How Therapy can Heal by Reflecting on The Past

https://youtu.be/vhncExThEKk

A few days ago I visited somewhere iconic that really made me reflect upon a fond time when I was younger, and it had me thinking about how SFBT uses time travel to trigger healing by visiting the past and even the future. Let’s talk about it more on today’s episode!

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Do you want to know what makes Solution Focused Brief Therapy so impactful, so powerful, so transformative, almost instantaneously, in a very quick amount of time? It’s that Solution Focused Brief Therapy, it’s almost like verbally putting yourself in a time machine.

What we do with Solution Focused Brief Therapy questions is we ask people about the presence of their desired outcome, either in the past, present or future. And the cool thing is, in order to engage your brain in that kind of description, you have to kind of experience the thing that you’re describing.

So if you’re talking about a past success or something wonderful that happened in the past, or some resource that was present for you in the past, you kind of start to relive that. And that happens to all of us. All, all of us actually do this. We just might not be aware that we do it.

How many of you have been driving around and then a song comes on that you used to really like from years ago, and you start remembering things you didn’t otherwise remember. The person you were dating at the time, the home you lived at the time. It just kind of takes you back.

Or sometimes, like when I’m talking about my past athletic successes, I kind of feel energetic, almost as if my brain thinks my body can still perform in that way.

Now, if you’ve noticed, I’m standing in front of a very iconic building. And I’m betting some of you, the whole time I’ve been talking, you’re looking at that building, you’ve been thinking, “Where do I know that building from?” Or those of you who immediately recognize that building, you’ve been thinking to yourself, “Oh, that’s where Karate Kid lived when he moved from New Jersey in the beginning of the movie, all the way to L.A., all the way to California.

This is the apartment where they shot that, the South Seas apartment. You guys remember the beginning of the movie when he was walking up with his bike and he had a suitcase on one of the handlebars, and he kicked the door, and it knocked the guy on the other side of the door over. That door back then was a wooden door. Now it’s metal door. But this is the building.

And how many of you, when you think about Karate Kid, you just remember what it was like to be, in my case, a child watching that movie. You remember the home you lived in at that time? I remember, and I hadn’t thought about this in forever, but just walking up and looking at this building, I remember.

I saw it in the early 80s when it came out, a buddy of mine living in Waltham, Massachusetts, had a birthday party, and the birthday party was at a movie theater in Dedham, Massachusetts. I hadn’t thought about all of those details until I saw this. And even though it’s not verbal, it’s visual, it kind of put me in a visual time machine.

That’s what Solution Focused Brief Therapy does verbally. We can ask people about the presence of things, and their brains shift and transform. Literally, you could measure that if you did a brain scan as people were having these conversations.

So why does Solution Focused Brief Therapy work so much? Because it’s like going back in a time machine, or going into the future in a time machine, and that is a very powerful way to make change happen.