Last week someone on a training course said ‘I often affirm my clients in my work – should we affirm our clients in Solution Focused practice?’. In retrospect it is easy to see that I started off on the wrong foot. Of course I should have asked ‘what would I see you doing when you are affirming?’ but we were short of time and so I assumed that I knew the answer to the question that I did not ask, and I assumed that she meant ‘praising and complimenting’. And so having made this assumption I answered that I tried to affirm as little as possible, whilst ‘admitting’ that I find it hard not to affirm, in other words to praise, children when they report achievements and successes, excusing myself by arguing that children tend to frame themselves significantly through the eyes of the adults who surround them and who reflect back to them who they are.
Having rowed back to this extent from my first, off the cuff, response, I couldn’t help remembering Insoo Kim Berg and her quite inimitable ‘wows’, her frequent comments ‘I’m so impressed’ and her support for ‘cheer-leading’. And I couldn’t help recalling the Milwaukee team and their careful construction of compliments during the session breaks taken in order to formulate their end-of-session messages. What happened to this influential element of Solution Focused practice – did it really disappear or had it gone underground and taken a new shape?
For BRIEF the reason that we largely dropped the praising and the complimenting was our interest in ‘centering’ the client and the client’s thoughts and perceptions and judgements rather than our thoughts and perceptions and judgements. We had arrived at the conclusion that we did not have the right, as Solution Focused Practitioners to judge or to evaluate our clients and that praising was no different from criticizing, both requiring us to adopt an evaluative stance. Fundamentally we decided that there is no difference between the statements ‘this is bad’ and ‘this is good’. And so we decided that we should elicit the client’s own evaluative judgements. ‘So were you pleased with the way that you . . .?’, we would ask or ‘so what does doing that tell you about the person that you are and the person that you can be in the future . . .?’, inviting the client’s own evaluation. And even if a ‘great’ or a ‘wow’ slipped out of our mouths we would quickly recover ourselves and follow it with ‘and were you pleased with that?’, heaving an internal sigh of relief as we recovered ourselves, finding our way back to our preferred position. This shift of position we characterised, merely a useful shorthand of course, as the shift from praising to self-complimenting. However since contemporaneous with our decision to ‘centre’ the client came our determination that we should ‘trust’ the client, and since if we truly trusted the client there was no further need for end of session tasks or homework, since clients could be trusted to do what was right for them following the session, the context within which end of session compliments found their home disappeared and with it the compliments themselves.
So does this mean, that with the demise of ‘wowing’ and the disappearance of compliments, that the approach is no longer affirmative? And I think that in retrospect the correct answer must be no, that the approach is still affirmative of the client. It is affirmative for instance in its choice of focus. If a client were to say to me ‘I’ve had a really tough week and it wasn’t until Thursday that I managed to get out of the house’, I can easily imagine myself responding ‘so how did you manage to get out of the house on Thursday?’. And if the client responds ‘well I just made myself’, I would in all probability ask ‘and how did you do that?’. Although I haven’t overtly judged or evaluated the client’s behaviour I have invited the client to focus their attention on an action that in all probability fits with their ‘best hopes’ (George et al.,1990,1999) and invited the client to ‘take credit for that action’. Is it possible that this will not be experienced as affirmative of the client? I think not. It is merely that the processes of affirmation are not so obvious and not so direct.
So the question is not ‘to affirm or not to affirm?’ it is rather ‘what does Solution Focused Practice do that clients experience as affirmative of them?’. I wish that I had taken longer to think when answering our colleague’s question last week. Apologies.
For those of you wishing to extend your thinking about this there is a lovely article by Frank Thomas entitled Complimenting in Solution-Focused Brief Therapy.
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
Thomas, F. (2016) Complimenting in Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Journal of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy — Vol 2, No 1, 2016
Evan George
15 February 2026
London
