ABSTRACT
I have used the attributes of the solution-focused approach as a counsellor/therapist and as a means of living my life in the best way I can for about 20 years now. It is to my eternal shame that I didn’t fully recognise what I was doing in the early days-it just seemed natural to me that we treated those with whom we were involved with helping in a way that acknowledged their ownership of the issue or problem and, consequent to that, their ownership of the solution to the issue or problem, which they might well have arrived at with us helping them co-create a different, preferred reality. What I did on a day-to-day work or life basis didn’t have a name; it was just how it was…
Then, after many years of working in this what I now recognise as intuitive way, I was invited to a two and a half day training session jointly run by a colleague in my service and a consultant paediatric psychologist. The topic was on a way of working with troubled adolescents using something called “solution-focused brief therapy.” Talk about hand and glove: I began to see that what I had been doing-true, in an untrained way, and also because it suited me-had a genesis, a history, and a focus. It’s a cliché, but I was “home” and what I did in the workplace now had a developing body of research, practice, and fellow practitioners. As Insoo would have said, “WOWW”!
