STOP ASKING the MIRACLE QUESTION (Use This Instead…)

https://youtu.be/Fod6eKZuXgY

This is not clickbait, I really don’t use the traditional Miracle Question, for TWO BIG REASONS, because it actually gets in the way of client progress. Let’s talk about what we can use instead, to move us forward during therapy.

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Let’s talk about ‘The Miracle Question’ and why you need to stop asking it.

When I was originally trained to do Solution Focused Brief Therapy, ‘The Miracle Question’ sounded like this, “Suppose you went to sleep one night, and a miracle happened that solved all of your problems. When you woke up the following day, what would you notice?” But there were two huge problems with asking the question in that exact way.

Number one, I don’t know if you noticed, but that’s a question about the problem. In Solution Focused Brief Therapy we’re not asking our clients to think about the problem. We’re asking our clients think about the outcome. So if I ask my clients, “Suppose a miracle happened that solved all of your problems, they have to think about their problem to think about that problem then being solved.

So what do we do instead of that?

Well, we ask the question, not about the absence of the problem, but instead, about the presence of the desired outcome. So [when] someone tells me, the outcome they want from therapy is they want to be happy. Instead of saying, “Suppose you went sleep one night and a miracle happened that solved all of your problems that are causing your [lack of] happiness were gone,” I’m going to say, “Suppose you went sleep at night and your happiness became present, what’s the first thing you would notice?”

The second big problem is, in order for a client to experience that question is answerable, they have to envision themselves going to sleep. And I cannot tell you over the years how many times I would say to a client, I even have some on recordings so I can prove it. I can show you. I’ll ask a client, “Suppose you went to sleep one night…”, and the client will interrupt me and say, “I’m not really sleeping these days.” Because if you have an anxiety disorder, if you have a stress issue, if you have bipolar disorder associated with mania, if you have certain levels of drug addiction, sleep is not something you’re gonna click with.

So it is our responsibility to ask answerable questions. When I say something like, “Suppose you went to sleep one night…”, to a certain sect of people, a large group of people, I might add, sleep is not a given.

So if I say, “Suppose you went sleep at night…”, I’m not asking the question in the reality in which they exist. So in order for me to ask the question as it was originally taught to me, I have to (A), invite my clients to think about a problem which I don’t think is the best way to go about therapy, and (B), I have to ask my client to buy into a reality that may not reflect the reality that they’re currently living in, making the question harder to answer.

So what do we do now? Now we do it in two steps.

It starts off by asking, “What are your best hopes from our talking?” And once we have an answer to that, for example, let’s say ‘happy’. The client says [they] want to be happy. Then I’m going to say, “Suppose at some point tomorrow you notice happiness is coming to your life…”

So do you see? I didn’t ask, “Suppose you went to sleep one night…” I didn’t even say a miracle happened. I just said, “Suppose at some point tomorrow happiness came into your life, what’s the first clue you would get that happiness happened?” And then they’d say, “I’d wake up smiling.” What time would it be? “7:00am” What’s the first clue that would tell you this is going to be a morning where you’re about to smile even before the smile happened?

And you ask them to describe the presence in as much detail as possible of the outcome. And if you can do that, that is a much more efficient, that is a much more effective and that is a much more Solution Focused Brief Therapy congruent way to ask “The Miracle Question.”

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