BRIEF

R is for Relationship

In both the introductory and the final chapter of their weighty (literally) text The Heart and Soul of Change (Hubble, Duncan and Miller. 1995) the authors draw our attention to the findings of Lambert (1992), citing his conclusions regarding the effective factors in therapy. Lambert’s proposition, often referred to as the Common Factors argument, is that 40% of the change effect in therapy can be ascribed to ‘Client/Extratherapeutic Factors’, 30% to variables relating to the client-therapist relationship, 20% to ‘Placebo, Hope and Expectancy’ and just 10% to ‘Model/Technique factors’. Expanding on the Client-Therapist relationship element Hubble, Duncan and Miller point to ‘a wide range of relationship-mediated variables found among therapies no matter the therapist’s theoretical persuasion. Caring, empathy, warmth, acceptance, mutual affirmation, and encouragement of risk taking and mastery are but a few’ (p 9). Given that in Solution Focused Practice and training there is little overt emphasis on the ‘therapeutic relationship’, indeed the term is not much used in Solution Focused texts other than in the work of Eve Lipchik ( 2002), this raises a question about how the approach manages to achieve such good outcomes, indeed how the approach manages to achieve such good outcomes in relatively few sessions if 30% of the change effect is relationship dependent. One answer to this seeming possible contradiction may be that relationship-enhancing activities lie at the very heart of all that we do in Solution Focused Practice. If a therapy could be thought to have a soul we could argue that the very soul of the approach is ‘relationship-positive’. So what are the practice characteristics in the model that could be thought to foster a strong and positive client-therapist relationship?

1. Centering the client. Since the Solution Focused approach is non-normative every SF practitioner will start by inviting the client to define their own ‘Best Hopes’ (George et al, 1990). The therapist has no view on what the focus should be. As Harry Korman has stated ‘until we know what the client wants we can have no questions to ask’. The client will perforce experience themselves therefore at the centre of the work. There is no assessment to determine what is wrong and what therefore the focus should be. There is no distinction made between ‘want’ and ‘need’, since the worker has no concept of ‘should’. There is no idea of ‘presenting problem’ and ‘underlying problem’, a framework common in mental health settings which invariably relegates the client’s knowing to second-class knowing. The client is the expert on their life. Only the client can answer the question ‘what are your best hopes from our talking together?’ The worker’s success or failure is assessed by the client ‘has this worker supported me in moving my life in my preferred direction?’. The worker is, in this sense, the servant of the client.

2. Appreciating. The Solution Focused worker adopts a position of ‘radical trust’. We choose to hold the assumption from our very first point of contact that the client is competent, that the client has the capacities necessary to make the changes that they specify, that the client is motivated towards change, and that the client is giving of their best. The Solution Focused worker is never critical of their client. Indeed if the work is showing no evidence of progress the Solution Focused worker, rather than choosing to blame their client’s ‘failure’, will turn their gaze onto themselves and ask the question ‘what am I doing that is not working here?’. The Solution Focused worker takes responsibility. Solution Focused workers will even take care in how they are talking about their clients in their clients’ absence, choosing only ever to talk as if the client was hearing every word that they are saying.

3. Co-constructing. Solution Focused Therapy is not a process that is done on or at or to our clients. It is a collaboration. We ask a question and the client answers and the worker’s subsequent response should both take account of the client’s statement and build on it. In Solution Focus we build our questions on the client’s last response, typically using their own words rather than our own. The client’s experience therefore should be, when the process is going well, an experience of exquisite attention, an experience of a worker listening hard, altering their tone to fit the client’s last response, concentrating on the client’s responses, working really hard to frame the next useful question. Experiencing a professional working so hard in this detailed way naturally gives the client the message ‘you are worth it’. And of course every answer that the client gives us is the right answer. There are no wrong answers in our approach. We choose to work with whatever the client says rather than challenging.

4. Partnership monitoring. At the beginning of my work with clients I will often say something along the lines of ‘there is no need for you to answer any question that you would prefer not to answer and if for any reason you begin to think that we are going in the wrong direction or that something important is being missed out could you please tell me – I really want this to be of use to you’. This framing invites the client into an active partnership – the client is not a passive recipient of the process. In addition we might well check as we progress through the conversation ‘is this making sense?’ or ‘are we talking about the right things?’ or indeed, as the client describes their preferred future, just checking ‘and if that were to happen would you be pleased’ or ‘would that be a shift in a good direction?’. These sort of questions repeatedly ensure that the therapist has not got disconnected from the client, that therapist and client are indeed still in partnership. And of course at the end of most sessions I will ask the client, prior to the final ending sequence, ‘and is there anything that you had in mind to say today that I have not given you the opportunity to say?’.

So here are four practices client-centering, appreciating, co-constructing and partnership monitoring that are embedded in Solution Focused conversations, that are foundational in our practice, and if, it seems to me, we honour these principles of practice in our work then the outcome will inevitably be to enhance the therapist-client relationship. As it happens the Solution Focused approach is also rather effective in relation to the ‘client/extratherapeutic’ factors and ‘placebo, hope and expectancy’. Everything that we do in the approach tends to enhance expectancy and inviting the client to watch out for pre-session change is just one amongst many ways of celebrating the extratherapeutic in our conversations. If Lambert is right in his Common Factor theory then no wonder Solution Focus works!

George, E., Iveson, C. and Ratner, H. (1990; Revised and expanded Edition 1999)

Problem to Solution: Brief Therapy with Individuals and Families. London: BT Press

Lambert, M. (1992) Implications of Outcome Research for Psychotherapy Integration. In J. C. Norcross & M. R. Goldfried (Eds.), Handbook of Psychotherapy Integration (pp 94 – 129). New York: Basic Books.

Lipchik, Eve (2002) Beyond Technique in Solution-Focused Therapy. New York: Guildford.

Hubble,M., Duncan, B., Miller, S. (1999). The Heart and Soul of Change. Washington, D.C. : American Psychological Association.

Evan George

London

09 March 2025.

M is for minimalism

In 1987 Steve de Shazer published an important, and simple, paper entitled Minimal Elegance (1987). In the conclusion he writes ‘based on the kind of simple ideas I described above, I have been called “the most minimal of minimalists” (Brewster, 1985). I do not think he was planning to compliment me, but I certainly take it as a compliment’. (de Shazer, 1987, p 60). In Solution Focused Practice minimalism lies at its core, and should be thought about in two ways. (1) What is the least that we can do with people during sessions that is associated nonetheless with good outcome? (2) What is the smallest number of sessions that are required to arrive at the same point?



de Shazer’s paper clearly and straightforwardly sets out the BFTC’s thinking at this early point in the development of the Solution Focused approach and the focus, it seems to me, is on simplicity and the conceptual requirements for doing less in sessions. As de Shazer argues ‘no matter how complex the (problem) description, the intervention should still be the simplest possible’ (ibid, pp 57 – 58). He adds ‘therapists as well as their clients often make the assumption that a complicated problem needs a complicated solution and that its duration is directly related to its severity and intractability. They assume that their complicated description (or analysis or map) of a problem means that the problem is complicated and, therefore, needs a complicated solution. But brief therapists think differently. No matter how complicated the description of the problem or the (apparent) duration, they believe that a small and simple difference that is noticed will often lead to unpredictably large changes. An unrecognised difference (since it goes by unnoticed) will not receive the amplification needed and will remain a difference that does not make a difference. A simple difference, often just some doubt, can be enough to begin changing a lifelong pattern or way of thinking’ (ibid, p 58). As he argues ‘simple interventions do not often come about spontaneously. They take time and a lot of thought’ (ibid, p 58). It is I think the disconnection of the problem pattern from the solution pattern that allows for the possibility of this sort of minimalism.de Shazer concludes as follows ‘if you want to get from point A to point B, but know no details of the terrain in between, the best thing to do is assume that you can go from A to B by following a straight line. . . . As William of Ockham might say, never introduce complex descriptions when simple ones will do’ (ibid, p 60). Minimalism in terms of our interventions requires us to hold a way of conceptualising that justifies and legitimises it, that ‘allows’ it.



The second aspect of minimalism, in the number of sessions that we deliver, requires us similarly to develop a way of thinking that supports it, such that we are clear that we are not offering a second-class sort of therapy within with the client is short-changed; we are not cheapskate therapists dancing to the tune of budget managers. So here are four assumptions that provide for us a basis for minimal interventions.



1. Less is better than more. Minimalism is founded on a belief, a belief that is a prerequisite for minimalistic practice. We have to believe that people have better things to do in their lives than spending their time talking with therapists. We do have to believe that life is for living rather than for talking about and so the less time that people spend with us and the more time that they spend out and about living their lives the better. This position is of course merely a position and many therapists take the opposite position, choosing to believe that therapy is good in itself and that more is better than less, a view that will almost inevitably be associated with longer therapeutic contacts.



2. The task of therapy is to help people to ‘get themselves moving’ again. Invariably there are times in our lives when we get ourselves stuck, when we can’t see a way forward, when what we are doing is the obvious thing to do, and yet whatever that obvious thing is just does not work and yet we find ourselves trying it over and over. We are stuck. The therapist’s view of their task in Solution Focused Practice is to work with the client in such a way that clients get themselves ‘unstuck’, such that the client is able to begin moving forward again in life. We do not take the view that the job of the therapist is to ‘cure’ or to ‘treat’ or to ‘resolve the client’s issues’, just for clients to experience themselves moving again in such a way that they will be able to again face all those difficulties that life throws at us with hopefulness and with an expectation that they can be faced successfully. John Weakland from the MRI in Palo Alto used to refer to this shift as the change from ‘the same damn thing over and over’ to ‘one damn thing after another’.



3. Every session can make a difference. Many therapists seem to have taken the view that the first few sessions in any new piece of work are involved in assessment and building rapport, almost that nothing therapeutic really happens in those sessions. Minimalists of course would not agree with this view. We would remind ourselves that one session is the mode in any therapy; more people come just once than any other specific numbers of session, and so it behoves us to remember that this really might be the last time that we see this client. This raises the question ‘how can we do something independently useful in this session today, something that might make a difference?’. And repeatedly we see that if we start with the assumption that one session can make a difference, that very often it does.



4. Trust. The hardest of all the challenges that face us when we meet a new client is ‘trusting’. Training as therapists introduces us to the surprising ideas that clients do not want to change, that they are resistant, that they don’t tend to mean what they say and that we often know better. These ideas invite us into a conflictual rather than a collaborative relationship with our clients that is bound to make our work with them longer, more complicated and less minimal. Learning to truly ‘trust’ our clients is vital, to take them seriously, to assume that they do indeed want to make the changes that they describe and that they are trying to do their best at all times.



Minimalism is not easy and it requires discipline and radical thinking.



Brewster, F. (1985) Seeing Something. Networker, 9(6), 61 - 64

de Shazer, S. (1987) Minimal elegance. Family Therapy Networker, 11(8): 57-60.



Evan George

26th January 2025

London

Domain Details Page

D is for describing

When writing Solution Focused Brief Therapy: 100 Key Points and Techniques (Ratner et al., 2012) the BRIEF team noticed the frequency with which the words ‘describe’, ‘description’, and ‘describing’ popped-up in our text and this was both a surprise and in some ways not a surprise. By that time we had come to define the key therapeutic activity in Solution Focused Practice as the facilitation of the client’s describing of their life in some very particular ways. It may be that at this time we saw this way of defining the approach as perhaps a little different, as somehow a (very) small contribution to the ‘rumor’ that is Solution Focused Practice (Miller and de Shazer, 1998). Of course we were wrong. Steve de Shazer had been using the terms ‘describe’ and ‘description’ since at least 1985. For example ‘when the therapist helps the arguing couple to describe life together after these arguments are no longer something to complain about, complete with the therapist's open expectation that this future is a good possibility, then the first steps towards a new set of expectations have been taken’ (de Shazer, 1985, p 76). On the same page he writes ‘in this case, the solution is built around the way the spouses describe life after the arguments are no longer problematic’ (de Shazer, 1985, p 76). Given that de Shazer had been using these words for so long was there anything significantly different about BRIEF’s placing of these words at the heart of our understanding of the approach? Perhaps there was, or perhaps the words lead to a difference, in the sheer minimalism of focus that they implied. The way that we began to talk about the approach was that all that we do is to facilitate the client describing their life in a particular way. We are not curing them, helping them, fixing them, treating them, just supporting the emergence of this description and if we do that we can trust client to sort themselves out. As Eve Lipchik wrote in Beyond Technique in Solution-Focused Therapy: Working with Emotions and the Therapeutic Relationship (2002) ‘You cannot change clients they can only change themselves’ (p 17).

If we accept this proposition that at the heart of Solution Focused Brief Therapy is situated this invitation to describe then there are two further questions that we need to address – what are people being invited to describe and why might engaging the client in describing make a difference? The ‘what’ is I think relatively easy to answer. Having established a workable starting point, a focus, through the ‘Best hopes’ (George et al., 1990) question, the worker then invites the client to describe in detail their everyday life as transformed by their best hopes from the therapy – a ‘best hopes’ reconfigured tomorrow (Ratner et al., 2012). This is no fantasy, no pipe-dream, this is the everyday reality of their living transformed. The client wakes up the next day in the same bed, in the same setting, with the same people, doing (or not doing) the same job, with (or without) the same children, in (or not in) the same relationship. The context of the client’s life will not have changed but the way that they ‘do’ their living and their experience of that living will be fundamentally altered by the presence of ‘confidence’, of ‘happiness’, of ‘liking myself, of ‘get up and go’, of ‘looking forward to life’, of ‘finding myself again’, of ‘feeling good’, of ‘wanting to be alive again’, indeed of whatever quality of living the client’s ‘best hopes’ lead us to. In such a life everything will be different, from the way that the client feels the floor beneath their feet as they walk from bedroom to kitchen (Katti Jisuk Seo, 2021), to the way that they make and indeed experience drinking their coffee. Katti describes ‘I would feel my bare feet on the wooden floor. I would think to myself how beautiful it is to have a wooden floor. I would see the sun reflecting on it and feel how warm it is.’. While many years ago a client, describing a day transformed by the presence of happiness told herself ‘I’d be outside in the garden, looking at my garden, my animals, and just drinking coffee and it wouldn’t taste so busy, it tastes so bitter at the moment, coffee, it tastes bitter’. ‘Making the description real’ (George, 2021) the specification of context, what time, where are you standing, who is there, who notices first, what does does Joni notice, and how does she respond in a way that shows you that she’s noticed, and how do you respond to Joni, and what is Cerys’s special way of noticing and so on, brings the day to life. The ‘best hopes’ day is happening.

The second area of description invites the client to focus on anything in the past that fits with the preferred future for which the client is hoping. This might start right at the beginning of a first session asking the client about change that they have already noticed. Here is a very recent session and we are 2 minutes in:

Worker: Since we started making this arrangement what have you been pleased to notice Steve? Even tiny things that have stood out for you – tiny changes – things that you’ve been pleased with – what have you been pleased to notice since we started this process?

Client: Oh – interesting one – related to me you mean?

Worker: Yeah.

Client: Well – it kind of sounds strange without any context – but I believe the last two days were the first two days in two and a bit months that I haven’t broken down

This interchange was followed by the client acknowledging that this was significantly different for him and then by a description of the difference that this had made to his life and how come the change had happened. Inviting clients to describe exceptions and instances, and change, the strategies that they used to bring these moments about and the self who achieved this, thickens the description and invites clients to see these moments as meaningful for them. Elements of the preferred future are already in place and it is the client who ‘did it’.

If the answer to the ‘what’ question is fairly simple the ‘why’ question is much harder to answer. Moving from a description of what we do to why we do it requires us to posit a theory of change and as de Shazer makes clear it is not possible to know: “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”. In this, I followed Wittgenstein: “Our mistake is to look for an explanation where we ought to look at what happens” (1968, #654)’ (de Shazer, 1991 pp xvii – xviii).

So when we speculate about ‘why’ we are not seeking to make truth claims, we are (merely) story-telling and each of us has our own favourite story and our story will in turn shape, in small but significant ways, the way that we practice. At the heart of my story lies this quotation form Terry Eagleton, taken from his book Hope without Optimism (2015): “‘. . . the mere act of being able to imagine an alternative future may distance and relativise the present, loosening its grip upon us to the point where the future in question becomes more feasible. . . . True hopelessness would be when such imaginings were inconceivable’ (p 85). What I take from Eagleton that helps me to make-sense of what we do, of the time that we allocate to a detailed describing of the preferred future is that so doing, as Eagleton states, ‘loosens the grip’ of the dominant problem story, the present and indeed the version of the past that we have constructed that fits with that story of limitation and restriction. Miller and de Shazer go beyond Eagleton when they write ‘The solution-focused language game is designed to persuade clients that change is not only possible, but that it is already happening. It is, in other words, a rhetorical process designed to talk clients into solutions to their problems’ (Miller, de Shazer, 1998. p372). It is the ‘already happening’ that emerges from the description of the history of the preferred future. In Keys (1995) de Shazer writes: “In order to readily prompt solutions, it is useful to develop a 'vision' or description of a more satisfactory future, which can then become salient to the present. Furthermore, once this "realistic vision" is constructed as one of a set of possible, achievable futures, clients frequently develop "spontaneous" ways of solving the problem” (de Shazer, S. 1985. P xvi). Description is associated with ‘spontaneous change’ an idea that de Shazer fills our a little in Clues (1998) when he writes “Simply describing in detail a future in which the problem is already solved helps to build the expectation that the problem will be solved and then this expectation, once formed, can help the client think and behave in ways that will lead to fulfilling this expectation” (de Shazer, 1998. p50). As is made clear in de Shazer’s final, posthumous volume (2007) “. . . for many people, the activity of answering (the Miracle Question) appears to elicit a significant shift in their state of consciousness” (de Shazer, 2007. P 42).

So D is for the Describing of Differences in Detail even if it is hard to know for sure why it makes a difference.

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 (1991) Putting Difference to Work. New York: Norton.

de Shazer, Steve, Dolan, Yvonne, Korman, Harry, Trepper, Terry, MacCollum, Eric and Berg, Insoo Kim (2007) More Then Miracles: the state of the art of solution focused therapy. New York: Haworth.

Eagleton, Terry (2015) Hope without Optimism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press

George, E. 2021. Making it real https://www.brief.org.uk/blog/making-it-real.html

George, E., Iveson, C. and Ratner, H. (1990; Revised and expanded Edition 1999) Problem to Solution: Brief Therapy with Individuals and Families. London: BT Press

Lipchik, Eve (2002) Beyond Technique in Solution-Focused Therapy. New York: Guildford.

Miller, G. and de Shazer.(1998) Have you heard the latest rumor about ...? Solution-focused therapy as a rumor. Family Process, 37: 363-77.

Ratner, H., George, E., Iveson, C. (2012) Solution Focused Brief Therapy: 100 Key Ideas and Techniques. London: Routledge

Seo, K. J. (2021). The Glint of Light on Broken Glass Or: The Power of the Micro-Moment. Journal of Solution Focused Practices, 5(2), 6. https://doi.org/10.59874/001c.75046

Evan George

London

27th October 2024

G is for Goals or for not-goals

The Solution Focused approach is not infrequently referred to as a ‘goal-focused approach’. Indeed the first site to come up on my search in relation to the query ‘what is Solution Focused Brief Therapy’ refers to Solution Focused Practice in the first two paragraphs as ‘future-focused, goal-directed and focuses on solutions’ and then ‘SFBT is a short-term goal-focused evidence-based therapeutic approach’ (1) The repeated referencing of the term ‘goals’ is perhaps not surprising since the word can be found throughout the writings of the pioneers and developers of the approach Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg and Eve Lipchik. For example, de Shazer writes “Without goals, therapists and clients cannot know when the therapy has succeeded or failed” (de Shazer, 1988, p 93), whilst Berg and Miller write “without explicit goals, it is difficult for the client to evaluate her successes” (Berg & Miller, 1992, p 32). de Shazer clarifies for us the risk of failing to establish goals “without this step” he writes “therapy could reasonably go on forever” (de Shazer, 1988, p 93).

If this is right that de Shazer and Berg use the word goal virtually interchangeably with the idea of ‘success criteria’, implying the co-construction of a method whereby the client is enabled to judge success and to be able to know when they no longer need to continue attending therapy, then this is far from the way that the term is typically used. It is this particular use of the term that is expanded when de Shazer writes “The goal is best thought of as some member of the class of ways that the therapist and the client will know that the problem is solved rather than any particular member of that class” (de Shazer, 1988, p 93). We can compare this with the Oxford English dictionary definition which defines the word goal as ‘the object towards which effort or ambition is directed: the destination of a (more or less laborious) journey’ (OED, 1971). Here it is the word ‘the’ that is important. Not any object but ‘the object’. Here we are not talking about one possible object out of many possible objects. The goal (or object) thus specified has specific significance, it is ‘the’ destination.

So de Shazer’s framing implies a certain arbitrariness and this somewhat arbitrary quality that he introduces challenges, as so much of his work does, more traditional approaches to therapy where the therapist might seek to establish ‘the client’s goal’ and indeed might see it as a cause for concern, a problem in the therapeutic process, if the client is thought to ‘change their goal’. de Shazer’s way of thinking introduces a fluidity, a flexibility, within which definitions and framings can ‘slip and slide’. Problems, and indeed solutions, are “constructed out of rather flimsy stuff, not concrete and stone”, which de Shazer reminds us is “good news. (Since) even problems that are traditionally seen as “difficult” are subject to rapid transformation under the right conditions” (de Shazer, 1988, p 113). This fluidity ‘some member of the class of ways’ is further reflected when de Shazer writes “Anything that prompts the client to say that "things are better" needs to be identified as verification of change, and anything new or different or more effective that the client reports needs to be encouraged or amplified” (de Shazer et al, 1986). de Shazer is clear. It is not only those things that fit with the established goals that need to be identified as verification of change but ‘anything that prompts the client to say that things are better’. It is potentially useful it seems for client and worker to co-construct a set of criteria but anything else that is different might also serve the purpose of allowing the client to notice that they have changed. Eve Lipchik also reflects the same fluidity “Solutions are the end product of a process of discovery. They may be far removed from what clients thought their goal was when they entered therapy” (Lipchik, 2002, p 79).

This level of fluidity around goals is highly unusual and has led us at BRIEF to question the usefulness of the term ‘goal’ at all. The term in its common therapy usage implies fixed, determined, unchanging, ‘the object’, ‘the destination’ and this is a long way from the way that the term is being used by Lipchik and de Shazer. Walter and Peller also use the term in this way writing “using goal as a verb, however, highlights that we are talking about a process and about developing possibilities, not about an end point. We are talking about conversation by which meaning evolves and the client begins to have a different experience and to envision alternatives for her life outside the session” (Walter and Peller, 1996, p 18). Note the words ‘process’ and ‘alternatives’. Engaging the client in ‘goaling’ is seen by Walter and Peller as useful per se, it makes a difference and de Shazer reflects this when he writes ” . . . for many people, the activity of answering (the Miracle Question) appears to elicit a significant shift in their state of consciousness” (de Shazer etal, 2007, p 42). As de Shazer argues “Simply describing in detail a future in which the problem is already solved helps to build the expectation that the problem will be solved and then this expectation, once formed, can help the client think and behave in ways that will lead to fulfilling this expectation” (de Shazer, 1988, p 50).

Harlene Anderson and colleagues from the Taos Institute also recognise the limitations attached to traditional goal-setting when they write “Change is inevitable. Holding too tightly to past constructions or the image of a desired future fosters insensitivity to the complexities of the present”. Jack Trout in the Power of Simplicity frames the risks similarly “Another problem with goal-setting is that it creates a certain amount of inflexibility. When you’re focused on a goal, you tend to miss opportunities that present themselves when you take a different direction” (Trout, 1999, pp 139 – 140).

Thus at BRIEF there are two parts to our ‘goaling’. The first part is to elicit from the client an answer to the ‘best hopes question’ (George et al., 1999) without which the worker has no direction for the conversation, no focus, literally nowhere to go. Having established a workable starting point we then invite the client to describe in detail their own real life as transformed by the presence of those best hopes. That description does open possibilities for action, the client could of course decide to follow any one of the possibilities suggested by their description and if they do they are more likely to notice the change. However, even though the process of describing a preferred future does indeed make a difference, it is in that sense ‘therapeutic’, we can have no way of knowing what the relationship will be between the preferred future description and what will be happening in the client’s life at the point that they say ‘that’s enough, I’m done, I don’t need to see you anymore’. At BRIEF we take the ‘goaling’ process seriously and yet we hold the contents lightly.

(1) https://solutionfocused.net/what-is-solution-focused-therapy/

Berg, Insoo Kim and Miller, Scott (1992) Working with the Problem Drinker: a solution focused approach. New York: Norton.
de Shazer, Steve (1988) Clues: Investigating Solutions in Brief Therapy. New York: Norton.
de Shazer, Steve, Kim Berg, Insoo, Lipchik, Eve, , Nunnally, Elam, Molnar, A., Gingerich, Wallace, Weiner Davis, Michelle. (1986) Brief Therapy: Focused Solution Development Family Process 25:207-221.
de Shazer, Steve, Dolan, Yvonne, Korman, Harry, Trepper, Terry, MacCollum, Eric and Berg, Insoo Kim (2007) More Then Miracles: the state of the art of solution focused therapy. New York: Haworth.
George, E., Iveson, C. and Ratner, H. (1990; Revised and expanded Edition 1999) Problem to Solution: Brief Therapy with Individuals and Families. London: BT Press
Lipchik, Eve (2002) Beyond Technique in Solution-Focused Therapy. New York: Guildford.
Trout, Jack. (1999) The Power of Simplicity. New York: McGraw-Hill
Walter, J., & Peller. J. (1996) Re-thinking our assumptions: Assuming anew in a post-modern world. In Miller, Scott, Hubble, Mark and Duncan, Barry (Eds.) Handbook of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Evan George
London
17th November 2024