3. Which are the things that you tend to remember when you meet with a patient for the first time?

Intervista ad Evan George / Evan George Interview

As I mentioned last week we are publishing today an interesting chat I had with Evan George, one of the founder of BRIEF Institute of London.

Since I value every word of this interview I have decided to split it in two parts.

Here’s the first bit of Solution Focused Brief Therapy knowledge.

1. Do you consider therapy a job where creativity and innovation represent key values and characteristics?

Well on the one hand ‘yes’ and on the other hand ‘no’.
On the ‘yes’ side I do think SFBT is like a performance art form. Each time we meet a client we are into the business of creation and innovation, building with that person a reality in language that fits with the client finding a way forward. I ask a question, the client responds and their response challenges me to respond to them in a way that both fits with what they have said and opens the possibility of change. In this sense of course, since every client is different, I am constantly being challenged to create and to innovate, to shape questions every one of which is unique, since the context in which it is asked is unique and yet every one of which is also familiar.
And on the other hand, on the ‘no’ side, is my recognition of the need for rigor and for discipline. I have a clear framework that I bring to every session with every client. I have in mind a default conversational process that works, that is associated with good outcomes and which does not waste the client’s time. I do not want to be reinventing the way I work every session – that would be too difficult and would risk me trying things that might not be useful.

And yet over time, and here we go back to the creativity and innovation, the BRIEF team has radically changed our idea of what we do, our description of the solution focused approach. And that process of change has come about through an interest in our innovations in a rigorously applied framework. Without the discipline and rigor there is a real danger that creativity and innovation will descend into chaos and that differences will cease to be remarkable and interesting because they are constant and thus not noteworthy, indeed not really visible. So really the answer is both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and both at the same time.

2. How much do you consider important keeping a flexible approach and building a customized therapy experience where different techniques and influences can be mixed with the only purpose to favor the desired change from the patient?

At BRIEF, when we started working with the solution focused approach we were interested in testing its applicability and effectiveness. We were the first team in the UK to use the approach and the first to ‘test’ it in a coherent way. In order to know whether a model works it is important to stay within the parameters of that model since clearly otherwise we cannot know what a good or bad outcome means. So we as a team developed a habit of working ‘purely’ within the approach. And in order to test the limitations of the approach it is equally important to try to think how the model can adapt, while staying true to itself, in facing a whole range of application issues. So we developed a challenge that we would put to ourselves when faced with tough situations – ‘if all we knew was solution focused brief therapy what would we do now? ’ This again encouraged us to stay within the approach.
As it happens the way that we work with people tends to make it hard to build a ‘customized therapy experience’. In order to customize the therapist has to listen for meaning, has to listen in a structural, surface/depth, way – ‘the client has just said x (surface) and that means y (depth) and that means that I could do z’. But in solution focused brief therapy the challenge to the worker, and by far the most difficult thing is to try to stay in and to work with the client’s narrative. So I am actively reminding myself to stay with the client rather than peering below and beneath and without that ‘depth’ looking or listening or sense-making, how could I know what else to do. The solution focused worker is not assessing and without assessing it would be difficult to think how to customize the therapeutic approach.

Evan is a founding partner at BRIEF, Europe’s largest solution focused training organization. He has taught throughout the UK, Europe and further afield. He is co-author of three books on the solution focused approach and is currently writing on ‘Building Cooperation’. To find out more about his work and about BRIEF you can go to www. brief. org. uk