48. 'Stretching the world' - a friendly explanation of Solution Focused practice
My ideas on how SF works have been getting some useful attention recently.
I first proposed the idea that Solution Focused (SF) practices works by ‘stretching the world’ of the client in 2017, at a session during the SF World Conference in Germany. I wrote it up in a book chapter for the conference proceedings Solution Focused Practice Around The World (edited by Kirsten Dierolf, Debbie Hogan, Svea van der Hoorn and Sukanya Wignaraja, Routledge, 2020), which took three years to emerge, and then also included it in The Next Generation of Solution Focused Practice (Routledge, 2021). I’ve been talking about it from time to time since, to polite applause.
It was very heartening to hear this week that the chapter is attracting the attention of my friends and colleagues and BRIEF in London. They have been reflecting on their practice in weekly Facebook posts for several years, and this week’s is about how ‘stretching the world’ appeals to them as a good balance between change happening during and after the session (which it does) and the person changing (which they do, but maybe not directly). To help readers here I am republishing it, prefaced by Chris Iveson of BRIEF’s Facebook post from Sunday. There is more to say on this topic, which I will address in future pieces here. First, Chris’s post, in which he quotes me from an email between us shortly beforehand:
‘A strokey beard moment’
What better way to spend a few minutes over Sunday morning coffee than having a “strokey beard” moment? The phrase is Mark McKergow’s (sfwork.com) during a discussion we had about the idea he puts forward that the Solution Focused approach “stretches the client’s world” (https://www.researchgate.net/.../341296569_Stretching_the...)
Steve de Shazer used to say the client left an SF session a different person to when they arrived. Elliott Connie and Adam Froerer talk about clients leaving a session as different “versions” of themselves, at BRIEF we often ask ‘identity questions’ like “What does that say about you?” as a way to encourage clients to to see themselves differently. All these ideas imply that change happens within the person and they somehow become ‘better’ people as a result of successful therapy (‘better’ in that they are more satisfied with their lives).
Mark’s idea suggests that it is not so much the client who changes but the world around them: successful therapy stretches that world and thus affords more possibilities than were hitherto apparent. This is a better fit with another idea of ours that the client’s answers open doors which they hadn’t noticed before.
To quote Mark more fully, “The question about whether the client changes or not (or something else) is a strokey beard moment, I think. There’s a Zen saying that when I change, the world changes. And perhaps vice versa?”
Like the chicken and egg we can go around an endless circle while “stroking our beards” but unlike the chicken and egg the choice might make a significant difference to the directions Solution Focused practice might take. This reminded me of BRIEF’s very first ‘tampering’ with de Shazer’s original version of SF. Our first outcome study in 1990 showed no outcome difference between the three categories of motivation posited by de Shazer (customer, complainant and visitor). It was impossible to tell if our assessment was inaccurate or that ‘motivation’ was a redundant concept. Faced with such an unknown we asked ourselves what would be most ‘friendly’ to the client? We decided to assume every client was there for a good reason (or to use the old language every client is motivated). That was a transformational decision.
The full title of Mark’s paper is “Stretching The World: A friendly explanation of SF practice” and if that is the case, if it is ‘friendlier’ to the client for us to be trying to stretch the world rather than imply that it is they who need to change then maybe we should follow this idea and see if it takes us somewhere new.
Chris Iveson, London, 18th February 2024
And now here’s the book chapter from the 2017 SF World conference session:
Stretching The World: A friendly explanation of SF practice
Mark McKergow PhD
Published as McKergow, M. (2020). Stretching The World: A friendly explanation of SF practice, in Solution Focused Practice Around The World, Kirsten Dierolf, Debbie Hogan, Svea Van Der Hoorn and Sukanya Wignaraja (editors), Routledge, 2020
Abstract
Solution Focused (SF) practitioners have traditionally been encouraged to be suspicious of explanations. While this is completely justifiable in terms of explanations of client’s circumstances, it is less useful when it comes to our own work and how we discuss it with others. This chapter presents an innovative proposal that our work can be explained as ‘stretching the world of the client’. Recent moves towards seeing SF in terms of building descriptions (rather than actions) clearly supports this stance, which also fits well with the latest work on ‘SFBT 2.0’. Taking an enactive view of the client’s world as an Umwelt, the combination of individual and all their interaction possibilities, helps us to see long-standing aspects of SF work in new ways. This position offers new and exploitable possibilities for practice development and research.
Introduction
In Solution Focused (SF) work we are traditionally very wary of explanations. There are good reasons for this, particularly in terms of explanations relating to the client and their situation. After all, what else is a diagnosis but a kind of explanation? SF work is based on what the client wants, and what’s working for them. We are definitively not interested in how they got into their current predicament and why they are stuck; that’s the problem solving route, the opposite of our principles. If we succeed in investigating the reasons or explanation for the client’s troubles, we risk merely confirming that progress will be difficult. Steve de Shazer himself pointed out that once accepted, the explanatory metaphor can obscure and distract from all kinds of useful conversations (de Shazer, 1991, p.25).
This is all well and good in terms of working with clients. But what happens when we are asked by other professionals about our work? An interested colleague might ask us “This Solution Focused thing you do… how does it work?”. It seems like a reasonable question – after all, other schools of practice have their own explanations. But if we stick to our no-explanations position, we either try to educate the colleague about why they asked a difficult conceptual question (which will take a deal of time and energy and is probably more detail than they had in mind) or we go with a not-knowing position and say ‘I don’t know…’. This may appear nicely coherent to us, but risks looking dumb, incurious and downright unethical to others. Not a good look.
This chapter explores the question of how we can give a brief and convincing explanation of our work – while maintaining a theoretical coherence with the SF literature and practice. If we can point to the aspects of what we are doing that make a difference for the client, our work will appear more grounded and clear to our colleagues, funders, regulators – and clients. I propose we are ‘stretching the world’ of the client.
SF 2.0 – building descriptions, not devising interventions
Before we look for suitable explanations of what we do, let us attempt to be clear about exactly what it IS that we do. Since SF appeared as Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) at the Brief Family Therapy Center, Milwaukee in the late 1980s (McKergow, 2009), it has been undergoing gradual renewal and adjustment. In the initial incarnations SFBT is clearly an evolution of the interactional brief strategic therapy devised by the Mental Research Institute, Palo Alto (see for example Fisch, Weakland and Segal, 1982) under Don Jackson and John Weakland, Steve de Shazer’s supervisor and mentor. This involved one-way mirrors, a team of therapists observing the therapeutic interaction, consultations between the main therapist and team out of sight of the client leading to the construction and delivery of an end-of-session message and task to the client. The intervention was intended to interrupt some key pattern holding the problem in place, allowing new behaviours to emerge.
There have been various shifts over the past two decades which have gradually moved away from this ‘interventionist’ model of SF work. Many practitioners don’t (and indeed can’t) work in the highly structured and resource-heavy environments of mirrors and teams, and single-practitioner work is now the norm (outside north American university counselling departments, at any rate). The focus of our work has moved away from exception-finding towards helping clients build descriptions of better futures, as well as connecting those with supportive events in the past and present. The influential book chapter by Guy Shennan and Chris Iveson (2011) pointed to this move, with clarity about the difference between ‘action language’ (“what are you doing?”) and description language (“what are you noticing?”), with the conversation being seen as the intervention rather than the tasks given to do later. This shift to description has been extended by Iveson and McKergow (2016).
I have dubbed this shift in emphasis ‘SFBT 2.0’ (McKergow, 2016). It feels to me a bit like one’s child growing up; there is little to notice day-to-day but comparing a photo of the six year-old with the reality of the sixteen year-old shows dramatic differences. A key part of this shift is an increase in the level of detail sought by the practitioner in terms of the client’s descriptions – not just that something would happen, but exactly what, what would be the first signs that others noticed, what difference would that make, what would happen next, and so on. There are key differences in practice here from the tapes of (for example) Insoo Kim Berg 20 years ago and Chris Iveson today. This quest for detail is pursued rigorously and with purpose by the practitioner, even in the face of initial protestations from the client that they don’t know!
With initial evidence that this form of SF work is at least as effective and efficient as the previous ones (and potentially more efficient, with fewer sessions taken), then we have a question to answer: how does simply describing something change things? What is happening when we encourage our clients to describe in detail better futures and instances from the past? I propose that the mechanism is that we are ‘stretching the world’ of the client in the conversation – so that when the client leaves the consulting room, their world is already different from when they arrived. But they don’t quite know how it’s different… yet. To explore this idea, we need first to consider what we mean by ‘the world of the client’ – which means going back a century, to some ground-breaking work from Jakob von Uexküll.
The world as Umwelt – opportunities for interaction
Von Uexküll was a German biologist working in the early decades of the 20th century. He became interested in how organisms interacted, or knew to interact, with their environments. He proposed the idea of an Umwelt (von Uexküll, 1920); a species-specific subjective self-in-world reference frame, constituted by ‘carriers of significance’ – signs of opportunities for interaction which were important to the creature. Von Uexküll gives the example of a tick (a small insect existing by sucking animal blood) – sensitive to light (to aid in climbing to the top of blades of grass), the ‘odour’ of butyric acid (emitted by hairy mammals like dogs), and warmth (to tell them whether they are on a suitable creature or not). These signs of what makes the world of the tick – other matters such as the time of year or the state of the stock market are simply not of concern (to the tick).
This kind of argument was extended by American psychologist J.J. Gibson, who proposed that humans (and other species) see the world as affordances – opportunities for interaction. Gibson (1977) proposed that perception is not a neutral sense-gathering activity but rather a key part of action, and so we perceive (say) a wooden café chair not as an interestingly twisted construction of steamed shaped wood coated with varnish but rather as a place to sit. (We may of course reflect on the chair too, taking a new look at it, rather in the same way that Marcel Duchamp forced fresh perspectives on a ceramic urinal by placing it in an art gallery and calling it ‘Fountain’.) Note that this is still species-specific; a small bird flying into my office might see a guitar on a stand as a place to perch, whereas I see it mostly as an opportunity to make music rather than as a seat.
As humans, we possess at least two key tools which expand our range of affordances – memory and language. Whereas the tick responds to warm fur in its immediate vicinity right now, we can remember many things which are not immediately present – I know to go to the kitchen when I am hungry and want an apple. (I don’t dispute that many animals have memory at some level too, which helps them make their living.) With the question of language however, humans are streets ahead of any other species. We can bring things like crocodiles into our presence with language, we can learn and pass on information with language, we can co-ordinate and co-operate with language.
With language and memory, affordances and Umwelt move from being species-specific to being individual. Imagine walking through a forest with a botanist, an artist and a survivalist. The botanist notices different plants, talks about how they grow and multiply and where they are normally found. The artist is noticing the light, the colours, the shapes, and can produce work which somehow brings these things into a new representation. The survivalist knows what can be eaten, what is poison and how to make useful artefacts like cords and hammocks from what’s around. It’s the ‘same’ forest – and yet these are three different Umwelts.
A world as a ‘field of affordances’
Looking at worlds as Umwelts and affordances has returned to the agenda with the rising interest in the paradigm of enactive cognition (see for example Varela, Thompson & Rosch (1991, Chemero (2009), and Hutto & Myin (2013)). In contrast to the prevailing cognitive paradigm of brain-as-computer, enactive cognition see the brain as a linking organ playing a part in a much wider process of action/perception. Gibson’s idea of the critical role of affordances in perception has been extended by Sanneke de Haan et al (2013) with their idea of ‘landscapes’ and ‘fields’ of affordances.
Remember that an affordance appears in the interaction between an organism and its environment. Thus it doesn’t make sense to speak of an affordance as simply ‘out there’ in the environment, or ‘in here’ in the organism – we need both. A chair may offer a sitting opportunity to a human – but it also offers sleeping to cats, eating to moths, chewing to dogs, and so on. De Haan and her co-authors whittle this down with their idea of the ‘landscape of affordances’ as “all possibilities for action open to a specific form of life”, which depends on the abilities available to this form of life – the entire field of possibilities open (say) to human beings. They then narrow this down further by proposing a ‘field of affordances’, the relevant possibilities for action that an individual is responsive to in a concrete situation.
This field of affordances corresponds to the ‘world’ of the individual – the opportunities for interaction which are noticeable and usable. Of course, this is an excerpt from the landscape of affordances, the set of all possible interactions for humans. For example, my office has a large chunky door frame which I use to enter and exit. My friend David, a climbing enthusiast, uses it to practice pull-ups to strengthen his fingers – indeed, his world is full of handholds, lines of ascent, foot-jambing gaps and opportunities for gymnastic exertion, which is probably why he is much skinnier than I am. (And yes, he also uses the door frame to enter and exit.)
De Haan et al go even further in proposing ‘dimensions’ for the field of affordances. They propose that it can be characterised by ‘width’ (broadness of scope, choices and options), ‘depth’ (extending from now into the future, including anticipatory responsiveness) and ‘height’ (relevance and importance of affordances, including motivation and ‘affective allure’. One can easily grasp how worlds of (say) someone who is depressed might be rather small in width and depth with not many possibilities and little chance to change them, or how an OCD sufferer’s world might be dominated in height by washing their hands or checking the gas. In my view the work of de Haan and her colleagues opens up huge possibilities for all kinds of clinical work, which has so far been little heeded.
SFBT as ‘stretching the world of the client’
What is going on when we engage the client in describing tiny signs of progress, of the miracle happening, that things were going better, that they are now closer to 10 on the scale? I propose that we are helping them generate new, or at least newly relevant and important, affordances. The client describes ‘better’…
In their own language
In the future, past and/or present
In everyday terms
In detail
In particular, in terms of ‘noticing’ and ‘signs’…
The language of ‘tiny signs’ and ‘noticing’ could hardly be more suited to such a task. Here is a small example taken from a session reported in Iveson and McKergow (2016), where Mary is talking about her partner returning from work the day after the miracle.
Interviewer: And what is the first thing he would notice when he got home, even before you spoke? What is the very first thing?
Mary: I would be… instead of a worried, stressed, anxious look on my face maybe a smile.
Interviewer: Okay. And what would be the first thing you would notice about his response even before he spoke?
Mary: I think my body language would just be so… you know normally he has to come looking for me whereas I would imagine that I would be open to go and cuddle him instead. You know? So…
Interviewer: Would he faint or…?
Mary: Possibly, yeah, absolutely. You might have to have the paramedics on standby, yeah. I think it would be shock, but pleasant shock rather than shock shock.
Interviewer: So where would that be? Where would you be cuddling him?
Mary: I would imagine that… because I do almost always hear him pull up. I never go to the door. I let him come in through the door and come find me. Whereas I would probably go find him.
Interviewer: Okay, so that would be a different…
Mary: Yeah.
Interviewer: And what would you notice about the way you cuddled him that fitted with this sense of peace and pleasure, of being you?
Mary: He describes sometimes that when he asks me for a cuddle… he said ‘When I ask you for a cuddle…’ and I do give it to him, he goes ‘You are rigid and you almost… you cuddle me but you are pushing me away.’ So I would imagine that it would be a much more natural, open embrace where I felt relaxed and safe enough to do that. Not rigid and tight.
Interviewer: And what would you notice about his response to your cuddling and that kind of relaxed…?
Mary: I think that he would be delighted with how it felt to have a cuddle that didn’t feel like he was a) having to ask for or b) being pushed away from.
Interviewer: And what would you notice about his arms?
Mary: I think they might be quite tight around me and probably hold me for longer than normal.
Interviewer: Okay. And what would you notice about how you handled that?
It is quite clear that there are now more significant possibilities in the cuddle, and different ways of doing it, that Mary has created for herself. Her world is stretched – there are more possibilities, more affordances, newly relevant affordances for her.
Why ‘stretching’ the world rather than ‘changing’ or ‘rebuilding’?
The idea of ‘stretching’ seems to me to fit this situation particularly well, for a number of reasons.
A stretch requires effort from the client. When the first response to (say) a miracle question is “Ummmm….”, that is a good sign that the client is going to work!
A stretch may show tendency to return somewhat towards original size. We can’t know how much of newly stretched world will persist, and it may relax back somewhat after the session. We have to wait and see.
Changes will continue after the session too. The client will leave the consulting room with their world already stretched and will live into their new worlds. The impact of that only appears over time.
“What’s better” questions at follow-up sessions can be seen as asking about how the newly stretched world is fitting for the client, how they are experiencing it, what else they need to do. This kind of conversation also fits well into the world-stretching paradigm.
Conclusions
The kind of language seems to have appeared in our work on the basis of empirical trial and error rather than any grand theoretical scheme, yet here is a well-fitting theoretical construct which not only helps to support our work, but also offers way to extend it and research it. It’s possible to see how research into the language of noticing and detail might be carried out. And, in a potentially controversial move, this idea moves SFBT away from purely ‘social construction’ and towards an even more overarching bio-social contextual position. Discussion of that must await further writing and conversation.
References
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge MA: MIT Press https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8367.001.0001
De Shazer, S. (1991.) Putting Difference To Work. New York: W.W. Norton https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393334708
Fisch, R., Weakland, JH. & Segal, S. (1982.) The Tactics Of Change: Doing therapy briefly. San Francisco: Jossey Bass https://archive.org/details/tacticsofchanged00fisc_0/page/n335/mode/2up
Gibson, JJ. (1977). “The Theory of Affordances,” in Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing, R. Shaw and J. Bransford, Eds. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum https://monoskop.org/images/c/c6/Gibson_James_J_1977_1979_The_Theory_of_Affordances.pdf
de Haan, S., Rietveld, E., Stokhof, M. & Denys, D. (2013). The phenomenology of deep brain stimulation-induced changes in OCD: An enactive affordance-based model. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience vol. 7, p. 653 (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00653/full)
Hutto, DD. & Myin, E. (2013). Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. Boston: MIT Press https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262018548.001.0001
Iveson, C. and McKergow, M. (2016). Brief Therapy: Focused Description Development. Journal of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy Vol 2 No 1, pp 1-17 https://doi.org/10.59874/001c.75113 (free to read and download)
McKergow, M. (2009). Gale Miller: The man behind the mirror behind the mirror at BFTC. InterAction 1(1), 78-88 https://sfwork.com/resources/interaction/InterActionMay2009-78-88.pdf (free to read and download)
McKergow, M. (2016.) SFBT 2.0: The next generation of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy has already arrived. Journal of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy 2 (2) 1-17 https://doi.org/10.59874/001c.75113 (free to read and download)
Shennan, G., & Iveson, C. (2011). From solution to description: Practice and research in tandem. In C. Franklin, T. S. Trepper, E. E. McCollum, & W. J. Gingerich (Eds.), Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: A Handbook of Evidence-Based Practice (pp. 281–298). Oxford: Oxford University Press https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-19840-019
Von Uexküll, J. (1920). Theoretische Biologie. Berlin: Paetel https://archive.org/details/theoreticalbiolo00uexk/page/124/mode/2up
Varela, F., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA,: MIT Press https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9739.001.0001
As I said at the start, I want to expand on this topic and will do so in future pieces here. Please look at this piece as setting the stage for more conversation.
Dates and mates
The weekly Facebook posts from BRIEF are always interesting and revealing. As they say, there is no ‘advanced’ SF course where extra techniques are to be learned; one can only build understanding by reflecting on the existing ideas, techniques, philosophy and experience in new ways and in new settings. Follow them at https://www.facebook.com/BRIEF.SolutionFocus.
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