F is for fitting

There is a lot of competition for the letter ‘F’. Future, focus, footprints (or the lack of them), even ‘focused vs forced’ (Nylund and Corsiglia, 1994) could all make a good case for themselves. But when it came to it, when a choice had to be made, I find that I can’t go beyond ‘fitting’. My first EBTA Conference presentation, in Bremen in Autumn 1995, was entitled ‘Fit the hidden heart of the Solution Focused Approach’ and those of you who glanced at the recent pieces ‘C is for Coping’ and ‘E is for Exceptions’ will have noticed the idea of Fit was central in both of those pieces.
The idea of Fit was extensively referenced in de Shazer’s first two Solution Focused books (de Shazer, 1985, 1988) and flowed straightforwardly from his thinking in his first book about  ‘cooperating’ (de Shazer, 1982, pp 9-15). Fit for de Shazer manifested itself in a number of ways. He wrote about skeleton tasks which only had to fit the problem sufficiently to work, meaning that there was no requirement to find the particular task (key) merely (any)one that would fit (open the lock) (de Shazer, 1985, pp 59 – 64): “it is only necessary that a therapeutic intervention fit the constructed problem in such a way that the goal is reached, i.e., a solution develops. This tells us nothing about how other interventions might have fit the client's problem construction in other ways and reached the same goal. Likewise, it tells us nothing about other therapeutic problem constructions which might have been built with the same components and how some other intervention might have fit that problem in such a way that it would have led to the same solution or a different but equally successful solution” (ibid, p 64). Additionally in Keys de Shazer refers to ‘fitting’ in another, slightly different way when he writes “… any intervention into a (problem) pattern based on the (client’s)  . . . exceptions to that pattern will have the benefit of fitting, since it is part of the (client’s) reality (it is after all, their solution)” (ibisd, p 34). In Clues de Shazer extends the idea of fit and offers a typology of client-worker relationship types, visitor-type, complainant-type, and customer-type relationships the purpose of which is to help the therapist to respond to the client in a way that fits the manner in which each client presents. And indeed the BRIEFER programme, constructed as a ‘if the client does this then do that’ sort of flowchart or algorithm which lies at the heart of Clues is an attempt to fit with the client, taking account of the client’s responses. However over the years the BRIEF team has let go of the idea of ‘tasks’, Skeleton or other, and has abandoned the visitor, complainant, customer distinction choosing to assume that every client is a customer for something, so how does the concept of ‘Fit’ inform our work now?

What Solution Focused Practitioners essentially do is ask questions. Of course the questions that we ask are somewhat strange. We don’t ask questions to find out about our clients, we are not attempting to understand what is going on for them, we are not figuring our clients out. Our questions are not informed by curiosity in the normal sense of the word. Our questions are better thought of as invitations to our clients, as interventions. Our questions invite the client to direct their attention, their focus, in a particular way and what makes a difference is the client hearing their own answer. Solution Focused questions are not ‘for’ the worker, they are ‘for’ the client. A good question is a question which prompts the client to hear themselves say something different in response and in particular something different that makes a difference. Indeed an answer that the client never says out loud, a silent answer, could still make a difference even though the worker has heard nothing. So when we hear the client’s answer what we are doing is working out how to respond, seeking to formulate our next ‘good’ question and in seeking to formulate the next question there are three considerations that we bear in mind. The question will be Solution Focused, it will take account of the client’s response and it will build on the client’s answer. Let us not take too long trying to specify the nature of Solution Focused questions – in general Solution Focused questions will either be future focused, eliciting descriptions of the future that the client wants, their preferred future (Ratner et al., 2012), or past and present focused, centring on what the client has done or is doing that fits (there’s that word again) with the preferred future that the client has described.

Building on the client’s last answer when constructing our next question involves us in paying careful attention to what the client says and listening for opportunities, for hooks, on to which we can attach our next question. If the client says, for example, ‘I wouldn’t be so miserable – I’d be looking forward to the day ahead’ most Solution Focused practitioners would frame a response around ‘looking forward to the day ahead’ and there are any number of possible questions that we could ask. ‘So what difference would it make to you if you were looking forward to the day ahead?’, ‘so how would you know that you were looking forward . . . ?’, ‘so who would be the first person to notice that you were looking forward . . .?’, ‘so what is the first thing that you might do were you to wake up looking forward to the day ahead?’. Building our next questions, using the client’s own words heightens the likelihood that the client will experience us listening to them and centring them in the conversation. We are cooperating with the client. However our questions do more than merely building with the clients own words. We take account of the client’s response and it is here, for me, that we find the core element of ‘fitting’ with our clients.

Let us return to our example of the client who says “I wouldn’t be so miserable – I’d be looking forward to the day ahead”. The worker is likely to choose to pick up on ‘looking forward to the day ahead’ and to drop the word ‘miserable’ in their next question. However if the client responds to that question by bringing the word ‘miserable’ back the worker understands that too big a jump has been asked of the client and that smaller steps will need to be taken. Tom Andersen, the Norwegian Systemic Therapist (somewhere) states that our questions need to be close enough to the client’s position to make sense, to be answerable, and distant enough from the client’s position in order to create the possibility of something new in the answering (1). Close enough and distant enough – that is the balance for which we search. So if the client brings the word ‘miserable’ back into the conversation then we need to take their instruction. Perhaps more acknowledgement will be necessary ‘I’m sorry I hadn’t realised just how tough things have been so how could you know that you weren’t so miserable and were looking forward to the day – even a little’. Adding the ‘even a little’ at the end of the question, re-including the word ‘miserable’ and starting with an apology and recognition are all likely to make our question easier for the client to answer. The question that we are asking now ‘fits’ better and in reaching ‘fit’ the question becomes answerable.

It is therefore in my view true that at the heart of the Solution Focused approach lie answers, the client’s answers that are invited by the worker’s questions. Solution focused workers ask questions and yet there is more to the approach than merely a list of pre-scripted questions. The questions have to fit because if they do not fit they are unlikely to be answerable. The Solution Focused worker is constantly adjusting, adjusting the words that are being used, adjusting their tone (George, 2024), adjusting volume, adjusting body posture (probably without noticing) in order to achieve fit. After all, as de Shazer wrote “If (the client) cannot answer (the question), the therapist has either asked the wrong question or asked it in the wrong way” (de Shazer et al. 2007, p 82). Clients must be ‘taken account of’ and the best way that they can know that is when the worker asks questions that evidence the loving care and attention that the worker is taking to ‘fit’ the client. Solution Focused conversations are indeed an art form with our ‘fitting with the client’ at their heart.

1. This is all that I can locate from Andersen that fits with the idea that I am drawing upon “If people are exposed to the usual they tend to stay the same. If they meet something un-usual, this un-usual might induce a change. If the new they meet is very (too) unusual, they close up.” Unfortunately I do not have a source for this either.

 

 

de Shazer, Steve (1982) Patterns of Brief Therapy: An Eco-systemic Approach. New York: Guildford.
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, 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, Evan (2024) Tone Matching  https://www.brief.org.uk/blog/%E2%80%98tone-matching.%E2%80%99.html
Nylund, David and Corsiglia, Victor (1994) Becoming Solution-Focused Forced in Brief Therapy: Remembering Something Important We Already Knew  Journal of Systemic Therapies  Volume 13 Issue 1  5 – 12
Ratner, H., George, E., Iveson, C.  (2012) Solution Focused Brief Therapy: 100 Key Ideas and Techniques.  London: Routledge   

 

 

Evan George
London
10^th November 2024