Difficulties are part of life, and it would be utopian to think that there are people who don’t have them. These difficulties become problems for which people ask for help, especially when, due to poor management, they persist over time and solutions that don’t work are applied, even though they may seemingly make sense.
These people who seek consultation find themselves trapped in a spiral where they’ve been stuck for a while, trying to apply progressively more doses of solution, which paradoxically becomes an important part of the problem.
The orientation towards the present and future necessary to change these aspects that keep us anchored to suffering and do so in the shortest time possible is one of the mantras of the Brief Problem Resolution Therapy model.
Each person is unique and has a particular way of seeing life, because they have a series of values and beliefs. In our years of mental health training, we learn many labels and diagnoses that, instead of focusing on this ‘uniqueness’, try to put humans into small diagnostic boxes that, once given, define the treatment to follow, losing sight of the context in which each problem develops and persists. In this sense, one of the brilliant contributions of this therapy model is the ability to work from curiosity to understand the world through the eyes of the people seeking consultation.
The therapist’s perspective constructs the reality of therapy (see the article from March 26). Therefore, avoiding assuming standards of “normality” and understanding that there are infinite ways to organize oneself as a couple or as a family allows us to help more effectively. For example, there are couple relationships where we detect that the man has a dependence on the woman, and they are consulting about how to limit family expenses.
If this relational pattern doesn’t generate any inconvenience or problem in their lives, what would be the point of changing it? Aren’t there multiple couples with relationships we could “label” as dependent who have found a good balance in their relationship? From this model, the importance of not imposing our way of seeing the world as the only or correct criterion is emphasized.
Taking this perspective a step further, we can say that, since we see the problems presented to us always from an interactional point of view, if we manage to help them resolve the problem of family expenses—which is where they are asking for help—we will generate a new relationship in which, perhaps, there will be less dependence of the man on his wife.
A large part of our professional task, consequently, is to listen to unique problems, problems of each person, and more problems. In brief therapy, we work with those people in the system who are most motivated to make changes. Some time ago, I was working with a family who came to therapy because one of the children had obsessive rituals of silently repeating certain words and performing checks that significantly limited his functionality, to the point where he lost his job and decided to return to the family home, where he received all kinds of care from his parents. In this new situation, there were no circumstances for him that were uncomfortable enough for him to want to change any aspect of his life. However, the mother in particular was not as calm.
When I heard her point of view—she was tired of having to cook special meals, driving 30 minutes from her house to her son’s house three times a week—I started working with the parents. Just with them, without including the son in those sessions. They were very willing to continue taking care of their son until they realized that, in some way, they were contributing, with the best of intentions, to keeping their son immobilized in that situation, distancing him from any chance of change. They were meeting all his needs without the son even having to ask for it! It took them a few weeks to realize that they could help their son differently: by waiting for him to relearn how to function in the world.
As therapists, we are taught that we can row alone in the ocean of change without wearing ourselves out, but in our experience, it’s not quite like that. In this case, the parents’ help turned out to be decisive in producing a positive change for the son and therefore for the family system.
