What is Solution Focused Brief Therapy

https://youtu.be/2DYTMLtKYmw

There is so much misinformation about what SFBT truly is all over the Internet, and it DRIVES ME CRAZY, because I truly love Solution Focused Brief Therapy, and I don’t want anyone to misunderstand what it’s all about ever again. So let’s clear the air and get to the bottom of what SFBT is all about!

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Every single video that I’ve ever seen online about Solution Focused Brief Therapy has been wildly inaccurate and grossly misrepresentative about what this approach is.

[Example 1:) The objective in Solution Focused Therapy is to encourage a client to do something different. So the idea here is that any change is a good change.

[Example 2:) This technique is perfect for people who don’t have a ton of barriers that just want to get straight to the point and want to be done with me in 10 sessions or less.

So I’m going to make this video so that you will know, forever and ever, what Solution Focused Brief Therapy is, and what it isn’t, in the most accurate way possible.

And in case you don’t know, my name is Elliott Connie, and I’ve spent 20 years devoting my entire life to mastering this approach and teaching this approach to others. And if you don’t believe me, look. These are two of my books, two of the most popular books in the entire world about Solution Focused Brief Therapy. These are two of my six books about this approach.

I’ve dedicated so much of my time to learning this approach, and it drives me crazy when something happened recently where Anna Francis, who, by the way, she’s the CEO, and she runs my organization, the Solution Focused Universe, sent me videos from somebody on TikTok where they were talking about Solution Focused Brief Therapy. And these videos have tens of thousands of views and it’s completely inaccurate about what the approach is.

People say things about this approach because it sounds good…

• I love Solution Focused Brief Therapy because it gets right to the heart of the problem and gets right in there. Not true.
• I love Solution Focused Brief therapy because it works very quickly. Not true.
• I love Solution Focused Brief therapy because we work really hard to help the client achieve. Not true.

I’m going to tell you exactly what Solution Focus Brief Therapy is. I’m going to use an example to tell you.

So let’s imagine that I come to you with a problem. My problem is I’m broke. I have absolutely no money. Now you have a choice. You consider, “Man, all right. Elliott’s broke. He’s got no money.” So let’s have a conversation about how you became broke. We’re going to analyze. You’re going to analyze my spending habits. You’re going to analyze my saving habits. You’re going to analyze where I learned my money habits in my family history. You’re going to ask me did I know anybody else in my family that was also broke and that also struggled with money. And we’re doing all of that, so That I can have a moment of awareness. I’m like, “Oh, the reason why I struggle with money is because my mother and father were not very good with money.” So they passed down their bad money habits to me. And, “Oh, that makes more sense now.”

But in Solution Focused Brief Therapy, we don’t do any of that. So with the same problem, and this is a hypothetical problem, not that clients come with this particular problem, but it’s very clear black and white problem, which illustrates what I’m trying to teach, what I’m trying to show you. So same problem, I come to you and I’m broke.

As a Solution Focused therapist, the mentality is different. I’m not really interested in the habits that led to the problem. I’m significantly more interested on what you’d like to be instead. So instead of being broke, what would you rather be? Well, I’d rather be rich. So now we’re gonna have a conversation about what it’s like to become rich and what habits you need to create in your life to move your life towards rich as opposed to broke. And the more I move my life in those ways, then the more likely I am to achieve richness, which solves the problem of broke.

Now this idea that in Solution Focused Brief Therapy, we get right in there, you guys have an overemphasized focus on this word brief, because you think the point of Solution Focused Brief Therapy is to go quickly. And I’ve heard people say, like, I love Solution Focused Brief Therapy when I don’t have a lot of time with my clients. Well, I can tell you, if you don’t know how to do Solution Focused Brief Therapy, you are not going to be successful with your clients. Whether you have a bazillion sessions, or you have a few sessions, doesn’t matter. You have to know how to use this language and do this work. Because the point isn’t speed. It just so happens it doesn’t take as much time to achieve an outcome (which solves the problem secondarily) as it does to solve a problem (which achieves the outcome secondarily).

To go after the outcome, to make that the focus is a more efficient way, than to go after the problem and make that the focus with the point of achieving the outcome after we solve the problem. So the point isn’t speed. The point isn’t to hurry up. The point is to achieve an outcome. And the byproduct of focusing on achieving an outcome just happens to be we achieve successful therapy in a much quicker time.

So from this point forward, if anybody ever says to you, I love Solution Focused Brief Therapy because we get right in there. That’s not what we do. We start immediately working with the client about an outcome, whereas every other approach works with the client about a problem.

So I’ll give you another example to highlight what I mean by that.

I was recently, I travel a lot and as a consequence I take a lot of cabs. And I was recently in Las Vegas, and I got there, and I landed, and I walked out of the airport, and there was a cab sitting there, and I got in the cab, and the cab driver asked me a Solution Focused minded question. The cab driver said, “Where to, buddy?” Never forget this old kind of, you know, leathery fellow that you would imagine meeting in Las Vegas. He turned to me and said, “Where to, bud?” And I told him I need to go to the Hilton such and such hotel. And he said no problem, put it in his address thing, and started the car, and we drove away.

He didn’t say to me, “Where would you not like to be?” He didn’t say that to me, because that would be associated with solving a problem. Because the problem I had was: I am not where I want to be. I’m at a different place than the place I want to be. And he could have analyzed, “How come you don’t like being here?” And we would eventually gotten to “Because I want to be at the Hilton place.” What he overtly said, “Where to?”

Well, Solution Focused Brief Therapy is a “Where to?” approach. We are immediately asking our clients, where would you like to go? And in the example I gave earlier, I’d like to go towards Rich.

We don’t ask our clients where have you been? Because in that example, “Well, I’ve been broke.” And then we have to analyze and dissect broke, which does work. But that is the difference between problem focused therapy and Solution Focused Brief Therapy. Solution Focused therapy attends to the outcome which inherently solves the problem, whereas problem focused therapy attends to the problem where hopefully that will achieve an outcome. But this way is much more efficient.

That’s it. We’re not trying to be quick, we’re not trying to be fast, we’re not trying to end the therapy in few sessions. That’s just a secondary outcome from taking this path as opposed to the problem path.

Now there are lots of techniques associated with Solution Focused Brief Therapy, and I say techniques with air quotes because we don’t really call them that. But there are things you’ve heard about: the miracle question, scaling, exception finding, all these things. Those are a part of taking this path.

So from now on. If anybody says what is Solution Focused Brief Therapy? You now get to tell them it’s an approach that focuses on helping the client achieve an outcome. It is not about going quickly in therapies. It’s not about getting right in there and solving the client problem. It’s not about getting right to the point. It’s not a great approach for goal setting. Solution Focused Brief Therapy is a standalone approach that takes a focus on the client outcome and achieving that end as opposed to focusing on the client problem.

Now you know.

And if you’d like to learn more about Solution Focused Brief Therapy, or you’re curious about how you become a master of this approach, and use this effectively in your work, with your clients, head on over to my website ElliottConnie.com – you’ll find my courses, you’ll find my lectures, you’ll find free content. You can join my mailing list there or even buy one of my wonderful books.

See you there.