Every Therapist NEEDS TO BELIEVE THIS

This one belief is KEY when doing work with clients that feel like they don’t really have many resources to change their lives, and I’m going to show you how to use this belief to increase their hope and success!

I’m going to tell you the one belief you have to have in order to be successful when you’re using Solution Focused Brief Therapy with your clients.
Now therapy can be a complicated thing and we learn all kinds of things about theory and about change and about how we create change and about what makes change happen and all of those things. But you have to have this one foundational belief if you want to use Solution Focused Brief Therapy to make your clients change. And that one foundational belief is…
“My client’s resources are enough.”
That’s it.
That one foundational belief is that my clients resources are enough to help them create change in their lives.
I was doing some teaching today. I was teaching a group in New York state. They worked at an HIV clinic. And I asked them at the beginning of the training, what do you hope to achieve from being at this training? What do you want to get from being here?
It’s a question I start almost every single one of my teachings with. And they said all kinds of things like I want to be more confident with this approach, I want to learn more about it. And one person said, I want you to show us how to give tools to our clients. And I had to say to that person like, I’m actually not going to teach you that. Your clients have all of the tools they need to be successful.
But our field trains us to think that our clients are actually lacking. And it’s our job to give them something that they need. But the truth is the clients have everything they need. Some of them don’t know it, some of them aren’t aware of it, some of them don’t know. They haven’t lived in an environment where anybody lifted them up, built them up, pointed out their strengths, talents, resources.
So it’s our job to help the client become more aware of their amazing and remarkable skills and not so over focused on their problems and their flaws.
Because here’s the truth about being a human is most of us are far more aware of our flaws and the thing that make us imperfect than we are about our brilliances and the things that make us remarkable.
So if you’re going to do Solution Focused Brief Therapy well, it has to come from that place of your solid hardcore belief that my clients resources are enough.
If you can believe that, then the rest of Solution Focused Brief Therapy grows from there. If you don’t hold on to that belief, then you’re going to start not believing your client’s ability to change. You’re going to start not believing your own ability to work with the client. You’re gonna lose track of that thing that makes therapy work.
So the next time you’re gonna work with a client and they walk into your office, they show up in your Zoom room or however it is you see them… the next time, before you do anything else, you start thinking, oh, what’s wrong with this client? And what approach should I use, and how should I diagnose them? What assessment tool? I want you to first remind yourself they came in with the problem, but they also came in with enough resources to solve that problem.
Because therapists, we don’t give our clients tools. We ignite them in them. Like, we don’t tell our clients what to do. We don’t give our clients these things. We inspire them in themselves so that they can start using what was once lying dormant in them.
That’s how change happens.
That’s the number one belief in using Solution Focused Brief Therapy. And if you want to really use this approach effectively, it has to start there.
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