Solution Focused Hypnotherapy - My Roots

I read an article in the Guardian recently, that reminded me of my roots as a Solution Focused Hypnotherapist and I just wanted to share some of that thinking with you all today.

Milton Erickson was a firm believer in finding solutions. Between the 1950s up until his death in 1980, he had continued to develop and refine his techniques in the practice of hypnosis and psychotherapy. Among his most famous techniques, the use of anecdotes, metaphors and client-centred therapy have endured as major approaches in modern therapy, and specifically for those like me, who specialise in Solution Focused Hypnotherapy.

Equally influential, in the 1980s, two therapists based in Milwaukee, Steve de Shazer, and his wife Insoo Kimberg, began to experiment with their clients using alternative questioning techniques to see if they could get better outcomes in their therapy sessions. Instead of focusing on the persons problem, they dared to ask the client what life might look like when the problem was gone? This question has evolved over time and as a modern day practitioner I now use, what is widely known as,“The Miracle Question” with all of my clients.

Just ask yourself this question: “Suppose that one night, while you were asleep, there was a miracle, and your problem was solved. How would you know? What would be different?”

In their imagined miracle worlds, clients come up with all sorts of preferred futures, one might say, “I’d be happier at work.” Another might say, “I'd be talking more at social events”. Another might find themselves in control of their eating.

What a simple but powerful change in approach, looking for signs of change, rather than ways to change. This approach moves us into a third-person perspective, where it’s easier to identify steps that move us towards our preferred future.

Even more intriguingly, Shazer, and his wife, Insoo Kim Berg, with whom he went on to found “solution-focused brief therapy”, realised not only that their clients knew what a solution would look like, but that it was often already happening, if only occasionally, together they were able to draw out these exceptions.

In the early 1990s, David Newton, who I had the absolute pleasure of being trained by in 2008, created a new approach to therapeutic hypnosis, which combined the most successful elements of the approaches outlined above, combining a solution-focused approach with hypnosis and neuroscientific understanding about the brain…and Solution Focused Hypnotherapy (SFH) was born!