1995 Volume 9 Issue 1 Pages 1-11
A boy had been refusing to attend school pathologically for a long time, to which an ordinary therapy was not effectual. Then his mother was given a peculiar advice by the therapist. It was that she should pretend to be ill and take a day off work. Surprisingly, this pretense resulted in a triggering effect on solution of the whole complicated problem. There must be many therapists who have had the same kind of experinces.
I consider these experiences to suggest a kind of therapeutic approach we should take for treating difficult cases. Such retreating approaches as mentioned above may have very effective therapeutic value. I call them ‘escape’ strategies as a whole.
Now I have realized that the solution-focused therapy, such as the family therapy, shares all the important features with our escape strategies. The solution-focused therapy was designed and has been developed as an antithesis to the problem-focused therapy, in such a way that all its therapeutic contexts consist in the retreat of various kinds from those contexts for the problem-focused therapy.
The solution-focused therapy was successful in evading those various hard tasks which the problem-focused therapy had been struggling to overcome. The tasks which may be evadable involve: to use complicated techniques, to interpret a client’s unconsciousness, to identify inexplicable causal relations, to regard a therapist's role as a problem solver, to contrive a scenario for therapy, to explicate solution process, to set a ‘true’ therapeutic goal and/or to get a ‘perfect’ solution, etc.
The escape strategies which can be adopted for the solution-focused therapy are as follows. Let the client (IP him/herself or other related persons):
(1) stay away from the problem-situation for a while in one way or another (physically and/or psychogically); or
(2) leave the direct and difficult problem as it is, and find a problem which is less direct and easier to cope with as a therapeutic substitute; or
(3) shift the meaning of the problem, most simply by paradoxically reversing it, for example; or
(4) leave the problem as it is, and try to find the situation in which he/she can operate better, by reframing it, for example.
