Solution-oriented therapy (Insoo Kim Berg, Steve De Shazer)
Many schools of therapy have an underlying trust that people are fundamentally OK. Solution-Oriented Therapy is unique in making that trust the actual method of therapy.
Solution-oriented therapy
When grey clouds fill our minds, we focus on our inadequacies, our failures, our feelings of inner ugliness. And we think of our past as photographic evidence of all this. SOBT does just the opposite. It views the past as a treasure house of evidence that we are OK, we deserve to love ourselves, and can move life forward in the direction we need. Of course many other therapies do this. What makes SOBT unique is to start doing this from the very beginning and to keep on.
For example: Let’s suppose that part way into the first session the client has made some picture of what life would look like in six month’s time if things were going better. Different therapists next explore a thousand different things. A solution-oriented approach would next ask: if 10 on a scale is that it seems easy to reach that future, and zero is that it’s impossible, then where does the client feel themselves to be? A common answer is 3 – 4 out of 10.
If so, a followup question might be: What makes it 3 and not zero? In other words what is already present in the client or their life or their history that is good and gives buoyancy and uplift? – and which if fully drawn on can give more self-trust, safety, self-love and sense of can-do.
Another question could be: If things were starting, merely starting, to get better, what would the client be noticing that makes them realise things are on the edge of getting better? This is subtly worded to avoid the client responding with what they habitually think they need or have to do, as these likely trigger a strong “I can’t.” There’s just a presupposition, things will get better.
Questions like these can be, and alas nowadays often are, delivered as mere impersonal technique. But the originators of SOBT (Insoo Kim Berg in the USA) and the pioneers in the UK (Evan George, Chris Iveson, Harvey Ratner) were and are passionate about people and their potential. They developed SOBT as an affirmation from one human being to another of the client’s potentiality and OK-ness. They made this not the end goal the the therapy, but the starting point and the ongoing methodology.
SOBTs strengths include:
- Highly present and future oriented. Not past dwelling.
- Action oriented
- Emphasises positive self-talk
- A wonderfully respectful, optimistic and empowering philosophy which creates the success of the method
- Flexible. If a teacher has 5 minutes with a pupil, they can do 5 minutes worth of SOBT.
- Forged in social work settings where you get rapid feedback what works.
- Good in organisational and family settings. You can ask couples the same questions as above.
SOBT’s limitations:
- Forged in social work settings where Mrs Jones is struggling to not have her second child taken into care. So far too oriented to action, determination and persistence etc.
- Blinkered focus on behavioural outcomes rather than outcomes of understanding and perspective etc.
- Works only with the immediately visible problem although the real problem may be buried and take many sessions to emerge.
- Dismisses sometimes-needed exploration of the past.
- Dismisses underlying emotional dynamics.
- Highly male action-oriented, lacks understanding of female qualities.
“To love is to recognize; to be loved is to be recognized by the other.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh