Elliott Connie
Founder/PresidentElliott Connie, MA, LPC is a Psychotherapist that practices in Arlington, Texas. He has worked with thousands of individuals, couples, and families applying the solution...
I love practicing Solution Focused Brief Therapy, but this common misconception is probably the thing that frustrates me the most. Let me explain.
There’s one thing above all else that has been my number one pet peeve about using Solution Focused Brief Therapy, or at least the feedback I’ve gotten from my colleagues in the field of psychotherapy about using Solution Focused Brief Therapy. And that one pet peeve is whenever I would tell people that I do this kind of work, oftentimes professionals say to me, “I don’t like Solution Focused Brief Therapy because you ignore the client’s past.”
And that is wildly untrue. That is completely inaccurate. But I understand why people think it.
I’ve seen in certain books where people said Solution Focused Brief Therapy is a future focused approach. And that gives people the idea, because you’re future focused, that you ignore the past, and what the past has done to your client.
Nothing could be further from the truth, though.
Solution Focused Brief Therapy is future focused because life is future focused. Hope lives in the future. Solution Focused Brief Therapy is actually hope focused. But again, hope lives in the future. So that’s where we focus our energy, and that’s where we would like our clients to move.
However, if you ignore the client’s past, then there are two massive things that become problems.
The first one is the past is where the pain lives. That’s where the trauma happened. That’s where the tragedy occurred. So if I ignore their past, then I’m ignoring how they got into the situation they got into, which is going to cause the person to feel ignored, invalidated, or dismissed.
The other thing is in the past is evidence of the client’s heroism. So hope lives in the future, but heroism lives in the past. And heroism also lives in the trauma story. So if someone tells you their trauma story, and they tell you the difficult thing they’ve been through, they tell you the horrible thing that happened, they tell you the awful thing they survived, they’re also telling you simultaneously how they got through it. And that’s the hero journey.
And in Solution Focused Brief Therapy, we always want to be asking…
“But how did you cope and deal with that?”
“How did you get through that thing? Even if you got through battered and bruised, how did you get through it?”
“How did you get through that thing, and make all the mistakes in the world, and then realize you wanted to heal, and help, and get into this therapy practice to start working on yourself?”
All of those things are hero questions, and they highlight the hero that lives within your client.
So in the past, we always want to ask questions that highlight or amplify the client’s greatness. And we can’t do that without honoring their past. So it’s incredibly important that we spend some time mining for gold in your client’s past. And it’s never accurate that we ignore the client’s past, because to do so would be disrespectful, would be dismissive, and cause your client to feel unheard. It’s literally the absence of compassion.
We do want to translate all of those hero lessons into the future, because this is a hope focused approach, and hope lives in the future.
So always remember, Solution Focused Brief Therapy doesn’t ignore anything. But while we’re paying attention to the past, we’re paying attention to a very particular part of the past, and then looking to do something very important with it.
Elliott Connie, MA, LPC is a Psychotherapist that practices in Arlington, Texas. He has worked with thousands of individuals, couples, and families applying the solution focused approach to help them move their lives from the current problems towards their desired futures. As well as being the Founder and President of The Solution Focused Universe, he is recognized around the world speaking at national and international conferences and events throughout the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, South Africa, Russia, Switzerland, England, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Scotland, Holland, Canada, and Asia training practitioners to apply solution focused questions and techniques in their work. He has authored or co-authored 4 books including “The Art of Solution Focused Therapy”, ‘Solution Building in Couples Therapy”, ‘The Solution Focused Marriage’, and ‘Solution-Focused Brief Therapy with Clients Managing Trauma’.
