> Well, now consider the postmodern approaches and we just talked about feminist therapy, and in some ways that falls under the general rubric of a postmodern approach. And certainly Solution-Focused Brief Therapy is a postmodern perspective and narrative therapy, and I'll be spending most of the time in this segment talking about solution-focused and narrative therapy. Both of these approaches and feminist therapy, stress the importance of context and the importance of taking into consideration the client's social and interpersonal world. So all of these approaches, feminist, therapy, Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, narrative therapy, have an interest in the world of the client external to individual dynamics. Let me linger a bit on solution-focused brief therapy. It was founded mainly by Insoo Kim Berg and Steve de Shazer, and their approach is basically saying therapy can be very short-term and brief; it doesn't have to be any longer than is needed to address a client's issue and concern. Also, Solution-Focused Brief Therapy began as a family therapy, and de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg were very interested in training family therapists. So this approach was primarily a family therapy approach to begin with, but then it moved off in the direction of individual counseling and individual therapy. Also it's used in groups, too. Solution-focused brief therapy tends to be very popular, and it's received a lot of acclaim as of late in the last numbers of years recently because it is effective. It's short-term. It has some research support, and it certainly is a breath of fresh air when we look at the basic assumptions. A Solution-focused brief therapist will basically look at as you being the client, your strengths, your competencies, your assets rather than your liabilities and your deficits and your problems. Solution therapists, solution-oriented therapists will say, let's not focus so much on the problem, but instead, let's talk more about possible solutions. What have you tried that might have worked, and what possible strategy could you use to craft the life that you hope you have? So the emphasis is on change talk rather than problem talk. So rather than just working with a client cemented with a problem identity, solution-oriented therapists are more interested in separating the client from the problem. And there are several key concepts here and techniques. Like one technique that a solution-oriented therapist will use will be looking for exceptions to the problem. So if you come to your therapist and say, you know, I really don't have a lot of self-confidence, and when I'm in a social relationship I often feel in a one-down situation, and I think people are judging me. So this therapist will say, and are there exceptions to that? Have there been times when you felt equal? Have there been times when you felt opposite of what you say you sometimes feel? And the person might say yeah, and then we'll say, now, what were you doing to make that happen? So they try to look at exceptions to a problem to ascertain what you might have done to ameliorate the problem, to make it less. Another technique in solution-focused brief therapy is called pretherapy change. So you call your therapist to make your first appointment and come into therapy. When you show up, the therapist might say something like, has anything changed at all from the time you called me 'til now? And the person might say, yeah, after I called you, I began to feel a glimmer of hope that things might change. Or, I started looking at my problem just a little bit differently. Or, I was depressed when I really called, and it helped just talking to you and just making the appointment. I feel a little bit less depressed. So they want to see what did you do from the time you called at the initial appointment til the time you came in the first time. Another technique here is the technique of scaling. It's very behavioral in this respect in that a solution-focused brief therapist will say, okay, you're saying you suffer from lack of self-confidence. On a scale of 1 to 10, or 1 to 10, where would you put yourself, 10 being extremely confident and 0 becoming absolute no confidence whatsoever? And then they'll take a situation that you had in a week, and they'll say, where were you and what could you do to inch up? If you say I'm about a 4, then they might say, do you have any ideas of what you could do to go to 4 to 5? And even in the context of a session, itself, a solution-focused brief therapist might say something like, on this particular behavior that we're talking about, is there anything that you can see that you've done to move up the scale? So scaling is a very important technique. de Shazer invented a technique he called "miracle question," and it goes something like this. Imagine that you're asleep tonight, you wake up in the morning and lo and behold a miracle happened. And the problem that you've come into therapy for is gone. You no longer have the problem. How would your life be different? Could you describe that to me? So the miracle question is a technique to get people to think about what kind of life they would ideally like, and then how their life would be different in absence of the problem that they've come into therapywith, you see. Then they can begin to say, now, what could you do to make this miracle happen? Again, I want to say, let's go back to old Alfred Adler. Adler had an approach. He called it "acting as if." That was a technique that Adlerians sometimes use. They'llsay, just for this one week, what I would like you to do is act as if you were the confident person that you would like to be, okay. So you go out for a job interview, act as if, at least in your mind, that you're on top of your game. Now, the miracle technique is sort of a variation of acting as if. It's basically asking the client to think, if I had a magic wand and could wave it and life could be different, what would your life look like and how would it be different? Remember, we talked about reality therapy and the quality world of a client? Well, what would your ideal world be like and what small steps could you take to bring about bigger changes? That by the way, is something that this approach talks about. Small changes pave the way to bigger changes. There's no such thing as an insignificant change. Any step toward change is honored and valued and is seen as a step in the direction of change and transformation. In this approach, the client is viewed as expert, not the therapist. At least, you're the expert on your own life. And this approach looks at more what's right with you rather than what's wrong with you. And it shares a lot in common philosophically with narrative therapy, which I want to say a few things about. Narrative therapy was founded by Michael White and Epston is also an important key figure here. Narrative therapy say, we tell stories and we tell stories to the world about our life. But context is everything. Many of us have picked up dominant stories that are problem-saturated from the world in which we live. So a client comes in and in narrative therapy they sometimes are so whetted to their problem that they develop an identity around the problem, and they can't separate themselves from the problem. So the narrative therapist will have a technique or a way of helping the client see that they are not the problem. In fact, an often-quoted maxim is this. The person is not the problem; the problem is the problem. Okay. I'll say that again. The person is not the problem in narrative therapy; the problem is the problem. And what the narrative therapist tries to do is externalize your problem from you. So if you come in and say, I'm depressed, and this is what I'm coming into therapy for, a narrative therapist will look for, what dominant themes in society has contributed to your problem-saturated narrative and your life story? And will try to do that by saying something like, has there ever been a time when depression didn't get the best of you? Or if you have an eating disorder, a narrative therapist will say, can you ever remember a time when your eating disorder was not dominating your life? Or can you remember a time when somehow the problem that is so pervasive in your life, about a sadness or a bleakness, or a hopelessness, was there ever a time when that wasn't dominating your life? So it's like the exception question of solution-focused therapy, it's more externalizing the problem and seeing what we can do to create a new life story. So narrative therapists are very interested in teaching people a new life story and how to create a new life story rather than being cemented to a problem-saturated story. This approach is based on a not knowing approach of the therapist. What that means is the therapist approaches the client with interest and a real sense of curiosity, not a sense of, well, I know all there is to know about you, but here you are, I don't know anything about you; you're the expert. I want to learn about your life and how I can help you find your own resources and how I can help you create a different kind of alternative life story that will be richer and more fulfilling. So a not knowing approach is just the opposite of an arrogant therapist who just thinks he or she knows everything there is to know. So again, the client is the expert in narrative therapy, not the therapist. The therapist is the expert in technique and understanding how therapy works, as expertise, but you the client, are the expert in your own life. You know a lot more about you and how you want to change and in what direction than the therapist ever will know. One of the primary techniques that a narrative therapist uses are questions. They have all sorts of questions that they ask, exception questions, a whole array of questions, and they don't ask questions just for information but ask questions to engage you in further dialog and discussion and discourse. Because therapy is really seen as a conversation. This approach says therapy is conversation in which we have a good relationship, a working relationship, and I'm really genuinely interested in hearing your story and helping you find an alternative life story that's going to be more meaningful to you. Now, one technique they use that I very much like and it's unique to this approach, it's called the letter writing technique. And the narrative therapist will often write a letter to his or her client in between sessions. And maybe it's a paragraph or two saying, I've been thinking about our session since last week, and here are some afterthoughts I have. Let me tell you what these thoughts were. Or, towards the end of a narrative therapy treatment, we're getting towards the second to last session, a narrative therapist might write a letter to the client, give it to the client a week before termination and say, I just kind of want to tell you some changes I've seen in you. I'm going to write you a letter of what it's been like for me to be your therapist and the changes I've seen in you so you can keep it and reread it. And maybe you want to reread it for next week and when we meet for our last session, you can tell me how it was to read my letter. Now, I like that very much, the narrative letter piece, and that's just one of many techniques. And these approaches, they're relatively new, and they're catching on and they have a very different dimension than some of the more traditional approaches like psychoanalytic and person-centered and existential Gestalt. They're called postmodern because they are more recent than the traditional approaches, but again, you can use many of these ideas and concepts integratively in other therapies as well.