Therapy often explores past struggles — but what if shifting the focus toward solutions could speed change up? That is the premise of solution focused therapy, and for a lot of people it is a considerable relief.
Solution-focused questions help move you from feeling stuck to being able to picture progress, which builds both clarity and a sense of agency. Rather than centring the problem, they invite you to recognise your own strengths and the resources you already have.
The Core Idea Behind Solution Focused Therapy
No problem happens all the time. There are always exceptions — the days it was slightly better, the situations where it did not happen, the times you handled it well without noticing.
Those exceptions are the raw material. If you can work out what was different, you have something to do more of. This is a fundamentally different starting point from working out what is wrong with you.
The questions it uses
- The miracle question. If you woke tomorrow and this was resolved, what would be the first small sign? It bypasses the analysis and gets straight to what you actually want.
- Exception questions. When was this even slightly less of a problem? What was different then?
- Scaling questions. Where are you on a scale of one to ten? What would half a point higher look like — not ten, half a point.
- Coping questions. Given how hard this has been, how have you managed to keep going at all? This one frequently surprises people.
Why it often works quickly
Because it does not require a full account of the history before anything can change. Insight into origins is valuable, but it is not always a prerequisite — sometimes the fastest route is identifying what already helps and deliberately doing more of it.
It is also inherently strengths-based. People arrive at therapy with an inventory of their failures. Being asked what they have been doing right is often the first genuinely different conversation they have had about it.
Who it suits
It works well when there is a reasonably defined goal, when you want something time-limited, when you are stuck rather than in crisis, and when previous problem-focused therapy left you feeling worse without moving anything.
It is less suitable on its own for complex trauma, active crisis, or conditions such as OCD that need a specific protocol. It can be combined with those approaches rather than replacing them.
Not the same as positive thinking
Solution-focused work does not ask you to look on the bright side or minimise what is hard. The difficulty is fully acknowledged. The difference is where the attention goes afterwards — toward what a slightly better version would look like, and what would produce it.
Getting started
Read about what to expect from therapy or request a free 15-minute consultation.
