Y is for YES – three shortish notes.

Solution Focused Practice is a YES approach; whatever answer to any question that we may ask, the client’s answer is always the right answer and that is the answer with which the practitioner will work. I remember many years ago on a training course a participant asked me ‘so what do you do if the client gives you the wrong answer’? Now of course it is (sort of) clear what was meant. When we ask, for example, at the beginning of a follow-up session ‘so what’s been better?’ we are inviting a listing of differences and in particular, perhaps, differences that fit with the client’s preferred future, although actually any differences will do. However if the client responds with ‘nothing’s been better, it’s been awful’ this is not the wrong answer. Our questions are not intended to get the client to say anything in particular. Of course the nature of the question makes some answers more likely than others and this is fine, however if the client offers a different response that is also right. On hearing the response, the Solution Focused practitioner is not evaluating that response, right or wrong, since we choose to assume that every response is right and so there is no space for judgement. Once we have received the client’s response all that we are focusing on is how to frame the next Solution Focused question that fits with, builds on and takes account of the client’s last (right) answer. In this sense the Solution Focused worker works from a YES position.

There are times when even a Solution Focused worker can succumb to the temptation to argue with their client. Let’s return to the client who responds to the opening follow-up question ‘what’s been better?’ with ‘nothing’s been better – it’s been awful’. An over-enthusiastic worker at this point may be tempted to argue for credit with the client, worried that the client is not doing themselves justice ‘yes but you got yourself here today – how did you do that?’. The intent is of course benevolent, seeking to draw a ‘positive’ (horrible word) to the client’s attention, so in what sense is this not appropriate. The difficulty lies in the word ‘but’ and the way that the word works. When the client says that ‘it’s been awful’, and we respond ‘but you got yourself here today’, we are implicitly undermining the client’s statement. The logic that we are proposing is ‘if things were truly awful you would not have been able to get out at all, but you have got out and that therefore means that things cannot be as truly awful as you said’. Thus doing the worker is, probably kindly and with the best of intentions, telling the client that they are wrong. ‘But’ is an excluding word, an either/or sort of word, either this or that, not an including word, a both/and sort of word. Shifting from an excluding to an including framing is not difficult - we merely have to substitute the word ‘and’ for the word ‘but’. So when the client says ‘nothing’s been better - it’s been awful’ we could respond ‘YES . . . and somehow you got yourself here nonetheless – how on earth did you manage to do that?’. This framing recognises the rightness of both client and worker. It truly has been awful, no attempt to argue or to deny, and somehow the client has arrived. Responding in this way is less likely to lead the client to feel that they have lost face, and thus less likely to lead the client to self-justify ‘yes I have got here but it has truly been terrible - Tuesday and Wednesday I was feeling so shit that I didn’t get out at all and I had to ask the children’s dad, and you know I hate doing that, to take them to school and to collect them and I was meant to have a doctor’s appointment but couldn’t go and the surgery were upset about that and I ended up having an argument with my mother who said that I should have gone and . . . ‘. - And so Solution Focused practitioners work from a ‘YES and’ position, not ‘YES but’! The difference albeit seeming small is important.

And finally a few thoughts on the demise of the ‘YES set’ (de Shazer, 1985, 1988). In the early days of Solution Focused Brief Therapy there was a significant emphasis on the formulation and delivery of a ‘therapeutic suggestion’. Indeed the main rationale for taking a break in the session was to facilitate the formulation of a fitting ‘task or directive’ and the consideration of how to best deliver the session ending in such a way that the therapist ‘get(s) the client into a frame of mind to accept something new’ (de Shazer, 1985, p 91). Despite the publication the previous year of ‘The Death of Resistance’ (de Shazer, 1984), there is still implicit in this thinking the idea that the client must be ‘got’ to accept something. In Keys to Solution in Brief Therapy de Shazer writes ‘to facilitate and promote the introduction of the therapeutic suggestion, the therapist begins the message with compliments or statements about what, in the therapist's opinion, the client is doing that is good for him or her. These comments may or may not have anything at all to do with the complaint. The purpose of the compliments is to build a “yes set” (Erikson et al., 1976; Erickson and Rossi, 1979; de Shazer, 1982a) that helps to get the client into a frame of mind to accept something new - the therapeutic task or directive’ (de Shazer, 1985, 91). Since those early days the approach has changed considerably. The emphasis on ‘tasks’ has diminished and the idea that post-session tasks are central to the change process has been replaced with an increasing emphasis on the therapeutic effect of the in-session conversation. This awareness was flagged up by de Shazer as early as 1988 when, incidentally, he was also still talking about the ‘yes set’. In Clues: Investigating Solutions in Brief Therapy he writes ‘simply describing in detail a future in which the problem is already solved helps to build the expectation that the problem will be solved and then this expectation, once formed, can help the client think and behave in ways that will lead to fulfilling this expectation’ (de Shazer, 1988, p 50). However at BRIEF the therapeutic directive has substantially withered and the idea that the client must be ‘got’ ‘into a frame of mind’ to do something useful after the session would never occur to us. The client, post session, will do whatever they do, and whatever they do will be right and we will work with it.

So the Solution Focused approach can be thought of as a ‘YES’ sort of approach, the client is always right, we ask inclusive questions, ‘YES and’ questions although the idea of the ‘yes set’ has virtually disappeared.

de Shazer, Steve (1984) The death of resistance. Family Process: 23: 11 – 17. 1984

de Shazer, Steve (1985) Keys to Solution in Brief Therapy. New York: Norton.

de Shazer, Steve (1988) Clues: Investigating Solutions in Brief Therapy. New York: Norton.

Evan George
London
16^th June 2025