' . . . change occurs sooner, and therapy is shorter, when the therapist initiates solution talk as early as possible in the first session.'
Eve Lipchik Beyond Technique in Brief Therapy
At BRIEF, early on, we arrived at the view that our clients’ time is precious and as therapists we do not have the right to waste our clients’ time. We further assumed that our clients came to us because life was difficult for them, that they wanted change, and that it was therefore our task to facilitate the change that our clients wanted as quickly as we were able. Of course this idea had implications for our practice. In our early Solution Focused development we had formed the therapeutic habit of opening our first sessions with ‘problem-free talk’ (George et al., 1990, 1999, Ratner et al., 2012), ‘connecting with the client in a context of competence’ as we often described this mini-process. Whilst this was a pleasant way to meet a new client, the question we began to ask ourselves was, does doing his make a difference? Are outcomes any better when we open a first session in this way? The only way to discover of course was to drop this opening ‘strategy’ and to see what happened, and when we did drop the ‘problem-free talk’, it seemed to make no difference to outcomes and left us with more time to do the things that did make a difference. Given that we viewed the Solution Focused approach as a non-normative model, and we therefore had no view on what the client should be addressing and no view on what the focus of our work should be, when we dropped the ‘problem-free talk’ we would open with ‘So what are your best hopes from our talking together’ (George et al., 1990, 1999). Perhaps a little to our surprise we found that most of our clients would answer and that most of them had specified their ‘best hopes’ within 5 minutes or so, at most within 10 minutes. This allowed us to get on with the work a little bit earlier. As our esteemed friend and colleague Harry Korman has written ‘until we know what the client wants we can have no questions to ask’. The client’s answer to the ‘best hopes’ question provided us with a focus. We could get down to work. Of course there are those, relatively infrequent, occasions where we do not find our way to a workable answer in this straightforward way and on these occasions we might take a detour ‘I’m sorry, I think that I have been trying to go too fast. Let’s start from somewhere else. Could I just ask . . . ‘ and at this point some ‘problem-free talk’ might well be useful.
Over the course of the last year however my opening to first sessions has changed, returning to another past practice. Back in 1987 Michele Weiner-Davis and colleagues published ‘Building on pre-treatment change to construct the therapeutic solution’. In this paper they noted that it was not infrequent for people, in a first session, to report that they had already noticed beneficial changes that had occurred prior to the first session. In their study they trialled three questions, the most interesting of which was ‘oftentimes between making an appointment and arriving for that appointment people have already noticed a change. Have you noticed a change?’. In a relatively small sample, when this was asked, 67% of the sample reported that they had already noticed positive changes. In Putting Difference to Work (de Shazer, 1991) de Shazer, in the context of a particular case description, adds ‘to be truly satisfying, it seems that the presession changes need to be certified by the therapist as worthwhile changes, to be marked as authentic and real’ (p 102). ‘Certification’, it seems to me can, can be achieved simply and minimally as a result of the therapist taking an interest in the changes and asking questions ‘how did you do that?’ or ‘so what changes did you make in your life such that things began to improve between you and your partner?’ and so on. Pre-treatment change has seemed to us to be of particular value since it is likely, indeed almost inevitable, that the client will take full responsibility for the change, will own it, ‘I did it’, rather than discounting or undervaluing their achievement ‘I couldn’t have done it without you’.
It has also seemed to me that the likelihood of the client noticing pre-treatment changes, which is of course already enhanced by the ‘normalisation’ in the framing of the question ‘oftentimes . . . people have already noticed a change’, is additionally enhanced when we invite the client to watch out for it at the point of making the initial appointment. Over the course of this year I have been consistently saying to new clients something on the following lines ‘often between making an appointment and arriving for that appointment people seem to notice positive changes. What you might like to do is to watch out for even tiny signs of change in the direction that you would like to see your life moving and you can tell me about them when we meet. But look if you’ve got too much on your plate don’t worry – no problem’. My experience so far is that almost everyone has noticed changes. This allows us to start by exploring the changes made and then to move to ‘best hopes’. As we did when we started in ‘problem-free talk’ I am meeting clients in a context of competence, changes that they have already made. This inevitably induces a more hopeful and ‘change-expectant’ state, thereby making the ‘best hopes’ question easier. The client has already made changes, independently, and is ‘merely’ considering how to build on those changes, and thus the question that I am trialling is ‘so what are your best hopes from our talking together, how will you know that you are building on the changes that you have already made?’. As yet the sample size for this latest formulation is too small and so it is not possible to generalise.
Of course, whether we start with the ‘best hopes’ question or with the pre-treatment change question we are certainly ‘(initiating) solution talk . . . early’ (Lipchik, 2002, p 47) and thus, co-creating the context within which ‘change occurs sooner, and therapy is shorter’. Yes indeed our clients’ time truly is precious.
de Shazer, Steve (1991) Putting Difference to Work. New York: Norton.
George, E., Iveson, C. and Ratner, H. (1990; Revised and expanded Edition 1999) Problem to Solution: Brief Therapy with Individuals and Families. London: BT Press
Lipchik, Eve (2002) Beyond Technique in Solution-Focused Therapy. New York: Guildford.
Ratner, H., George, E., Iveson, C. (2012) Solution Focused Brief Therapy: 100 Key Ideas and Techniques. London: Routledge
Weiner-Davis, M., de Shazer, S., Gingerich, W. (1987) Building on pre-treatment change to construct the therapeutic solution: an exploratory study. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 13(4), 359 – 363.
Evan George
London
14th September 2025
