Most of us often tend to dwell too long on our problems, be it of the past, the present, or the future. Sometimes to the extent that that’s the only thing we do. Dwelling and ruminating. And the intense suffering resulting from it doesn’t help us in any way to fix the problem or even deal with it effectively.
Solution Focused Therapy (SFT) is a therapeutic approach in psychology developed by Insoo Kim Berg which, as the name suggests, focuses on the solution to any given problem rather than the problem itself. By its nature, it’s a brief therapy that aims to quickly and efficiently find a solution in order to move forward in life from a problem being faced and not dwell on the different aspects of the problem. It is a pretty simple concept that most of us can easily make use of it in our lives.
But before I get further into it, I’d like to emphasize a disclaimer that this post is in no way, shape or form suggesting you try, or even attempt to give yourself your own therapy. Take this as one of those self-help ideas, just that this one is inspired by the theory/techniques that a therapeutic approach is based on.
As mentioned earlier, solution-focused therapy does not analyze the problem and try to find its causes or triggers. Of course, this is not effective for many mental illnesses where intense therapy is required. But when faced with daily life issues that all of us encounter at some point or another where we feel stuck and overwhelmed and confused as to what to do next, these techniques would help to quickly move forward in life and find an effective solution to get us out of the stranded situation rather than painfully dwelling on the problems and everything that is wrong with the situation for too long.
How SFT does this is by asking a few simple questions. I mention three of them here that are the most beneficial. Your answers to these questions will help you a great measure in identifying possible actions that you can take and give you a direction to place your focus on.
The Miracle Question
The first of the questions is the miracle question. And as the name suggests it literally involves you imagining that a miracle has happened. The question goes something along the lines of “Imagine you woke up in the morning and a miracle had happened and the problem you have was solved overnight, how would you know it was solved, and what would be different?”
This might sound silly or irrelevant to some. But really, take some time to really think about this and use your imagination to identify the micro and macro details of what would be different if the problem just disappeared. Think about how you would be feeling, what would be different in your daily environment of home, school, or work. You know how we sometimes tend to say, “if only such and such problem wasn’t there, then…”. Then what? Depending on the problem, think about how much and what all would change or become better if the problem actually wasn’t there.
Sometimes we don’t know how to get out of a problem because we don’t know where to go. This question helps you think of what your life would look like if the problem was not there, which guide you on where to go, what to eliminate, and what changes to make.
Scaling Questions
Another type of question is the scaling questions, which can be used at any stage to understand the severity or the progress of your problem. This question quite literally asks you to weigh your problem by giving you a scale. For instance, the question can be something like “on a scale of 1 to 10, how severe or troublesome do you think your problem is?” Your answer to this question can give you a clear picture of where you stand in regards to the issue and recognize if the amount of stress or anxiety that you’re having because of it is actually on par with it.
This may also help you identify how much priority you have to give the issue. Accordingly, along with the help of your answers to the miracle question, you can start making action plans of baby steps to tackle the problem. Furthermore, once you’ve made some changes you can ask the same question again and see how your experience has changed if you’d managed to go down the scale (in terms of the above question).
The scaling question can be used in several other ways. Some examples are;
“On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you think this problem hinders your daily functioning?”
“On a scale of 1 to 5, what would you rate your level of stress is as a result of this problem?”
“On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you think this problem is externally driven and out of your control?”
You can ask this question to yourself in pretty much most situations where you want to have at least a little bit of clarity on where your feelings (or anything else for that matter) stand.
Exception Questions
The next type of question is called the exception questions. These are basically about finding “exceptions” or situations in your life where there were exceptions in regards to the same/similar problem. Perhaps a time in your life where such an issue was not there, or when it did exist but affected you differently. Identifying these exceptions helps you recognize what was different then from now. Figuring out these differences will again give you an idea of what you may have to do differently or change entirely.
There are of course some more techniques in the actual therapy, but I have mentioned the few that I think we can all use in our daily life as self-help techniques. In terms of how to use these questions effectively, I would recommend journaling/writing it down. Write your questions and your answers on paper, this way you have your answers tangible and outside of your head where you can look at it and analyze it better. This way you are also able to look at your worries by stepping outside of yourself and it is as if you are looking at it with a second pair of eyes in a way.
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