Is SFBT Effective for Everyone? Featuring Chris Iveson

I just spent a couple of days in London with Chris Iveson, who I believe is the greatest Solution Focused Brief Therapist who ever lived.

We took lots of walks. He’s been practicing Solution Focused Brief Therapy since 1989. I was twelve years old then. I turned 13 in the year 1989. And as we were going for walks, we talked about the evolution of this approach.

We talked about where Solution Focused Brief Therapy was when he came to it, where it was when I met him in 2008, where he has seen me take it, and where we hope it goes beyond.

And one of the things that came up as we were talking was this idea of, what kind of clients do you use Solution Focused Brief Therapy with, or not?

There’s an interesting thing, that when we do research and we are using Solution Focused Brief Therapy, 80% of clients claim that it was effective and beneficial to them. 80%, that’s an incredibly high rate.

There was a group in Spain, a group of researchers, that wanted to take the 20% where it wasn’t effective and see if they could find out why. Like, what is it about this group? Is there a particular problem that it doesn’t work with? Is there a particular client type that it doesn’t work with? Is there a particular sort of issue that it doesn’t work with? And this group has been researching this for lots of years, and they found… I’m not gonna tell you, I’m gonna let Chris tell you….

Chris Iveson: Well, I would see anybody, in fact, for over 30 years of seeing clients, most of them referred by public sector professionals (who we see without charge), and we’ve never turned anybody away.

And though we don’t succeed with everybody, we don’t know why we don’t succeed. Our colleagues in Spain, at the University of Salamanca, have spent years trying to research the causes of Solution Focused failure, and they’ve never found a reason. So I say to my clients, “Look, there’s an 80% chance that things will improve, 20% chance you’ve come to the wrong place, it’s worth a go.”