Solution Focused Therapy : Miracles?

While I am here in Belgium, I wanted to use my time here to look for some of our Western therapeutic tools, especially the ones developed for dealing with children and bereavement or traumas. Through Gérald Brassine, a Belgian psychologist who spent some time working in the USA, I came across the solution focused therapy.

Solution focused brief therapy (SFBT), often referred to as simply 'solution focused therapy' or 'brief therapy', is a type of talking therapy. It focuses on what clients want to achieve through therapy rather than on the problem(s) that made them seek help. The approach does not focus on the past, but instead, focuses on the present and future. The therapist/counselor uses respectful curiosity to invite the client to envision their preferred future and then therapist and client start attending to any moves towards it whether these are small increments or large changes. To support this, questions are asked about the client’s story, strengths and resources, and about exceptions to the problem.

The Miracle Question The miracle question is a method of questioning that a coach or therapist uses to aid the client to envision how the future will be different when the problem is no longer present. Also, this may help to establish goals.

A traditional version of the miracle question would go like this:

"Suppose our meeting is over, you go home, do whatever you planned to do for the rest of the day. And then, some time in the evening, you get tired and go to sleep. And in the middle of the night, when you are fast asleep, a miracle happens and all the problems that brought you here today are solved just like that. But since the miracle happened over night nobody is telling you that the miracle happened. When you wake up the next morning, how are you going to start discovering that the miracle happened? ... What else are you going to notice? What else?"

It should get very good results, with clients only needing a couple of sessions, and not years and years of therapy. Also new to me, was the concept of "secondary victimisation": the victim of some traumatic experience going through the pain each time when telling the fact to police men or therapists who think that "talking about it will help them heal".