The Expert Position Scares Me…

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gndaR5aKP0[/embedyt]

[Sassy_Social_Share]

There have been many recent stories in the news lately reminding me that the expert position can be dangerous, even harmful. This video is about why that matters and why the Solution Focused Approach does it differently.

---

Recent news has has reminded me why I fell in love with solution focused brief therapy and why I still love solution focused brief therapy and why I still practice solution focused brief therapy with the enthusiasm and passion that I do. But in order to understand that, I want to take you back to the very beginning of my career because you know way back then like what got me into this field and what really got me enthused was I wanted to be a really good and effective therapists and I was working in a place and being educated in an environment where problem focused types of therapy, where the dominant ways of doing this work, most predominantly cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT and I got trained to do CBT and I worked really hard to be the very best cognitive behavioral therapist I could be. I wanted to learn how to do a really good assessment that would target and helped me understand the client problems and the symptoms helped me be really good at diagnosing so that I could develop an intervention that would make a difference in the client’s life.

The reason I thought that way is because I was working in that environment and people were telling me that the type of therapy you needed to do with CBT, because CBT is one that research says is effective. So I bought into that and I tried as hard as I could to be the best cognitive behavioral therapist I can be. But then I learned an incredibly valuable lesson from my clients. What I learned was no matter how hard I worked, no matter how hard I tried to understand my client experience and develop an intervention that we make a difference for them. I just couldn’t, I couldn’t understand what it’s like to be that person with that problem. I also learned that no matter how much I tried to develop an intervention to make a difference in my clients’ life, that people didn’t always respond well to being told what to do and it led to me having a bunch of problems getting stuck in therapy.

And I’m sure if you watch this video of some of this might sound familiar to you, but back then I would do therapy with like know family or a couple and using CBT. And I would say so after sitting with you and talking to you, here’s what I think you should do. And the family would say, Oh, we’ve already tried that. It won’t work. Or, um, I don’t think we’re going to be able to do that for these reasons. So we had all these barriers. I remember going to my supervision meetings and my supervisor would tell me, you have to talk about objections to barriers to help them overcome those barriers. And it was all about trying to get clients to comply. And then I met solution focused brief therapy and I learned about this process that invited the clients to tell me what they wanted.

And then it’s my job to ask them questions to help them achieve that. So it’s my job to involve them in the process, in fact, to be led by them and the process. And then all of those things went away. You know, I used to be so frustrated when I was doing card behavioral therapy because I would, I would tell these kinds of, do these things that I thought were really good ideas and make a difference in their life. And they’d come back for a followup session and they tell me, I forgot what we were supposed to talk, what we were supposed to do, or I can’t remember what the assignment was. And then I switched to involving people in the process. And there was this amazing thing that happened because all of those things went away. And I realized that like people don’t want to be told what to want to do.

They want to be involved in the process. In fact, they want to lead the process. So recently when I was watching the news and I saw a story where 25 men made a legal decision on what women can do with their bodies, and there was this huge uproar in the news and on social media and people like, you know, I’m on Facebook and I’m seeing people I’m friends with that don’t understand why there’s so much rage. And I just want to say because women didn’t have a seat at that table, like 25 men made a decision on what women could do with their bodies and then there was no woman involved in that law being passed. And it makes me realize like, wow, this solution focus stuff is so important and probably has ramifications far beyond the therapy realm, but I’m not sure that people really understand how important representation is and I and in representations in a dignified way where we need to let people lead the conversation that are relevant to the conversation.

Instead of us trying to understand their process and develop an intervention that will make a difference in their lives. I think society would be better served if we were operating with that premise. And I think, I think maybe asking people what are your best hopes from this thing is a much more important questions just doing it in therapy. So, um, I hope that somebody would watch this video and just take this lesson away. That if you want to make a difference in the world, you want to make a difference for people. We have to be led by the people that are relevant to the problem with the led by the people that are relevant to the topic and not try to not try to fix things for them because people don’t want to be fixed. Uh, they want to be, they want to be leaders. Um, so I hope that as a society we can do better than that. And I hope that, um, you guys watching this will understand that asking about the desired outcome is so important that we need to understand the process far beyond therapy cause involving people is how change actually happens. So thank you for watching this video, really sensitive topic, but I really appreciate you took the time to watch it. Please like this video, share it if you, if you are so kind and I’ll see you in the next video.