I wen to Cooma for a Mental Health training today. We were at least half an hour late due to travel issues, but when I got in to the meeting room, I instantly got drawn into the topic.
It’s about a kind of approach of talking therapy belongs to the big family of system therapy, called “Solution-oriented Brief Therapy”. It took me a while to get my heads around as I missed the beginning part, but after having seen a couple of counselling DVD demos, I felt that all I have known from my previous academic training had all started to come back together.
I was amazed by two assumptions that had made based this theory: one is they assumed that clients are expert; The other one is they pointed out that there is not a necessary logical linkage between problems and solutions.
Basically speaking, this therapy is more focusing on to help clients to achieve their goals rather than on the problem(s) that brought them to counselling, which I found very interesting, as most of my psychological training emphasised on finding the DEEEEEEEEEP reason that caused the problems. And that, usually time consuming, sometimes produced little results on soothing people the negative feelings or making them feel better or contributing towards their behaviour or belief changes.
I was particularly fascinated with the power of The Miracle Question as a very important part of this therapy. It aids the client to envision how the future will be different when the problem is no longer present. Also, this may help to establish goals. A traditional version of Miracle Question is like this:
“Suppose our meeting is over, you go home, do whatever you planned to do for the rest of the day. And then, some time in the evening, you get tired and go to sleep. And in the middle of the night, when you are fast asleep, a miracle happens and all the problems that brought you here today are solved just like that. But since the miracle happened over night nobody is telling you that the miracle happened. When you wake up the next morning, how are you going to start discovering that the miracle happened? … What else are you going to notice? What else?”
I couldn’t help imaging how I am going to develop a tailored version miracle question for a person who had a relationship problem in his life. I think that would help a lot to make him feel more clear about his options, the negativeness and the positiveness.
To be honest, I don’t think this therapy would help me a lot at the work, but certainly it broadened my horizontal about how to effectively talk to those people in troubles. I guess I enjoy doing it and maybe I am good at it as well?
All these past two decades, I think I didn’t change a bit. If 16 years ago, I said I was not quite sure about why I chose to do psychology, now I know it’s just a part of me, no matter how old I am, what jobs I did and how I would choose my lifestyle to be. I just love playing this sort of mental game. It’s a part of me and something in me that makes me feel comfortable to deal with. Maybe not so much enjoy listening to other people’s craps or shits, but the part of seeing and making changes happening, is what I like.
By the way, my definition of “being comfortable” is something that could possibly need a lot of efforts from you to achieve results, but doesn’t even make you feel worse than pulling a hair off your head.
This is the time of a year that I love and hate the most.
2 piece of items for only 20 bucks, or 3 for 15 bucks…lots of shoe shops and I always can look into something interesting. I was more restrained than my girlfriend was. She bought about 3-4 shirts and one pair of shoes and a 
