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13/09/2026

Always there: Evan George

I wonder how many of you read the moving piece by Natasha Walter writing about her mother Ruth Oppenheim (Observer, 20th August 23).(1) The trigger for the article is Natasha’s mother’s decision to end her life, an act that was carefully planned over a period of time, and effectively put into practice when the time, in her view, was ‘right’. Despite having heard her mother discuss her intention over a period of time Ruth found it hard to believe that her mother would indeed follow through. She describes her mother as ‘timid’, as ‘nervous’, ‘moving uncertainly through the world’. She writes ‘for my mother, this anxiety around setting off on a journey had always been there, or if not always, then as long as I had known her. So how could I expect that she would set off on the longest journey, so decisively, alone? How could I expect that courage? I did not expect it. I did not expect my mother to kill herself.’

The version of Ruth, we could say, that her daughter Natasha had constructed, just did not fit with a woman who in an organised and decisive way would kill herself.

And then when reading through her mother’s papers, that woman, the decisive, determined woman who would make her decision and carry it through, determined and organised, emerges clearly. In her mother’s papers Natasha found documents relating to her mother’s 19 arrests for civil disobedience in the 1960’s as her mother stood up for her deep-founded belief in nuclear disarmament. She found photos of a young woman bringing up two daughters on her own. She found a mother far from ‘timid’ and ‘nervous’. The woman who was later to take her life was always there, merely unnoticed by her daughter and others around her.

This example reflects rather well what I find myself doing in my Solution Focused practice and indeed doing both prospectively and retrospectively, and doing both in relation to my own thinking about the person I am working with and in relation to their own thinking about themselves.

When I meet people I am interested in meeting the person who is going to be successful in the talking that we do together in such a way that after an unknown number of conversations they will be able to arrive at the point of thinking ‘I don’t need to meet with Evan anymore’. This means that I will be inviting people to think about instances and exceptions, about changes successfully negotiated in the past, about sparkling moments and about the times that they coped with difficulties better. When people are identifying these times the strategy and identity questions that I ask invite people into ownership and agency and into the sense that they are implicated in these moments, that these moments speak of them at their best, that they showcase the version of self who can achieve whatever it is that they are wanting. In this process my experience of people changes and I think that people’s experience of themselves changes as both they and I come to the sense ‘they/we can do it’. It does seem to me that when people have the idea ‘I can do it’ that they are more likely to leave a meeting and to go away and do something useful and of course the converse also holds, that if people leave with the idea ‘this is too much for me, I will never achieve it’, that they are less likely to either take action or to notice any action that they might have taken. It also seems to me that it is important for the worker to believe in the client’s capacity and that the very last thing that anyone needs is a worker who does not believe in them. As Chris Prentiss wrote ‘‘How would you like to be treated by someone who thinks you are incurable?’’. Thus in Solution Focus we co-construct in the talking the version of the client who is going to be successful. That is the person that we listen for. That is the person that we watch out for.

However it is also useful sometimes to negotiate the same process, retrospectively, when people are reporting change in order to stabilise the change. If the client is convinced that even though things are better, that this represents a blip and that things will inevitably return to the way they were before, then the risk is that their prediction will turn out to be true. In these circumstances we can ask questions which invite people to construct the ‘hidden history of the preferred future’. For example we can ask ‘so what qualities, strengths skills and capacities do you think that you drew on to make these changes?’ and we can follow up by asking ‘and when have you drawn usefully on these qualities in the past?’. In this way we invite people into a sense of coherence, those capacities have always been there, have always been a part of me, there is a solid foundation for the ‘surprising and yet not surprising’ change that they have made. We can ask ‘now that you look back what tells you that you always did have the capacity to make these changes even if it was not obvious to you at the time?’. We can ask people ‘so who in your past would be least surprised to hear that you have made these changes, who would say I knew they could do it and what would be their ‘evidence’ of your capacity, what did they see in you in the past?’. In this way we invite people into that sense of founded coherence, of course I can make and maintain this change because look at the person that I have always been (even if I never noticed).

Finding the person who is going to be successful is a conscious process and rarely happens by chance. It is a key part of the discipline that underlies Solution Focused Practice. Successful clients do not arrive in our offices ready-made, they are co-constructed in the therapeutic process, as Steve de Shazer liked to say.

(1) Natasha Walter’s piece in the Observer is a very short extract from her book ‘Before the Light fades: A memoir of grief and resistance’ recently published by Virago

Chris Prentiss. Passages. October 31, 2006. The Times Newspaper

Natasha Walter. Extract from ‘Before the Light fades: A memoir of grief and resistance’. August 20th, 2023. The Observer Newspaper.

Evan George

London

10th September 2023

It is 21 years since the death of Steve de Shazer. Steve's work transformed my life, more than just my working life, and...
11/09/2026

It is 21 years since the death of Steve de Shazer. Steve's work transformed my life, more than just my working life, and I am grateful to him every day. But more important is the way that his work has touched on and continues to touch on the lives of so many hundreds of thousands, indeed probably millions, of people across the world. His legacy is enormous and is still growing.
Thank-you Steve.

The photo is of Steve with the BRIEF team, Chris Iveson, Harvey Ratner and myself Evan George, in 1997.

30/08/2026

The Death of Resistance
Evan George
First posted on 19 July 2023

In 1984 Steve de Shazer published the paper the Death of Resistance in the Journal Family Process. It was, in my view, a hugely significant moment and remains, in my opinion, one of the most important papers underpinning the development of our approach. Here I am sharing just a few very simple thoughts about the difference that this idea makes in my work. However before we start let's just be clear about the starting point for Steve's thinking. The way that he thinks about the concept of 'resistance' is not as something real, not as something concrete that can be picked up and looked at, turned around and examined. He thinks about the term merely as a way of describing patterns of interaction, a way of describing, normally, client responses. Thus in this paper all that de Shazer does is to challenge the utility of describing client interaction in 'resistance' terms and he proposes that it is more useful to us as therapists to conceptualise in terms of 'cooperating'. Now of course I say that 'all that de Shazer does . . . ' but in my view this 'all' is a rather significant 'all'. So what difference does this shift from resistance to cooperating make in my practice.

1. It changes the way that I listen. When we shift our perspective from resistance to cooperating we are choosing to assume, and it is of course a choice, that the client means what they way. When clients say that they want to change we choose to believe that that is indeed the case. We shift our position from an evaluative frame 'does the client really mean this' or 'what is the client really saying' to a radically accepting frame. The client means what they say and it is my job to work with what they are saying rather than to look through the client's utterances for any evidence that they might not 'mean it'. All that we need to think about when sitting with our clients is how to construct the next question, building it on, and taking account of, the client's last answer.

2. The centrality of the concept of resistance in the way that therapy has thought about client's has also affected the way that therapists sit with people. de Shazer in his very early book Patterns (1982) writes: 'From the earliest days, 20th-century psychotherapy has most often been described as a contest. . . . The contest was this: The therapist (for change) had joined battle against the client's resistance (a force against change). Once the therapist "won" this contest, the client was no longer seen as resistant, and there was a "cure"; the problem was solved' (p 13). In this contest it was assumed that clients were, inevitably deceptive, they say one thing but mean another, they say that they want to change but their 'resistance' gets in the way. Now one tool that therapists have developed for strengthening their hand in this contest is 'body language'. Therapists begin to watch out for secret clues in order to understand the client's 'true' position, the little signs that give the client away, the elements of their communication that clients can be thought to be less in control of. This position leads therapists to observe their client's carefully in order to figure out what is going on, the position can be thought of as 'observational'. In Solution Focus of course we are not observing our client's in this way, we are, as it were, sitting beside our client's listening to their words rather sitting opposite them observing.

3. 'The Death of Resistance' also changes our entire stance in relation to any one piece of work. In the place of 'resistance' we choose to assume that client's are giving of their best at all times and that it is our job to cooperate with the client's way of cooperating with us. This thought is both challenging and uncomfortable. If the client does not change we cannot 'blame' the client's 'resistance'. If the client does not change all that we can do is to take responsibility and to accept that however hard we tried we did not find a way of helping the client to change. This is not an easy position to take and yet is fundamental to Solution Focused practice.

So de Shazer's paper invites us to shift our position, moving from an evaluative position to an appreciative and accepting position, from an observational stance to an alongside stance and overall moving us into a position of taking responsibility. These shifts are, I think, truly significant and have made a huge difference in my practice.

At the end of the paper in Family Process there is a brief response by Susan Stewart and Carol M. Anderson who the previous year had published the book 'Mastering Resistance' (1983). Unsurprisingly they were less than impressed with de Shazer's thinking, framing it, negatively I suspect, as 'theoretically oriented' whilst describing themselves as 'two terminal pragmatists'. They write 'we must confess to some initial shock at de Shazer's proclamations that resistance is dead. We thought that we had seen it just last week, alive and looking amazingly healthy' (p 17). Their dismissal of the paper as theoretical fails, in my view, to appreciate the massive practical difference that the shift of conceptualisation that de Shazer proposes makes in our work. 'The Death of Resistance' changes everything!

de Shazer, Steve (1982) Patterns of Brief Therapy: An Ecosystemic Approach New York: The Guildford Press

de Shazer, Steve (1984) The Death of Resistance Family Process 23: 11 – 17.

Anderson, Carol M., Stewart, Susan (1983) Mastering Resistance: A Practical Guide to Family Therapy New York: The Guildford Press

Evan George

London

02 July 2023

23/08/2026

I just need to know why: 6 conversational possibilities

What do we do as Solution Focused Practitioners when our client says to us ‘I really need to know why I am (depressed, anxious, anorexic, bulimic, bi-polar . . . . )’. This question was asked again this week by a very engaged participant on our BRIEF Level 1 programme however interestingly it is a question that is asked on courses more often than the scenario that the question implies seems to actually happen in practice. I do remember a client saying this to me in 1999 and it must have happened since – but not that often. However if this were to happen tomorrow what might I think of doing? Here are 6 possibilities for practice.

Possibility 1. Wrong shop. Steve de Shazer liked to describe the Solution Focused approach as ‘just a bunch of talk’ (1989). He would state that The Solution Focused approach contains no explanatory theory; it neither seeks to explain why problems occur nor, in any elaborated way, why and how change happens. SFBT he explained is a description of a way of talking with people that is associated with clients reporting change and no more (and of course no less). Theory in the sense that he used the word was defined as follows “Theory as I use the term, is not meant as an explanation, but rather as a coherent description of specific sequences of events within a specific context” (de Shazer, 1988, pp 62 – 63). Were the client to ask for an explanation of why they have their problem the Solution Focused practitioner could, with justification, argue that the Solution Focused approach has no way of explaining, it has no theory of problem, it is merely, although rather usefully, a way of talking with people that leads most people to report changes relatively quickly. In other words if the client wants an explanation rather than life change they have come to the ‘wrong shop’, they have come to a change shop rather than an explanation shop.

Possibility 2. No way of knowing . . . for sure. A more radical although probably risky response would be to question the possibility of anyone truly being able to know for sure why people have problems. We could say to the client that if we had a panel of 20 mental health practitioners in a room all coming from different ‘therapeutic’ persuasions that they would be likely to come up with 20 different explanations. A psychiatrist might come up with an organic explanation, a CBT therapist might propose a cognitive explanation in terms of the way that the client is constructing and making sense of their world, a systemic therapist might offer an explanation in terms of patterns of interaction, a therapist for whom attachment theory was central might look back to early bonds and attachments and so on and so on. Whilst the 20 therapists in the room might be tempted to argue for the correctness of their own (pet) explanation actually all of them might know in their heart (or their head or wherever we might know things) that truth claims in relation to explanations are not justifiable. These ‘explanations’ merely hold the status of hypotheses and the question is not whether they are true but whether they are useful in the sense of productively guiding the therapist’s intervention. And indeed even if the intervention based on a particular explanation works it does not mean that that explanation was the right explanation since after all there is no way of knowing that an intervention based on a competing explanation might not have worked. Knowing why a problem has happened is in fact unknowable – for sure! All that we can ever do is to have ideas, to generate possibilities, and given the inevitable uncertainty it behoves us to hold our hypotheses lightly. de Shazer in ‘Putting Difference to Work’ (1991) talks about an analogous problem ‘it has always seemed to me that rigorous descriptions of what works, including decision-making criteria for figuring out what to do in specific clinical situations, are sufficient. But the question “How does it work?” always seems to arise. My position has been that one cannot know how it works, one can only know that it does work. Answers to the question “How does it work?” always involve speculation.And to speculate, to conjecture, is a matter of storytelling; it is fiction. Therefore, until quite recently, my response to the question “How does it work?” has been “Make up your own explanation: It is as good or better than mine”.’ (pp xvii – xviii).

Possibility 3. Make up your own. Following the last point that de Shazer makes, and perhaps influenced in addition by the work of Plamen Panayotov and his Simple Therapy, we could ask our client “so how do you explain the difficulties that you have been having?’. The client is likely to have an explanation and we can merely endorse it “that makes sense to me too – sounds very possible – although obviously we can never know for sure”. If the client has no explanation then we could ask ‘I guess you have had other people explaining how come things have turned out this way – which explanation makes most sense to you?’. And again on hearing the client’s response we could endorse it whilst still holding on to a little uncertainty, the impossibility of knowing for sure.

Possibly 4. Normal difficulty. Again in ‘Putting Difference to work’ (1991) de Shazer writes “It is, of course, easier to develop a solution to a "normal difficulty" than it is to develop a solution to a "very pathological problem that has roots deep in my infancy” (p 66). So if we felt that an explanation was necessary we should offer an explanation that ‘empowers the client’ to take an active part in the change process. Were we to explain the problem in relation to early childhood experiences then the client might reasonably be led to doubt that they themselves can do anything effective in relation to it, that this sort of complicated difficulty is likely to require expert intervention. An alternative, non-pathologising, empowering sort of explanation might be ‘habit’ “very often people do something that seems a good idea at the time, seems useful at the time, but after a time they get stuck, it becomes a habit, and habits can catch us all out”. Framing the problem, whether it be self-harm, or compulsive behaviours, or substance use as a habit empowers the client. All of us can get stuck with a habit- it is normal. In the same way dissociation can be framed as an initial useful response to an impossible situation but we can get stuck; the solution can outlive its usefulness.

Possibly 5. What difference would it make? And of course we can respond to the request for an explanation in a more conventional Solution Focused conversational way. When the client asks we in our turn could ask “and if you had an explanation that made absolute sense to you what difference would that make?”. The client may respond, for example, with “well I guess that I would just be more confident about my future, less worried about falling back into the problems that I have been having”. We could then respond with “well if we were able to do some talking together and you found yourself more confident about your future and less concerned about the possibility of falling back into the problems of the past and maybe during our talking an explanation had emerged for you but maybe not would that be good enough?”. Most people at this point will agree that this would be ‘good enough’ even if they are initially a little hesitant, indeed a little sceptical about the possibility of feeling better about their life without the explanation that they have assumed to be necessary. In responding this way we are utilising the ‘route and destination distinction’ (George, 2020). The client does not want an explanation merely because they are curious, it is not an end in itself; what they typically want is the difference to their living that they assume that the explanation would make. So we can then offer them the difference that they want, whilst separating it from the route that they had assumed necessary. Now every now and again the client’s construction around the requirement for change has rigidified to the point where the route is as important to the client as the destination. Only the defined route will work for them. And this was indeed the case with my 1999 piece of work. We negotiated together the destination, rather than sticking with the route, and we had a first session which seemed to go well. The client came back and reported that life was better. We spent the session unpacking his account of better and I asked at the end whether he thought that is would be useful to come back for a further session or whether we had done enough. He responded by agreeing that things were better but said that he still wanted an explanation. After some discussion I referred him on to an ‘explanation shop’, a psychodynamically-oriented counselling service. Only at this point did he tell me that his partner was in long-term psychodynamic therapy. Perhaps he wanted some of the same! I hope that it worked for him.

Possibility 6. Change first and explanation afterwards. Finally, another possibility is to respond to the client wanting an explanation with this idea. “Solution Focused Therapy is not focused on explanations and so I could not guarantee that you would reach an explanation during our work. You might but you might not. What about if we do two or three sessions together. You are then likely to be feeling better and if you still want an explanation then I could refer your elsewhere but at least when you were searching for an explanation you would not have to be living with the problems and the difficulties that you have been struggling with. What do you think?” Very few people are likely to still be interested in the explanation when life is going well for them!

I would be really interested to hear what all of you do in these circumstances. Thank-you.

de Shazer, Steve (1985) Keys to Solution in Brief Therapy. New York: Norton.

de Shazer, Steve (1988) Clues: Investigating Solutions in Brief Therapy. New York: Norton.

de Shazer, Steve (1989) Therapy is nothing but a bunch of talk. Paper presented at Social Work symposium. Poughkeepsie: New York.

de Shazer, Steve (1991) Putting Difference to Work. New York: Norton.

George, Evan (2020) Route or destination: a small and very important distinction. https://www.brief.org.uk/.../route-or-destination-a-small...

Panayotov, Plamen (not known) https://www.ebta.eu/.../the_difficulties_and_benefits_of...

Evan George

London

21st April 2024

16/08/2026

Mini Solution Focused presentations with Evan George
Index Of YouTube videos

This YouTube page has a range of short presentations about the Solution Focused approach that many people have found useful. Here is a list of those ‘talks’, a brief summary of each and a link that will take you directly to each one.

Solution Focused Practice in 8 minutes: 5 key features https://youtu.be/ml02EuvgAzk

Solution Focused Practice is always described as 'simple' - and it is - but doing it is not as easy as it looks. This video outlines 5 key features of this flexible approach which is particularly good at engaging clients and building cooperation whilst not wasting even one session of the client's valuable time.

What are the disadvantages of the Solution Focused Approach? https://youtu.be/FrwJEjMhfow

Everything has an upside and a downside, advantages and disadvantages. What are the disadvantages for clinicians in using the Solution Focused approach?

'What are your Best Hopes from our talking together?' https://youtu.be/FrwJEjMhfow

This video focuses on the question that lies at the very heart of the Solution Focused approach - 'what are your best hopes from our talking together?'. If we do not ask this question, or another similar question, it is difficult to see how our work can be Solution Focused.

What do we do when . . . we disagree with our client? https://youtu.be/Zpj0P3yX2_s This is the first in a series of videos entitled 'What do you do when . . . ?' The series is based on the questions that course participants often ask us and the sort of answers that we often give.

Things are worse! https://youtu.be/T5CCv5mWHvo The question that we ask does not determine the answer that people give. When we ask 'so what has been better since we last spoke' not every client will answer that things have been better. Naturally some will say that things are worse. So what do we do then? How do we respond?

What if people have differing best hopes? https://youtu.be/2IykNCjdJSc What can we do when we are working with more than one person and people have differing best hopes or preferred futures? This video addresses this frequently asked question.

'Negative' clients. https://youtu.be/vHvc2bx6Q3c Sometimes our clients are overwhelmed by difficulties. Sometimes our clients have been struggling for a while and have 'tried everything'. It really is easy to give up hope. What do we do then? Evan George shares his thoughts. (Subtitles in Finnish are available.)

I want him to change! https://youtu.be/K5IukCw72TA It is not unusual for people to respond to the 'best hopes' question by saying that they want someone else to change - whether that person be their partner, their child, their boss or social worker. How do we respond in a Solution Focused conversation? This video explores this question and suggests possible pathways.

Tell me what to do (you're the expert) https://youtu.be/Af8gT7Edgoc It is normal and natural for people to come to meet with a professional and to want solutions. How do we respond in Solution Focused practice when someone asks us what they should do?

Why does Solution Focus work? https://youtu.be/sza2GCklpl0 Steve de Shazer described the Solution Focused approach as a description of a way of talking with people that made a difference. There was he said no theory of problem nor a theory of change. However very often on courses people ask - 'why do you think that SFBT works?' Here is a possible answer.

Learning Solution Focus - the greatest challenge: 1 https://youtu.be/n01dsJhv0hY People on training programmes often ask 'so what is the hardest thing to learn when you are new to the SF approach'? This video is the first part of an attempt to respond to this question. (Subtitles in Finnish are available.)

Learning Solution Focus - the greatest challenge: 2 https://youtu.be/Od7zBuaxFrs Participants on courses often ask 'what is the hardest thing when learning Solution Focus'. Here is the part 2. (Subtitles in Finnish are available.)

Impossible hopes https://youtu.be/jaEy725ibIE A frequently asked question is 'what do you do when the best hopes are impossible?'. This is not something that happens often – people are typically very realistic – and yet sometimes it does. Here are a few possibilities.

Solution Focused Brief Therapy - 'As if' - a delicate balance https://youtu.be/zGj5Nd74VAY

Does Solution Focus work with the past? https://youtu.be/mdpiwXyxcfw So often we hear people say that the Solution Focused approach is not interested in the past – this video addresses this understandable over-simplification.

How does Solution Focus 'work through' endings? https://youtu.be/8QI9AnDjJUo Thinking about how we end work with people in Solution Focus tells us a lot about the nature of the approach. Here are some thoughts.

How does Solution Focus protect against burnout? https://youtu.be/f86wJO5FX0E Many of us accept that Solution Focus is great for clients - but in what way is SF good for workers? Evan George shares some thoughts. (Subtitles in Finnish are available.)

The idea of worker neutrality in Solution Focused practice. https://youtu.be/Uv4V-Ue_Rik Solution Focus is often stereotyped as a very 'positive' approach with the worker cheering on change. But is this right? The BRIEF team in London no longer thinks of Solution Focus this way.

As long as it takes . . . https://youtu.be/Sf5FVHV4vMw This phrase which so many of us associate with Steve de Shazer leads us directly to so many of the key assumptions that are associated with the Solution Focused approach. Here we follow this path a little.

Leaving no footprints https://youtu.be/T5wEY5Q7W1Y The phrase that many of us associate with Insoo Kim Berg is the phrase 'leave no footprints in your clients' lives'. Here we explore what this phrase implies and where it leads us in our Solution Focused practice.

Simple but not easy - the Solution Focused approach. https://youtu.be/D8LjcVy7Uno 'Simple but not easy'. In what ways is Solution Focused Brief Therapy simple and why is it not easy? Evan George shares some of his thoughts and would welcome your thoughts on this topic.

Best Hopes and Goals in Solution Focused Practice. https://youtu.be/X0pJtMqDKn0

Best Hopes lie at the heart of Solution Focused Practice - but in what way are they different from 'goals'. Indeed why do we no longer use the term 'goals' in talking about our work and why is the 'best hopes' question so important to us? So here is the latest but certainly not the last version of our thinking about this.

Solution Focus in a time of Covid-19 https://youtu.be/2C2L-ktWYjU

Invited by the Systemic Institute of Cyprus to talk about the way that Covid-19 might be 'reconstructing people's realities', Evan recorded this piece. The opening is autobiographical and if you wished you could skip that and start at 02.50. The latter part explores the sort of SF questions that we might use with people struggling with their living at this time.

The Best Hopes Question: a detailed deconstruction. https://youtu.be/sMCk2d2LsCA

Evan George takes a very detailed look at the construction of the 'Best hopes' question where every word matters.

Useful conversations in tough times: 3 simple steps https://youtu.be/yfO_kmDYiTM

There are lots and lots of people who are looking for a way to talk usefully with people who are distressed by these times that we are living through. Solution Focused practitioners know a lot about useful and minimal conversations. Here is a template based on just three steps that we can share with all those who might be looking for a way of responding, whether that be in the workplace, the family, the church community, the neighbourhood, as a volunteer supporter, teacher, friend. Before offering it to others you might like to try it out yourself!

Becoming BRIEF https://youtu.be/vg4u3Ourc8s

This video explores a 20 year journey that the BRIEF team took, shaping and re-shaping the Solution Focused approach.

Working with 'great' clients: 4 simple steps https://youtu.be/JNEIOyWOB58

What if having 'great' clients was not a matter of luck? What if we could do 4 simple things that would increase the likelihood that we had 'great' clients to work with? Evan George believes that 'great' clients do not arrive ready-made, that they are co-constructed. So here are 4 really simple steps that we can take towards this end.

What is Solution Focused Practice in 2020? https://youtu.be/JBMNhKWM7q4

The Solution Focused approach is constantly changing and developing. Sometimes our teaching and description can get 'stuck in time' describing something that we used to do, something that we used to think while our practice has moved on. Here Evan is trying to describe the model as he sees it in his practice today. If you have 10 minutes you could compare this description with your description.

Clients really do want to change - The Legacy of Steve de Shazer no. 1 https://youtu.be/gLCGUfzH26I

This is the first in a series of videos exploring the legacy of Steve de Shazer and the Milwaukee team. Looking back it is hard to imagine how radical the idea that 'clients really do want to change' was at the time of writing in 1985. And still now there is a body of ideas that seems to get in the way of really believing this. This video explores the impact of Steve's thinking.

Without the therapist's understanding: The Legacy of Steve de Shazer no 2. https://youtu.be/K_q1WeeY2GU

The second part of this Legacy of Steve de Shazer ‘series’, focuses on the core of Steve’s thinking that made the Solution Focused approach possible, an idea which we can find encapsulated in two short sentences, the first from 1985 and the second from 1988: ‘Interventions can initiate change without the therapist’s understanding, in any detail, what has been going on’, and ‘Solutions need not be directly related to the problems they are meant to solve’. These two quotes exemplify the separation of the problem creation process and the solution development process that is at the heart of SFBT.

Exploring difference through the past. https://youtu.be/yuXI8612VKQ

Often people view Solution Focus as an approach that is very future-oriented and in some ways that is right. And yet the approach also works with the past. Here we focus on exploring difference through the past.

Using a scale framework: the key practice points https://youtu.be/Fgal-zP2jgo

People have begun to question the place of scale questions in our modern and up-to-date version of Solution Focused practice. Evan George argues that there is a place and talks about the key practice issues in making the questions useful.

Advantages of SFBT https://youtu.be/AGcM1qiov5g

Just recently a student from a post-graduate course in SFBT from UCLL in Belgium asked about the advantages of SFBT, the added value that it offers over and above other models of therapy. This is an unusual question and fitted in with some thinking that I have been doing recently.

Endings to beginnings https://youtu.be/39568CtR-Bo

The shift in significance from session endings to session beginnings in first Solution Focused sessions tells us about how the approach has developed and indeed changed.

‘Perfect day’ https://youtu.be/oaZ5rhqOFeM

A course participant asks about the 'the risks of inviting people to describe their Preferred Future in detail'; might it not lead to despair and hopelessness. And yet our experience is the opposite. Why?

'I don't know - I just don't know' https://youtu.be/WY0ttWRqLoA

One of the most commonly asked questions on Solution Focused Practice Foundation programmes is 'so what do you do when people answer the best hopes question by saying 'I don't know'?' This is a good question' to ask since 'I don't know' is probably the most common answer that people give us and what is important to hold in mind is that 'I don't know' does not mean that people will not, often moments later, answer the question. This video describes a structure, a framework, that seems to help people to move from 'I don't know' to workable answers within minutes, very often! What do you do in these circumstances and what thoughts do you have about this framework?

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