Solution Focused Brief Therapy Association

I want to begin the first of these columns by thanking all my colleagues from the SFBTA Founders group for giving me this opportunity.

I thought I would begin by answering some questions about my own history and experiences with the Solution-Focused Brief Therapy approach and invite you (dear reader) to send me your own answers or responses to any or all of these questions. I will then share your responses in future columns. You can email them to me at yvonnedolan@yahoo.net. Please send them as an attachment so they can be easily forwarded to our web editor. (Depending on the setting where you learned SFBT, you may or may not be aware that Steve de Shazer was an excellent cook. Just for fun, and as a little advance thank you for what I hope will be your contribution to this column, I have included Steve de Shazer’s personal recipe for Sicilian Spaghetti Sauce at the end of this column.

1. From whom did you learn the Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) approach, in what setting were you working at the time, and what first appealed to you about the SF approach?

2. In what ways has the SFBT approach effected your work with clients and colleagues, and what impact (if any) has it had on your personal life?

3. From your viewpoint, what aspects of the SF approach contribute most significantly in it’s effectiveness in therapeutic, supervisory, and/or organizational settings?

From whom did you learn the Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) approach, in what setting were you working at the time, and what first appealed to you about the SF approach?

I first learned about the Milwaukee Brief Therapy Center and the approach that eventually became known as Solution-Focused Brief Therapy in the early 1980’s when I was working at a Shelter in New Orleans for runaway and homeless youth, aged 13-18. We were funded by church groups and charities and had so little money that we were only able to house, feed, and counsel each child for 3 weeks, so we desperately needed an effective short term therapy approach that would allow us to help these children. At the time, it was assumed that brief therapy was only suitable for “minor” problems and not “serious” issues like childhood sexual abuse, assault, severe neglect, trauma, and loss.

Many of the children I worked with had been sexually abused; most had been emotionally abused, neglected, and battered. In most cases one or both parents were missing, in jail, or incapacitated by severe drug and alcohol abuse or chronic mental health problems. Trained in Strategic therapy and Ericksonian psychotherapy, I was naturally curious about new developments in Brief Therapy, and so I began reading articles and issues of de Shazer’s newsletter, The Underground Railroad. What I read was compelling and made me dare to hope that I COULD help these children at least to some degree despite the extremely limited financial resources of the program where I worked.

In 1983 I phoned the Milwaukee Brief Therapy Center (BFTC) to arrange a visit there. I traveled to BFTC that summer and spent several days behind the mirror observing therapy sessions with my then partner, Charlie Johnson. We were staying in Insoo and Steve’s guest room, and every evening we all sat around and talked about brief therapy, and the particular sessions we had observed that day. I was so fascinated by what I was seeing and asked Insoo and Steve question after question.

I particularly remember Steve’s view that “how” was a more useful question than “why” questions and also his background in Philosophy, particularly Formal Logic, the work of Derrida, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Kant and the fact that he saw these thinkers as being relevant to the practice of psychotherapy. This visit lasted for a week and by the time we left, we had all become friends.

Insoo was hospitable and warm, and demonstrated a great sense of humor. Tacked up on the wall of the observation room she had pinned up hand written examples of some of the more outrageous problem descriptions BFTC clients had given over the years. Typically, these problem descriptions defied conventional logic yet painted a vivid, meaningful picture of the client’s experience as seen through their own eyes. It was hard to read one without smiling and yet also feeling moved and compassionate towards the person. Even now (nearly 30 years later) I still remember one that read: “My mother’s apron strings are 300 miles long.”

Insoo was very passionate about her work and did not seem to mind talking about BFTC over dinner even after spending one of her typical long days at the clinic. I remember on that first visit noting that she left the house an hour before any one else was up every morning except Sunday and spent an hour or more reviewing case session videos at BFTC before any one else arrived. Steve, too was an early riser, but not as early as Insoo. (It would be another 15 years before I would manage to be the first one up to make the coffee during a visit to their place or mine.)

Eve Lipchik was working closely with Insoo and Steve at that time, and I really enjoyed observing several of her sessions. She was (still is, no doubt) a brilliant clinician. I remember being very impressed by her intellect as well as by the very warm, gentle way she interacted with clients and colleagues and also the very precise way she had of using language during her sessions.

There was a lot of therapy going on at BFTC those days. Often 2 or more sessions were going on simultaneously, and there was one or more team members observing each session. For me, observing live sessions from behind the mirror at BFTC was a revelatory experience. I felt that I had finally “come home” to a therapeutic approach and culture that embodied my core beliefs about the nature of therapeutic change, the significance of demonstrating respect as well as empathy to both clients and colleagues, and the necessity of making the approach fit the client’s needs rather than vice versa.

I was quite taken aback however when on the second day of our visit, Insoo firmly told us that our observation period was over and we were now expected to be active team members. We both did our best, and apparently Steve and Insoo thought we did okay because they afterward invited us to come back to BFTC whenever we were able and also kindly offered to come and sit behind the mirror on the Brief Therapy team we were planning to start in Denver.

We subsequently returned home and started a team[1] based in large part on what we had learned that week at BFTC. Steve and Insoo often visited our team in Denver, and we became close. They visited several times a year and always spent at least one afternoon or evening with our team behind the mirror; the team subsequently became the Solution Group, and it continues to this day. [2] In a tradition that lasted right up until their respective deaths, Insoo, Steve, and I talked about the approach while taking daily walks, sharing a meal, and continued on while Steve and I helped each other cook, and while Insoo and I did the dishes. Steve and I exchanged many emails over the years, but the longer ones were usually about cooking rather than therapy.

Although Steve and Insoo refused to let us pay for their consultation, we did our best to reciprocate by sponsoring several workshops for them. These events along with visits to BFTC, and later assisting with their trainings at (since 1993) afforded me with a lot of invaluable “hands-on” training and ongoing experience in the evolution of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy.

The atmosphere at BFTC back in the 1980’s was very special; unlike anything I have witnessed any where else. In addition to Steve, Insoo, and Eve, I remember meeting other members of their “team” during this and other visits including Kate Kowalski, Michele Weiner-Davis, Wally Gingerich, Gale Miller, Elam Nunnally, Jim Kral, and much later, Larry Hopwood. Jane Peller and John Walters were also frequent visitors in later years. I had met Scott Miller in the early 1990’s just prior to his 3 years at BFTC.

As the years went by, more and more people came to BFTC from all over the world, and I met many wonderful colleagues there, some of whom include many of the others Founders of the SFBTA. In retrospect, I would say that every person I ever met at BFTC was highly intelligent and shared some common goals. People who came there typically were motivated to discover what questions or behaviors resulted in positive therapeutic changes, wanted to work in a precise yet respectful manner, and were passionately invested in learning to do therapy well. Perhaps this was why they were willing to do the hard work involved in learning a highly disciplined, subtle approach as SFBT. (Oddly, I never met anyone at BFTC who said that their primary goal was shortening the duration of therapy. Although very appealing to managed care companies, for most SF practitioners I have known, the brevity of treatment associated with the approach is typically viewed as an interesting effect of the approach but not as an end in itself. )

The relationships between team members early on (1983 or thereabouts) impressed me at the time as respectful, egalitarian, friendly, and informal. The discussions I heard taking place at BFTC seemed rather extraordinary, quite unlike what I would have expected to hear among the staff at other outpatient mental health clinics or social service agencies at the time.

The topics could range from team members’ straight forward observations of the live sessions they had seen that week; to arguments about the relevance of philosophy, linguistics, strategic therapy, or Batesonian theory; to their ongoing work with clients; to the comparative virtues of various research designs; to the cultural, social, and therapeutic relevance of anthropology and social rituals! The atmosphere between team members seemed extremely non-judgmental, and people managed to be playful at times despite the intellectual rigor of the discussions and the hard work involved in working with such a large and varied clientele.

For example, I remember hearing about the male BFTC team members’ chili making competition organized by Steve. They had blind tastings. I remember seeing a box of imported licorice in the viewing room and was told that Steve de Shazer, Wally Gingerich, and Michele Weiner-Davis shared a special affinity for imported licorice. Team members often took walks together while discussing ideas, and they shared an occasional pizza and beer.

Most significantly (it seemed to me) everyone working on the BFTC team at that time shared a genuine interest in finding out what others thought, and this included the clients whose views were treated with great respect. The clients were considered to possess genuine expertise and knowledge about their lives and what would be necessary to dissolve the problems that brought them in. I remember saying at the time that the atmosphere at BFTC seemed to me to be an “ego free” zone and in retrospect I believe this was largely true.

BFTC was essentially an inner city outpatient clinic, and they saw a very wide range of clients including homeless heroin addicts, severe alcoholics, chronically mentally ill people, multi-problem families who had previously exhausted all the local county social services, highly educated upper income people struggling to make high level career decisions, couples experiencing domestic abuse, children with school problems, parents of children exhibiting problematic behaviors like bed wetting, defiance, etc. They had a policy of working with whoever showed up rather than for example, requesting that the extended whole family come in or that a couple be seen alone. This was considered rather unusual, even radical at the time.

In what ways has the SFBT approach affected your work with clients and colleagues, and what impact (if any) has it had on your personal life?

Clients who have experienced other therapy approaches --- most notably court mandated, often tell me they appreciate that I do not tell them what to do and that I take the time to listen to their perspective before offering practical questions that help them identify what will be needed in order to get the results they want. Just last week one of my clients said, “I really appreciate that you did not try to give me advice!”

My personal life history includes episodes of violent sexual assault, repeated physical and emotional abuse, early childhood loss of a parent, and episodes of elective mutism during grade school. If I had been exposed to only the psychodynamic literature and not had access early on to a collaborative, hope instilling approach like Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, given my early life events, it would have been hard NOT to think of myself as a collection of debilitating symptoms that might appear at any time as a result of those long ago experiences ---- pretty depressing, to say the least! I probably would have thought of myself as “damaged goods” and not felt much hope about living a good life, much less a satisfying, rewarding one like the one I have now enjoyed for many years. Looking at my life from the perspective of SFBT has afforded me the opportunity to forge a self identity based not only on the sum total of painful life experiences but upon the good ones as well as cherished aspirations, goals, longings, and dreams. For me this has been invaluable, and I have never stopped being grateful for the quality of life that developed as a result.

From your viewpoint, what aspects of the SF approach contribute most significantly in it’s effectiveness in therapeutic, supervisory, and/or organizational settings?

I am sure there are many factors, some of which are probably yet to be identified. When done well, the SFBT approach utilizes language with such precision and deliberation that it becomes a highly personalized response specific to each client. The therapist’s responses are carefully calibrated to consistently communicate to the client by asking questions that undeniably indicate that the client is being listened to with great diligence, concentration, and care and that his or her ideas are being considered thoughtfully, respectfully, and appreciatively.

So that was how it all began for me and why I continue to value the SF approach as one of the most effective ways to do good therapy. Please write and tell me your thoughts.

7. Add 4 thighs, skin side down @5min, turn and fry 2-5, turn and fry 3 min, turn and fry 3 min. Remove to paper towel. Once cool, remove skin.

[1] Charlie Johnson and I divorced in 2001, and I have since relocated to the Chicago area. The Denver Solution Group however continues as does Johnson’s ongoing affiliation with it.

[2] I have since moved away from Denver and am now affiliated with the Institute for Solution-Focused Brief Therapy in northwest Indiana near Chicago.

Yvonne Dolan’s Column