has to have gone right.

For the counselor and the person seeking help, it's a matter of discovering what the circumstances were when things were going better and to try to rediscover them.

Breslow said she frequently will ask the person she's counseling, "What will be the first sign to you that this therapy may be working?"

She said that encourages the person to notice what they did differently on the days when that sign became apparent to them for a little while.

Breslow said that unlike some counseling practices, this one focuses on what the patients can do for themselves, not what the counselor can do to fix the problem.

"They already know how to solve the problem, they just don't know they know how to solve the problem," she said of the people seeking counseling. "Most people are not aware of their own strengths."

Another focus of the therapy is what the person being counseled wants, Breslow said.

That makes the therapy complex for the counselor, since a great deal of time is spent determining the person's goals.

She said it is important to help clients see what they want, and to define what the goal "looks like," since people seeking counseling will often speak in generalities about what they want, like wanting to be happy.

But at the same time, the counselor cannot make decisions for the person or tell that person what to do.

While Breslow emphasized that this form of therapy is not necessarily better than any other form of therapy, she said solution-focused therapy is faster.

Since guidance counselors do not always have a lot of time for every student, it can be very effective.

While this type of therapy can be used by many kinds of professionals, Breslow said that it can be ideal for guidance counselors or teachers because they already "tend to look for the positives in students."