Therapists, Are You Practicing Your Professor’s Biases?

You need to stop listening to your supervisors in your office. Need to disavow all the stuff you were taught by your professors in graduate school. If you’re in graduate school, you need to stop listening to your professors right now. And I’m going to tell you why.

When I was in graduate school, I really, really wanted to learn how to be the best psychotherapist that I could possibly be. I wanted to get good at this job because I wanted to help people. That was my mission. That was my purpose. That’s why I went there. I didn’t go there to get rich. I didn’t go there to get famous. I went there because I had a troubled background and I wanted to help other people who had troubling family dynamics and wounds they needed to heal from.

And I started noticing that a lot of my professors were pushing their agenda. I had one professor who really wanted me to do Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and he would talk badly about all of the other approaches, including Solution Focused Brief Therapy.

I had another professor who wanted me to do a Bowenian type of work and she would talk badly about other kind of approaches, including Solution Focused Brief Therapy.

When I decided that Solution Focused Brief Therapy was the way that I wanted to work, it was really because this was the approach that spoke to me. I didn’t anticipate that I’d one day be the leader of that field. I just was sitting in the student chair. I was listening to Strategic Family Therapy and Structural Family Therapy and CBT and Adlerian and Freudian and Jungian. Listen, all that stuff. And I kept thinking, which one of these can I do and which one of these sounds fun to do? Which one of these fits with the kind of person I want to be?

And Solution Focused Brief Therapy jumped out at me. It was like, this is the one that really seems to fit with how I want to be doing things. So that’s why I did it.

And then I remember telling all my professors, especially when I got to the practicum, I’m going to start using Solution Focused Brief Therapy. I want to be good at it. And they would try to talk me out of it and they would say things like, it’s not evidence based. It doesn’t create long term change. It doesn’t work with clients who have really serious problems.

And I was so conflicted because I believed them, I listened to them. And then when I got my placement, I got my internship placement at a community mental health agency. My supervisor, everybody at that agency was supposed to do Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. And my supervisor, she was like, you can’t do Solution Focused Brief Therapy here because we only do evidence based things.

By that time I knew some people in the field and I reached out to them and I said, “Hey, my job is telling me that I cannot do Solution Focused Brief Therapy because it’s not evidence based.” And they were like, “Oh, yes it is.” And then they gave me research and evidence. They gave me the proof that it was evidence based. And I brought it to them and then they said, “Well, you still can’t do it.”

And I was like, “Well, wait, you said I can do anything that’s evidence based. I just demonstrated to you this is evidence based.” And they still wouldn’t let me do it.

And I realized that sometimes these professionals have biases that cause them to try to convince you that something that’s true is not true. And it drives me nuts because that was over 20 years ago. And 20 years later, when I do lectures and when I do talks, I still have people telling me, “My professor told me it doesn’t work. My professor told me it doesn’t create long term change. My professor told me it’s not evidence based.”
And I’m like, whoa, this is craziness. Now look, I have a bias too. I really like Solution Focused Brief Therapy. But I’m not trying to convince you to do it. I’m just trying to convince you that the truth is, it is evidence based, it does create long term change. And there’s tons of research about how this works with all kinds of problems.

We need to stop allowing people to use their biases to manipulate us into other things. And instead talk to yourself and listen to your heart.

I think all the way back to 2005 when this was being dump trucked onto me. If I had listened to those people and just done what my professors wanted me to do because of their biases, so many things wouldn’t have happened in my life.

I think the greatest thing ever did in my life was follow my heart.

So I encourage you to follow yours. But when it comes to Solution Focused Brief Therapy, I simply want you to know the truth. And the truth is there’s a mountain of research. And this approach was actually started from a research perspective by Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg, Elam Nunnally, Eve Lipchick and their team of professionals that were working with them in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And it’s been 50 years and they’re still doing research.

There are multiple meta analysis demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach across problems.

I just want you to accept the truth and not let anybody mislead you about this way of working.

Now I happen to believe that Solution Focused Brief Therapy is the single most misunderstood form of therapy, and that’s because it works differently than the problem focused way we typically go about solving problems.

But different does not mean ineffective.

But when people don’t understand something, they tend to want to discredit it. Now I don’t fault people for not understanding it. You understand what you understand. But I will fault people for trying to discredit using false claims.

So I literally created this channel 8 years ago just to add some clarity to the truth, and evidence, what Solution Focused Brief Therapy is. So I hope you benefited from it.
But I thought it was time for me to make this video and just boldly say, stop listening to people who are using their biases to lie to you about how these approaches work.