I was once invited to see an eighteen-year old young woman who was expected to die that night or the next. She was alone in a locked ward of a 19th Century psychiatric hospital starving to death and too weak to withstand any intrusive treatment.
Her response to my opening question, “What are your best hopes from this meeting?” was so forlorn, so devoid of hope that I almost lost hope myself. As that seemed about to happen I was struck by a lightning flash of realisation: my job was not to give this person hope, not to save her life not to do anything except ask the next question.
In our work all we ever have to do is ask the next question.
Then I remembered that all clients are motivated. She was intent on death and close to finding it yet she had agreed to see a therapist. There had to be a crack through which a future might be found and it would be her words that could find it but only if I ask the next question.
There is a simple logic to this process. Solution Focused Brief Therapy (and coaching) is a conversational process. That means that each party takes turns and each turn builds on what has gone before. The therapist/coach asks a question and when the client answers they are also (by implication) giving permission for another question to be asked. Every answer is, therefore, an act of cooperation in the therapy/coaching conversation.
When the young woman says “I don’t do hope”, far from ‘resisting’ therapy she is fully cooperating and presumably hoping that I too will do my job.
The same when the disaffected teenage boy answers with “I don’t know” he is giving permission for me to have another go – and I do until I find the right question, the right tone, the right time to ask the question that he can answer differently.
“I don’t know” is a totally cooperative answer, not to say a generous one in that we are being given another chance to ask.
(These and other musings come not from my head but from other conversations with my closest colleagues, Evan George, Harvey Ratner, Adam Froerer, Elliott Connie and Biba Georgieva as well as the 100,000 or so people who have joined a BRIEF course.)
Chris Iveson
London
9 June 2024