‘Too often people who want to learn SFBT fall into the trap of not being able to see that the difficulty is to stay on the surface when the temptation to look behind and beneath is at its strongest’. (Lee, Sebold, Uken. 2003 p 18)
Time and time again those of us who have had prior trainings, trainings in other models before we came across the Solution Focused approach, can get ourselves into muddles when we view Solution Focus through the lenses that we have previously taken for granted. And many of us were previously trained to listen through the client’s words for a ’deeper’ level of reality. Of course the idea of ‘deeper’ is also merely a construction but one that many of us have been accustomed to take for granted and some hardly question. The ‘surface/depth’ distinction is so obvious that we come to assume that it is reality. Listening to the words – that which we can see, the surface, is obviously superficial, a word that implies lesser value and lesser significance. However in his third book Clues, Steve de Shazer writes ‘Traditionally, therapists have thought they had to penetrate the clinical situation, to see beneath or beyond the appearances. This is based on the assumption that the essence is hidden away (in the psyche or in the system?). However, other assumptions are possible. Perhaps nothing is hidden away and everything lies in plain sight.’ (de Shazer, 1988 p.70). So Solution Focus rather than listening through the client’s words listens to the client’s words and works with those words. We chose to assume that the client’s words are all that there is. Of course other assumptions are possible and other models make other choices, but they are just choices. So Solution Focus chooses to ‘stay on the surface’ and whilst doing so is informed by simplicity and minimalism. What is the least that we can do and what is the simplest way of thinking about what we are up to? This choice and where it leads us came up this week in a discussion about ‘describing’ and ‘visualisation’. Why not use the term visualisation when many other models do? And the idea that we might see the use of the term as intrusive and redundant is not simple and not easy.
So what I am going to do is to re-print a piece that I wrote last year which attempts to address this. I hope that it might be of interest.
de Shazer, Steve (1988) Clues: Investigating Solutions in Brief Therapy. New York: Norton.
Lee, Mo Yee, Sebold, John, Uken, Adriana (2003) Solution-Focused Treatment of Domestic Violence Offenders: accountability for change. New York: Oxford University Press.
Evan George
London
22 March 2026
V is for ‘visualisation’: a very brief note first published by Evan George April 2025
The Solution Focused approach is challenging for people coming to it new and with experience of other approaches. The idea that the worker does not need to know what the client thinks that the problem might be, the idea that at the heart of the approach is a maximising of ‘Solution talk’, that the worker resists the urge to develop theories about causation and so on and so on can be difficult. Solution Focus seems to deprive people, or that is how it can feel, of the foundations upon which their practice and sense of knowing their way about are based. And in such circumstances what all of us tend to do is to look for familiarity, for things that we can recognise. And so observing us negotiating the ‘Best hopes’ (George et al., 1999) people not infrequently equate the process with ‘goal-setting’ and I have to explain the difference, why ‘goal’ seems an unhelpful concept to us at BRIEF. And when people listen to or observe a Solution Focused worker facilitating the description of the ‘preferred future’ (Ratner et al., 2012), the description of the client’s life as transformed by the presence of the ‘best hopes’, they reach out for something familiar and they find ‘visualisation’. However yet again the point of stability that they are searching for merely betrays them, the Solution Focused practitioner does not invite clients to visualise. So what is the difference?
The BRIEF team started reading de Shazer’s writings, obsessively it may be said, in 1987 and we started inviting him (and Insoo Kim Berg) to the UK in 1990. Naturally we were interested in the techniques that the Milwaukee team were developing and that he and Insoo demonstrated and yet at another level we took from our contact with them a number of broader concepts that were at the heart of the way that our ‘take’ on SFBT developed. From Steve we took an interest in simplicity and in minimalism, what is the simplest and most minimal way of approaching our work that fits nonetheless with a good outcome, whilst from Insoo came the idea that we should ‘aspire to leave no footprints in the client’s life’. Indeed our experience of our work over the past 30 or so years has been learning to do with less, straightening the line as we called it (George, 2016) . So how does all this fit with ‘visualisation’?
Solution Focused workers do indeed invite clients to describe their ‘best hopes transformed’ lives in detail, often taking 35 minutes or more in a first meeting asking preferred future focused questions and it certainly appears to be the case that detailed description is associated with change. But when so doing it never occurs to me that I am inviting the client to ‘visualise’. To hold the concept of visualisation is to add complexity, to add a concept which is not necessary. It is not, it seems to me, the worker’s business to pre-determine what should be going on in the client, for the client, as they answer our preferred future questions. Who knows what they might be thinking about, what images may or may not be developing during our conversation. My job is not to develop intra-psychic theories, indeed is not to develop theories of why change is happening, it is merely and simply and minimally to ask the next question and to try my best to ensure that it is a fitting question, one that the client is able to answer.
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
George, Evan. (2016) https://www.brief.org.uk/blog/2016/02/02/straightening-the-line
Ratner, H., George, E., Iveson, C. (2012) Solution Focused Brief Therapy: 100 Key Ideas and Techniques. London: Routledge
