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