Switch - Chip Heath [13]
Murphy was almost powerless in the situation. The counselor had no way to improve Bobby’s situation at home, and time was working against him—at best, he’d see Bobby for an hour here, an hour there. Murphy couldn’t reward Bobby if he behaved well or punish him if he behaved poorly. (Not that punishment would have worked. Bobby usually ended up in the principal’s office by mid-morning for disciplinary issues, but his behavior never changed.)
Ignoring the “school stinks” comment, Murphy began talking to Bobby and posed a series of unusual questions. So began the first of a handful of conversations between Murphy and Bobby.
Now, fast-forward to three months later: A dramatic change had occurred. The number of days Bobby was sent to the principal’s office had declined by 80 percent. Bobby hadn’t become an Eagle Scout, mind you, but the improvement was strong enough to keep social services from having to transfer him to the school for troubled kids. Bobby, a chronic offender, had become an occasional offender. And it happened because of a few hours of talking with a counselor.
What, exactly, happened in those conversations?
4.
John Murphy is a practitioner of solutions-focused brief therapy (“solutions-focused therapy” for short). Solutions-focused therapy was invented in the late 1970s by a husband-and-wife therapist team, Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, and their colleagues at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee. Solutions-focused therapy is radically different from traditional therapy. In classical psychotherapy (think Tony Soprano and Dr. Melfi), you and your therapist explore your problem. What are its roots? Does it trace back to something in your childhood? There’s a sense of archaeological excavation: You’re digging around your mind for a buried nugget of insight, something that may explain why you behave the way you do. Excavating the past takes time. A standard Freudian psychoanalysis might take five years of work, with sessions once or twice a week. (And after five years and $50,000, you discover it’s all your mom’s fault.)
Solutions-focused therapists, in contrast, couldn’t care less about archaeology. They don’t dig around for clues about why you act the way you do. They don’t care about your childhood. All they care about is the solution to the problem at hand.
Marriage therapist Michele Weiner-Davis was initially trained as a classical psychoanalyst. Like all psychoanalysts, she believed that childhood experiences created unresolved traumas that fed current problems, and she tried to help her clients understand how their upbringing had shaped their behavior in relationships. But she was often unhappy with the outcomes her clients achieved through psychoanalysis. In her book Divorce Busting, she explained why: “My clients would frequently plead, ‘Now I see that we are reenacting our parents’ marriages, but what do we do about it? We can’t stop fighting.’” She learned that understanding a problem doesn’t necessarily solve it—that knowing is not enough.
Weiner-Davis was initially skeptical about solutions-focused brief therapy: “It seemed too simple…. Most people, including most therapists, believe the change process has to be complicated and arduous. ‘No pain, no gain’ is the general rule of thumb.” To describe how her thinking about solutions-focused therapy changed, she used an analogy from golf.
At one point, her golf swing started misfiring, so she went to a golf pro, thinking her technique needed a major overhaul. She noted that the golf pro didn’t do any archaeology. He never said, “You obviously have a fear of winning. Did your father intimidate you as a little girl?” Instead, all he did was suggest a minor modification: