J is for ‘Just a Bunch of Talk’

Steve de Shazer started visiting the BRIEF team in London in 1990 and did so regularly until shortly before his death in 2005. Over those years he delivered a number of large conference presentations for BRIEF, he led smaller workshops, he consulted to our work and he ‘showed off’ his latest thinking through a series of clinical demonstrations with BRIEF clients. These visits were enormously influential for us and I would always have assumed that I had paid careful attention to what Steve said – but perhaps not!

For many years I have cited de Shazer describing therapy as ‘just a bunch of talk’ (and maybe at some point he did) but when I was checking the reference what I find instead, at the beginning of chapter one of Words were Originally Magic (de Shazer, 1994), is this “When I first started to talk and write about therapy as a “conversation” (de Shazer, 1988) and as “nothing but a bunch of talk” (de Shazer, 1989) . . . “. Oh dear! So in all probability I either misheard or misremembered or more likely changed de Shazer’s words to suit myself, to suit my thinking, to fit with my preferences. He may never have used the word ‘just’ even if he clearly did use the phrase ‘bunch of talk’. So how did the word ‘just’ creep in? What was it that I liked about this word such that I substituted it for what de Shazer, in all probability, said since he was after all a man who knew the importance of words and if he meant ‘just’ he would have said ‘just’?

For me defining therapy as ‘just a bunch of talk’ resonated. The phrase has a pleasing colloquiality which reminds me, in its tone, of the three rules of Solution Focused Brief Therapy as set out by de Shazer on many occasions in his early presentations:

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

If it works do more of it.

If it doesn’t work do something different.

The homespun language, and the simplicity, tell us that therapy is not complex, that it is an everyday affair, that it is commonsense. And ‘just a bunch of talk’ points us in the same direction. The words remind me that we therapists should not take ourselves too seriously. Reducing therapy to something that only highly (and lengthily) trained people can do, in special settings, with very particular requirements such that many potential clients will be adjudged unfit, turns therapy into a ‘minority sport’ of relevance to the few rather than the many. But if we think of therapy as ‘just a bunch of talk’ then what are we reminded of? Well pretty well all of us can talk and indeed pretty well anyone can learn to talk in the very particular way that the Solution Focused approach requires. Of course it is very disciplined, it is very focused, it does require us to be able to create a context within which the client will want to answer the questions that we ask of them, but in the end it is ‘just a bunch of talk’. Let’s not get above (I was going to say something else) ourselves. We Solution Focused Therapists have no answers, we know none of the really important things. We do not know how people should live, we do not know how people should solve their problems, we don’t know about people, we don’t understand people. Therapy is ‘just a bunch of talk’. All that we do is ask questions and it is the client’s answers, the things that they hear themselves saying to themselves in response, that make the difference. Of course when a client comes to see us depressed (for example) and after some talking leaves telling us that things are better we might forget de Shazer’s injunction ‘the client has the magic and we’d better do something small and let the magic operate’ (1990), indeed we might start thinking in terms of curing or treating or healing. And at those moments if the phrase ‘just a bunch to talk’ is not sufficient to ground me, to bring me back to earth then I remind myself that BRIEF has trained children down to the age of 10 to do what we do! Remembering that always does the trick.

So for me the word 'just' represents part of a demystification of the therapeutic process, a step in the direction of accessibility both for client and for worker. I can only hope that Steve would forgive the misremembering of his words.

de Shazer, S. (1989) Therapy is nothing but a bunch of talk. Paper presented at Social Work Symposium, Poughkeesie, New York.

de Shazer , S. (1990) Learning Edge. AAMFT tape

de Shazer, Steve (1994) Words were Originally Magic. New York: Norton.

Evan George

London

05 January 2025.