Earlier this week I spent an interesting hour talking with Sonia Maceiras from Hywel Dda UHB abut the application of the Solution Focused approach when working with families. During the course of our conversation 5 of my ‘practice guidelines’ emerged.
1. Ask questions first of the person, or people, who most want to attend the session. This is normally the person/people who are most concerned about the situation and this is typically the adults or parents. Since very often the children attend the session feeling criticized, feeling that the adults believe them to be the problem, then to start with the children risks leaving them feeling exposed, risks leaving them concerned about giving away too much and so can lead to self-protective, and understandable, ‘don’t knows’. When starting with the adults then it is the worker’s task to demonstrate to the children that this is a ‘safe environment’ where the worker will not focus on the mistakes of the past, on fault or blame, but will shift the focus to the better future that is desired, constantly listening for capacity and resource. When it comes to asking the children questions, with luck, the children will feel more able to engage, will feel that the worker is indeed a ‘person of good will’.
2. Rotating questions. The most typical structure of one of my first family sessions is to rotate the questions around the family, starting with the most concerned attender’s best hopes and then the children’s best hopes, and then a number of rounds of preferred future questions asking the same question of all present and then a scale and then the evidence for people seeing the family wherever they do on the scale and then at least one round of the evidence for one point up and so on. As the questions rotate around the group the detailed description builds and builds and builds from the view-points of each of the family members. Of course in follow-up sessions the structure is the same just that we start with ‘so what has been better’.
3. What difference might that make? If a parent (for example) starts by indicating that they are looking for change in a child or indeed anyone else, I do not just move the interviewing on in the rotational fashion just described. I accept the answer and guess that the change in the child is likely to make a big difference to the parent. Mot parents agree and can talk about the difference that the change would make. Once the parent has agreed that the child’s change would indeed by significant for them I ask what difference the child’s change and the parent’s changed response would make to family life. Mostly parents, one way or another, state that family life would be happier. This word, describing the difference in the family, then becomes key in the construction of subsequent questions. The family want to be happier and the change in the child and the changed response in the parent become two possible indicators, amongst others, of a happier family. It is the family difference that is high-lighted and the specific changes become secondary.
4. No need to ‘push’ for agreement. Assuming that everyone, with sufficient ‘and what difference would that make’ questions agrees that the family would be happier, might be getting on better and so on then the individual variation in the picturing of a ‘happier, getting on better’ family does not matter. Indeed the more variation, the more difference, the more likely it is that some of the happier family characteristics will be noticed prior to the next session. It is positively counter-productive to try to ‘get’ everyone to agree, to limit the number of ‘accepted’ descriptions, and indeed it is normal and usual for people to picture ‘happier’ differently.
5. Parents in despair. When parents are at the end of their tethers they not infrequently, and indeed naturally, become extremely critical of their children, heaping stories of bad behaviour one after another on the therapy table. The instinct of many workers is to step in and to protect the child, arguing that the child cannot be that bad, that they must have good qualities and so on. The effect of this is to convince the parent that the worker either has not understood how bad things are or does not want to understand and that therefore they must work harder to prove the child’s ‘badness’. So rather than arguing it is better to accept and to validate not the child’s ‘badness’ but how difficult this must be for the parent, how tough life must be for them and we can then ask ‘and I guess that you would like things to be different’. Inevitably the parent agrees and then we can ask ‘so how would you know that things were improving in the family?’, a simple step out of ‘complaint, though acceptance and recognition into a describing of a better future.
So thanks SM for our conversation – I’m sure that if we had had longer that more ideas would have emerged.
Evan George
London
16 June 2024
