I Surprised a Room Full of Therapists with this BOLD CLAIM!

One of the most exciting things about my life is I never really know where I’m going to end up, or who I’m going to meet. And this week, my life took me to southern Kentucky. I’m in a place called London, Kentucky, which kind of feels to me like in the middle of nowhere. And I came here to give a lecture about Solution Focused Brief Therapy to an organization of psychotherapists. And it was really, really cool. But I said something that triggered the room.

What I said was, Solution Focused Brief Therapy is an approach that can help any client with any problem. And people are like, “What? There’s no such thing as a cookie cutter approach.” Or, “That’s not how I was trained.” Because most of us were trained that it is our job to figure out what problem the client has, and then match a clinical approach to that problem.

So when a client comes in and they’re like, “I struggle with depression.” Then we start thinking, “Okay, so what approach is the best approach to use with depression?” But here’s the thing, that is not the best way to go about doing the job of psychotherapy.
In fact, there is no research whatsoever supporting that that’s how we should do psychotherapy. However, there is a ton of research supporting that when you have fidelity and mastery of an approach, your clients are significantly likely to get better.

And specifically, why would I advocate for you guys to master and really understand Solution Focused Brief Therapy? Because this is not an approach dependent upon the client problem. So the way Solution Focused Brief Therapy works is we start by focusing on the client outcome. And we do that by asking, “What are your best hopes from our talking?” That’s our way of saying, “What difference would you like this therapy to make in your life, that focuses the session on the outcome?” And Solution Focused Brief Therapy is an approach that focuses on that kind of outcome instead of the problem.

So why is it so effective regardless of the problem? And it’s because every single client has an outcome regardless of what their problem might be. And this is an approach that wants to know, what’s that outcome? And then we go about moving life in that direction the way that we do it.

I think people get triggered because I think they, even though I said “Helping any client with any problem.” I think they hear me saying, helping all clients, which is not true. No therapist can help all clients, but that’s based on the individual that’s sitting in front of you. That has nothing to do with the category of problem that they brought to therapy.

Now, this is a massive departure, massive departure on how most of us are trained. But when you think about it, it’s true. When you think about it, it’s absolutely true. When a client comes into your office, and let’s say they said they had a problem and the problem was a complex trauma, for example, you wouldn’t say that client like, “Oh, that one’s too big of a problem. We can’t really help you.” That’s not what we would do.

And even further, when you were in graduate school, and you were studying Freud, Jung, Adler and all these people, which one of them said, “When I’m working with a client who has X, Y or Z problem, I change my approach and I do a different approach.”? None of them. None of them. Because all of the gurus recognize that fidelity is actually how you accomplish change.

So I thought it was important to share this message because I really want to confront this idea. Even though it’s a common idea in our field, it doesn’t make it an accurate or a good idea. And I want to address it.

I do a training frequently about this. In fact, if you’re watching this, very soon after I released it, I have a training coming up. I’ll put the link in the description for you guys to sign up. But this is a really, really important concept. Not only like whether or not you do Solution Focused Brief Therapy or not, which obviously I hope that you do like that work.

But I want you to understand that the best way that you can accomplish change consistently with your clients is actually all about fidelity in your work. It’s all about the connection you form with your client, and it absolutely has nothing to do with the problem.