An Introduction to Solution-Focused Therapy
Every page on this site describes my approach as direct, warm, and solutions-driven. This page is the solutions part. Solution-Focused Brief Therapy starts from a premise most therapy quietly inverts: you don't have to fully excavate a problem to solve it, the future is more workable than the past, and the evidence for what will help you is already hiding in the parts of your life where the problem, somehow, isn't.
You already know why you're stuck. You're still stuck.
Solution-focused work tends to find people at a specific moment: after the insight, before the change. If any of this sounds familiar:
- You've done therapy that circled the past for months or years, and you can now explain your patterns beautifully, to anyone, while still living inside them
- Understanding why you procrastinate, avoid, or shut down has not once caused a Tuesday to go differently
- You don't want to start every session from what's wrong with you; a lifetime of evaluations, report cards, and feedback already covered that
- You have a specific thing you want different: the mornings, the backlog, the conversation you keep not having, and you'd like to aim at it directly
- You're suspicious of therapy that has no visible direction, where "how does that make you feel" is both the map and the destination
- Some part of you has noticed the strangest clue of all: there are days the problem doesn't happen. Nobody has ever asked you about those days. They're about to become very important.
Two ways out of stuck: start from the past, or start from the future
Most therapy runs on archaeology: dig into the past, understand the origins, and trust that insight eventually converts into change. Sometimes it does. Solution-focused therapy runs the other direction: define where you're going, find where it's already partly happening, and build forward from there. Same starting point, very different first question.
Notice the bottom route is a loop, not a line. Find an exception, take a step, notice what improved, feed it back in. Change compounds instead of waiting for insight to ripen. And no, the past isn't banned here; it just gets used differently, as a record of what you've survived and how, rather than a site to excavate indefinitely.
What exactly is Solution-Focused Brief Therapy?
SFBT was developed in the 1980s by Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg, and their team in Milwaukee, and its origin story explains its whole character: rather than starting from a theory of what's wrong with people, they studied hundreds of hours of actual therapy sessions and kept what demonstrably produced change. What produced change, it turned out, was rarely the archaeology. It was clear goals, attention to exceptions, small concrete steps, and the client's own competence taken seriously. So they built a therapy out of only that.
Three commitments define it. First, you are the expert on your own life; my job is asking the questions that surface what you already know but haven't been asked. Second, no problem happens one hundred percent of the time, and the moments it doesn't are not luck, they're data. Third, brief is a design principle, not a budget cut: the work aims at specific, described-in-your-words outcomes, which is why it often needs a handful of sessions rather than a standing weekly appointment stretching into the sunset. Decades of research and multiple meta-analyses back the approach across a wide range of concerns.
Four moves you'd recognize from the room
SFBT works through questions with unusual engineering: each one is built to point your attention somewhere the problem never let you look. Here are the famous ones, described but deliberately not performed, because they land differently when they're aimed at your actual life.
The miracle question
SFBT's most famous move: a carefully built thought experiment that walks you into a detailed, concrete picture of life with the problem gone, so specific that pieces of it turn out to be startable this week. I won't run it here, partly because it deserves the room, and partly because the answer you'd give alone is never the one that surfaces with someone asking the follow-ups.
Exception questions
"Tell me about a day it didn't happen." Every problem has gaps: the morning the routine held, the week the spiral didn't start, the conversation that went fine. Those gaps are the closest thing to a solution that already exists, built by you, tested in your actual life. We find out what was different and do more of that. It sounds simple. It's forensic.
Scaling questions
"Where are you on it today, zero to ten?" Not to measure suffering, but to make change visible and negotiable: what does your six look like, what did the five have that the four didn't, and what would half a point of movement require? Scaling turns vague stuckness into a dial you can actually see yourself turning, one notch at a time.
Coping questions
"How have you managed to keep going?" Asked seriously, not rhetorically. For people in genuinely hard seasons, this question surfaces the machinery of survival you've been running without credit: the systems, the grit, the workarounds. That machinery is a resource inventory, and treatment built on your proven equipment beats treatment built on my theories.
What solution-focused does not mean
The name invites misreadings, and a few of them keep good candidates away. Four corrections up front.
Not toxic positivity
Nothing here requires pretending things are fine, finding the silver lining, or being talked out of your feelings. The problem is real, the pain is real, and both get acknowledged in full. The distinction is where the working attention goes: acknowledgment is the floor of the session, not the ceiling of it.
Not shallow because it's brief
Brief measures duration, not depth. A precisely aimed question about the one morning your system held can reach further into how your life actually works than a month of general exploration. SFBT trades broad excavation for surgical attention, and surgical is not the shallow one.
Not me handing you solutions
Despite the name, I don't arrive with answers, and you'd be right not to trust them if I did. Generic advice is what the internet is for. The solutions in solution-focused are yours: assembled from your exceptions, your values, and your proven coping, which is exactly why they tend to survive contact with your real life.
Not a replacement for specialty treatment
Honesty about scope: OCD gets I-CBT or affirming ERP here, and ARFID gets CBT-AR, because specialty conditions deserve treatments aimed at their machinery. SFBT is the thread that keeps all of it practical: goal-shaped, step-sized, and measured in your actual weeks.
Why SFBT fits neurodivergent adults unusually well
Some therapy models need heavy adaptation to be affirming. SFBT needs surprisingly little, because several of its founding commitments happen to be the exact opposites of how neurodivergent people are usually treated. A few of those alignments, plus the one place it does need adapting.
It starts from competence, not deficit
Most ND adults have a lifetime of paperwork describing what's wrong with them: evaluations, IEP meetings, performance reviews, diagnostic criteria. SFBT's opening stance is that you've been solving hard problems your whole life and the record of how is sitting right there. For many clients, being interviewed about their competence is itself a novel clinical event.
Your workarounds are treated as evidence
The alarm labyrinth, the body double, the same lunch that removes a decision, the script that survives phone calls: exception-finding treats these as engineering successes to study and extend, not quirks to replace with a neurotypical system that lasts nine days. This pairs directly with executive function work, where your existing systems are the starting inventory.
Concrete beats abstract, by design
SFBT's questions want specifics: what would you see, who'd notice first, what happens at 7:40am exactly. For literal, detail-oriented minds, this precision is home turf rather than a communication barrier, and scaling questions give pattern-minds actual data to work with. Where a classic question runs too abstract, it gets rebuilt concrete, because the question serves you and never the reverse.
The goal is yours, which is the anti-masking clause
Client-as-expert means the target is never "seem more normal." If your good life includes the same dinner weekly, socializing monthly, and a job with headphones, the work aims there, at your definition, described in your words. A lifetime of other people's goals is part of what many late-identified adults are recovering from, and this model structurally can't repeat it.
The shape of it, minus the follow-ups
Solution-focused work is conversational on the surface and highly engineered underneath: every question has a job, every session ends with something noticeable to do or watch for, and progress gets measured against the picture you described, not a symptom checklist. I've kept the follow-up craft off this page on purpose, because the follow-ups are the therapy: anyone can ask about your best day; knowing what to ask next is the part you're hiring.
Where it lives in this practice: SFBT is the engine behind the "practical, not abstract" promise that runs through everything here. It shapes the systems work in executive function therapy, the re-entry ladder in depression work, the pacing decisions in burnout recovery, and the concrete agreements in couples work. Specialty conditions get their specialty treatments; SFBT is why none of them stays theoretical.
The destination
Where you're headed, described concretely, in your words, until we'd both recognize it on sight.
The exceptions
The moments it already partly works, found and studied forensically, because they're your proven prototype.
The step
The smallest move that's genuinely doable this week, built from the exceptions, sized for your real capacity.
The amplifying
What's better gets noticed, credited, and fed back in. Momentum does the rest, and we stop when you say we're there.
All sessions online via secure, HIPAA-compliant video. You must be physically located in Texas, Maine, Montana, or New Hampshire at the time of session. Solution-focused work suits telehealth naturally: the life we're aiming at is right there around you, and the week between sessions is where the actual therapy happens anyway.
Sagebrush Counseling is in-network with several insurance plans across TX, ME, MT & NH (Carelon, Cigna, Aetna, and more, varying by state), and private pay is also available. Visit the services page for plans, rates, and details.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy alongside ACT for autism and adult ADHD, I-CBT, neurodivergent-affirming ERP, CBT-AR, and DBT skills for neurodivergent clients. I'm Amiti Grozdon, M.Ed., LPC, licensed in four states. Meet your therapist →
You don't need another year of why. You need a Tuesday that goes differently.
If you're looking for solution-focused therapy in Texas, Maine, Montana, or New Hampshire, this is the work I do: direct, warm, solutions-driven therapy from a neurodivergent-affirming lens. Sessions are virtual and can be done from anywhere in your state; I hold licenses in all four.
The consultation is free and short. We'll talk by phone (I'll call you at the time you schedule) and see if we're a fit. No pressure, no commitment.