2. Premise
People make sense of their world through
language and stories
Can be brief
View people as competent
3. How Problems are Seen
• Problems arise because of subscriptions to
narrow and self defeating views of world
• People are not problems; the problem is the
problem
• Problems are to be deconstructed and
externalized
4. New Insights Through Stories
• Drawing people’s attention to subtle changes
in their lives can foster new insights, promote
empowerment, and help people develop
better ways to resolve difficulties
• People become authors of their own lives
• Clients are experts on their lives.
• Externalization allows re-authoring (hidden
problems can’t be changed)
5. Emphasis in Therapy
• Listening, accepting, making non-judgmental,
non-confrontational comments
• Can ask multiple forms of same question
(intricate and delicate process)
• Therapist as linguistic detective
• Not seeking to heal or fix, but to learn about
client and understand them
6. Goals
• Therapists invite clients to describe their
experience in new language; facilitate process
of discovery
• Create shift to bring about new meaning to
client’s story
7. Therapist Role
• Suggest alternative viewpoints
• Mirroring
• Emphasis on being encouraging of client
strengths and resources
• Participatory, interactive
• Careful listening, empathic, summarization,
paraphrasing to give people ownership
8. Therapist Role continued
• Search for exceptions to the problem
• Ask clients to speculate about what kind of
future they could expect from new feelings of
competence
• Separate person from problem
9. Techniques
• Questions!! More questions!!
• Creating alternative stories, identifying
preferred directions
• Externalizing – when has client been
successful, new (less problem-saturated)
stories around problems
11. Limitations
• No set formulas
• Attitude is critical
• Therapist needs to be able to make quick
assessments, assist clients in setting up goals
and effectively use appropriate interventions