Solution-Focused Couples Therapy: A Clinician’s Guide
with Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby and Elliott Connie
The Stance Precedes the Technique
Most clinicians who try SFBT graft questions onto a problem-focused practice. The reason that approach falls flat is structural: the questions only land when the underlying clinical posture has shifted from “what is wrong?” to “what does this person want?”
By the time you are three couples into a Friday afternoon, you can feel it. The shoulders heavy. The body braced. The quiet thought that you are not sure if you have it in you to do another high-conflict session in October the way you did in August. And underneath that, something more uncomfortable: the question of whether the framework you were trained on for couples therapy is actually the work you most want to be doing for the rest of your career.
This article is about an alternative — solution-focused couples therapy — and what it actually looks like to practice from that stance. In this episode of Love, Happiness, and Success For Therapists, I sit down with Elliott Connie, founder of The Solution Focused Universe and co-author of The Solution Focused Brief Therapy Diamond. What he shared on the podcast genuinely shifted how I think about couples work, and I want to walk you through it.
Most of the clinicians my team and I work with at Growing Self came to coaching psychology not because they had stopped believing in therapy, but because they had run out of room in the problem-focused frame to do the work the way they wanted to do it. The community where that conversation continues for clinicians is the Therapist Growth Collective, and the kind of professional development we built it for is exactly what this article is about.
“I think therapy should be viewed as a relationship more than an occupation.” — Elliott Connie
Moments from this episode
Episode transcript
Elliott Connie: It’s a shocking thing to me that we spend so much of our time trying to figure out what a client’s problem is instead of just doing the damn job of helping them.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Therapists, most of us were trained to believe that effective couples therapy, perhaps all therapy for that matter, starts with understanding the problem deeply. But what if sometimes it’s actually the problem that is the thing keeping your clients or your couples stuck?
Elliott Connie: When people can identify their hope for a future, and then have the realistic belief that that future can be theirs — if I can do those two things, it is impossible to stay the same.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: My guest today is Elliott Connie. He’s the founder of the Solution Focused Universe and one of the most influential voices in solution-focused brief therapy, and he’s going to make the case that a solution-focused stance — not a set of techniques, an entire stance, and a big mental reset that doesn’t necessarily even think about the problem — is actually a better path forward for many of our clients. Elliott, thank you so much for being here on Love, Happiness, & Success for Therapists.
Elliott Connie: In the therapy world, we’ve been indoctrinated to believe our job is to gain some sort of deep understanding of a problem. To be honest with you, that’s ridiculous. If I’m walking down the street and I get shot by an arrow, does it help me to figure out why that person shot me, or what direction the arrow came from? No. The only thing that will help me is taking the arrow out. That’s it.
Elliott Connie: It’s a shocking thing to me that we spend so much of our time trying to figure out what a client’s problem is instead of just doing the damn job of helping them. Human beings are so varied and so complex. Relationship dynamics are so varied and so complex. I could give you the absolute blueprint — here is this couple, here is a 100% understanding of that couple — and then by the time you see them the next week, everything you thought you knew is no longer true.
Elliott Connie: What we know automatically — this is not just therapy, this is life in general — is when people can identify their hoped-for future and then have the realistic belief that that future can be theirs, their behavior changes. That’s it. If I can do those two things, it is impossible for people to stay the same.
Elliott Connie: So much of what we do is based upon a social construct, and we never take a moment to sit and think, “Why am I doing this behavior?” Why does your affectionate routine include a hug and a kiss but not a high five? Just because we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that a hug is a better exchange of emotional experience than a high five. We’ve been taught a hug is the right thing. That’s how problem-focused therapy got installed in us too — we just do it because it’s always been around us to do.
Elliott Connie: My father was an incredibly abusive, angry person. As a consequence, I’ll never forget the first time I started thinking about ending my life. I was 12 years old. I lived several years fighting that battle in my head. When I was an undergrad, 19, 20, I had decided I was going to take my life. I was laying in my dorm room and there was a moment where a higher power spoke to me. I had this clear picture of my funeral, and I thought about my friends going up to the podium and saying, “I didn’t know Elliott was this sad. I didn’t know Elliott was this broken.” I couldn’t handle everybody blaming me for my own death. I wanted them to blame my dad. So in that moment I decided I’ve got to live long enough so that people can know the truth.
Elliott Connie: Over time I realized that in owning my truth I was actually saving my life. I changed my major to psychology. In order for me to live, I had to change the way I viewed myself. My academic advisor, Dr. Marilyn Pugh, said, “Have you ever thought about being a psychotherapist? I think you have a gift.” So I went to graduate school.
Elliott Connie: Two things pissed me off almost immediately. First — they don’t teach you how to do psychotherapy. They teach you how to pass an exam that will allow you to be a psychotherapist. The second thing — you don’t study change in graduate school. You study diagnosis. They teach you what depression, anxiety, schizophrenia look like, but I was like, teach me how to actually do something to help the person have a different life.
Elliott Connie: The program was very heavily focused on cognitive behavioral therapy, which I was terrified to do. It had taken me years to learn how to love myself. CBT taught me it’s my job to find the flaw in my client and use techniques to fix it. I knew if I spent my career looking at other people to find their flaws, I would relearn how to look in my own mirror and focus on mine. Because of my history, I knew that could potentially kill me.
Elliott Connie: Right when I decided to quit, my university hired a professor who taught solution-focused brief therapy. It was the very first time I heard anybody doing therapy in a way that was more about honoring client hope than investigating the problem. I knew this is how I wanted to talk to people, because it’s based on hope — and I needed hope when I was a kid. My professors and peers criticized me, told me it doesn’t work. But I had to stick to my guns. I had to be like, “Yeah, I believe this way helps people.”
Elliott Connie: I think therapy should be viewed as a relationship more than an occupation. Similar to wife, for example. When you identify yourself as Matt’s wife, that’s a relationship status thing. And I think therapy is more of a relationship than an occupation. You cannot be a good wife or husband without knowing yourself. And you can’t be a good therapist without knowing yourself, because everything about what we do is about connection. I can’t connect well if I don’t know myself.
Elliott Connie: Here’s an analogy. I went to Joshua Tree once. Everyone told me it was epic. We woke up at stupid o’clock, drove out there — it was cold, windy, mosquitoes, hiking trails I had to climb. My friends were running around basking in nature. I was like, “I’m out of here.” I went and waited by the car. If I met a woman from Joshua Tree who loved hiking it every weekend, and I’m a Manhattan-in-New-York-City person, the relationship will not work. But a lot of people over-compromise who they are. They build resentment, they’re not their authentic self.
Elliott Connie: A relationship — which therapy is — can only work when I know my true authentic self. My true authentic self was not aligned with practicing CBT 25 years ago. It was fully aligned with solution-focused brief therapy because I like to talk to people about a hope for a future. It’s that simple. If you don’t know who you are as a therapist, then you can’t form relationships effectively with your client. And if you cannot form relationships effectively with your client, they will not change. Doesn’t matter what you say. They’re not going to change unless you have a trustworthy, nurtured, bonded relationship with them.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: For our colleagues listening, many of whom may not really have been exposed to solution-focused therapy except maybe one small chapter in a textbook at Counseling 101 — take us into it. What is it and how do you understand how it works?
Elliott Connie: I’ll start brief and see if we can expand. If traditional psychotherapy can be thought of as a problem-solving approach, solution-focused brief therapy needs to be thought of as a hope-descriptive approach. Because we know the way the human brain works — if you can describe a future that you’d like to live in, hope goes up. And when hope goes up, your behavior changes around the hope.
Elliott Connie: So what we do in solution-focused brief therapy is we have conversations with our clients about the future they would like to be living in, and we ask them to describe that future in as much detail as humanly possible until the pathway forward becomes illuminated. In this approach, the therapist doesn’t have to tell the client what to do. The pathway forward just becomes clear.
Elliott Connie: I had a client who struggled with alcoholism for a really long time. The kind where his liver was poking out, jaundiced skin. He came to therapy because he had gotten his third DUI and his attorney said going to therapy would help with court. I asked him what kind of future he wanted to be living in. He said two really powerful things: “I want to be a better dad, and I want to be a better baseball coach.”
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Not “quit drinking.” I’m noticing the absence of that statement in that answer.
Elliott Connie: He didn’t say a single thing about drinking. To traditional psychotherapy that’s a problem. But to me, I love those answers because I knew something he didn’t know yet — in order to be a better dad and a better baseball coach, at some point drinking would have to be removed. So even though he didn’t overtly say “I want to stop drinking,” he gave an answer wherein drinking is incongruent.
Elliott Connie: I asked him to tell me about his kids. I asked why baseball was so important. In a future when you’re a better baseball coach and dad, what would you catch yourself doing? At the end, I said, “Between now and the next time we meet, would you take one step toward being a better dad?” Drinking never came up.
Elliott Connie: A week or two later he comes back. He says, “I learned something strange. It’s really easy for me not to drink on Wednesdays.” On Wednesdays he was doing the household dry cleaning, baseball practice, things around the house — he was too tired to go to the bar. I said, “Can you add another day?” He came back: “I don’t drink on Thursdays now either.” Then: “I now don’t drink Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday.” Why Sunday? “Because a good dad would lead their family in church.”
Elliott Connie: Then his wife called and canceled the next appointment. She said, “He realized he needed to go to detox to add a fourth day. He has just checked himself into an alcohol detox center.” About a year later, that guy walks back into my office. He gave me his one-year sobriety chip. I still have it. I have no idea what his triggers to drinking were. I have no idea whether his father was abusive. But I know exactly how he got sober. Solution-focused brief therapy is a conversation about what they actually want — deep inside.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: What a master class in connecting with the client around what they want. You’re not telling them what to do. It’s so aligned with the person. This is a type of therapy for the purpose of treatment — and it’s underrepresented in a lot of graduate-level training programs. Can you tell us about your mission training psychotherapists who believe in this approach but haven’t really had the opportunity to dive into it deeply?
Elliott Connie: The simplest way I can answer that is I want to build a community where professionals can be around like-minded professionals who are also trying to get really good and knowledgeable about this way of working. I also want people to have access to very high quality training content — not just solution-focused brief therapy training, but training in general in our field. I hear a lot of terrible stories of “my previous counselor did and/or said this.” I see psychotherapists on social media and I’m like, “Oh my God, the stuff they’re saying actually causes harm.”
Elliott Connie: So I founded an organization called The Solution Focused Universe that is both a community and a home for high quality training content, so no one can ever say, “I don’t know how to do that.” We have a certification program with mentorship and supervision built in. We host weekly free webinars. We host an annual in-person conference. We do a lot to make sure people feel fully supported in their journey of getting good at solution-focused brief therapy.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Earlier you said that at the time we were in grad school, CBT was — and I think in many ways still is — identified as the gold standard. There’s research that supports it. One could argue it’s also a theoretical orientation that’s easier to research than many others. What does the research actually say?
Elliott Connie: Our research is actually very clear in this field. What we know basically is all therapy works and all therapy does not work. One of the most important factors of whether a client is going to change is clinical confidence. If the clinician is practicing without confidence, it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing something researched to be effective or not — that client is not going to change.
Elliott Connie: The simple truth is we fall victim to what our professors tell us more often than we are appropriately and academically scrutinizing. If a professor says, “Solution-focused brief therapy doesn’t work,” then you treat that as concrete knowledge — when the truth is there are multiple meta-analyses (Kim, Smock Jordan, Franklin, & Froerer) that take all available data and compare SFBT to everything else. The answer in all three is yes — and it always works in fewer sessions.
Elliott Connie: The standard for evidence-based is two randomized control studies demonstrating efficacy. So when people were telling me CBT is the most evidence-based, that’s kind of like saying someone is more pregnant than another. You’re either pregnant or you’re not. CBT is often used in research because it lends itself to curriculum very easily, and researchers like curriculums because they can control them. A stats professor told me once she used CBT in her dissertation only because it was the cleanest, most direct way to get the study done — then later saw herself cited as proof CBT is better than other approaches. There’s a structural bias toward research with CBT by non-clinicians because it’s easier for them to do.
Elliott Connie: Your job as a student is to be skeptical of everything you’re told. When a professor tells you “solution-focused brief therapy doesn’t work with real problems,” go find out — is that the truth or not. Because if you don’t, you’re just falling victim to your professor’s confirmation bias. And your job is not to be indoctrinated by somebody else’s confirmation bias.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: As a professional too. Our learning cannot possibly stop as soon as we graduate.
Elliott Connie: But it does. People graduate, and then they just collect CEUs in a random way throughout their career instead of trying to master a skill. Most people, when they graduate, never read another research study and never read another book in our field. The human experience is never static. We’ve been changed by 9/11, by social media and the internet, by the global trauma of the pandemic. If you went to graduate school like I did pre-2020 and never picked up another article or book, you’re not staying up to date on how these events impact human development. People are more prone to anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, overwhelm. If you never read another article and never read another book, I believe you are practicing unethically.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: For a therapist listening who’s still harboring “solution-focused brief therapy is superficial, even if there are short-term gains they wouldn’t last, it’s not durable” — what would they learn in one of your training programs that might change their mind?
Elliott Connie: They would learn that all that is bullshit. It’s not true. SFBT has as much long-term benefit as any other approach. It just accomplishes it in fewer sessions. They would learn there’s research supporting that. But more importantly, they would learn how to actually do it. I would make the argument you don’t learn how to actually do therapy in graduate school. You learn theory, names, places, and dates so you can be regulated. We need regulation, but it is your unique and individual job to be great. That’s your job — to build the skill. You didn’t learn the skill in graduate school. It is your duty to be great.
Elliott Connie: Find me at elliottconnie.com. You’ll learn about my upcoming show The Elliott Connie Show, my podcast, my book publications — and my budding comedy career. Several years ago, somebody saw my content and wanted to make a show about my work. I got a development deal in Hollywood. Tiffany Haddish, who’s a well-known actress and comedian, agreed to be executive producer. As we worked on the show she said, “You’re a really good storyteller. You should do stand-up comedy.” I said, “Absolutely not.” But she convinced me. I now travel and open for Tiffany Haddish in LA, Phoenix, Providence — all over the US doing stand-up comedy.
What to take with you
The stance precedes the technique.
Most clinicians who try SFBT graft questions onto a problem-focused practice. The questions only land when the underlying clinical posture has shifted from “what is wrong?” to “what does this person want?”
Problem-excavation is a clinical tradition, not a clinical necessity.
The reason most of us reflexively investigate the problem first is that we were trained to. Trying a different stance is harder than learning a new technique, but it is the work that actually changes outcomes with stuck couples.
Clinician exhaustion is a clinical variable, not a personal failing.
The cost of problem-focused couples work compounds over a career. SFBT’s hope-descriptive approach is not just better for the client. It is sustainable for the therapist, which is something almost no training program names out loud.
The evidence base for SFBT is real and growing.
Multiple meta-analyses (Kim et al., 2019; Vermeulen-Oskam et al., 2024) have established SFBT as effective across emotional, behavioral, and interpersonal outcomes, often in fewer sessions than alternative modalities.
Therapy is a relationship, not an occupation.
Self-knowledge in the therapist is a precondition for clinical effectiveness, not a soft skill. The clearer you are on who you are and how you practice, the more your clients can change.
Continuing to read the literature is part of practicing ethically.
The field is moving. The clients in front of you are different from the clients you trained on. Stopping at graduation is a quiet form of clinical drift.
Solution-Focused Couples Therapy: A Clinician’s Guide
By the time you are three couples into a Friday afternoon, you can feel it. The shoulders heavy. The body braced. The quiet thought that you are not sure if you have it in you to do another high-conflict session in October the way you did in August. And underneath that, something more uncomfortable: the question of whether the framework you were trained on for couples therapy is actually the work you most want to be doing for the rest of your career. This article is about an alternative, solution-focused couples therapy, and what it actually looks like to practice from that stance.
Most of us came up through training programs that told us, explicitly or implicitly, that effective couples therapy starts with deeply understanding the problem. Map the cycle. Trace the attachment injury. Diagnose the dysfunctional pattern. The unstated promise is that if we just understand enough, eventually the work moves. But many of us have been doing this for ten years and watched the same five couples sit in the same loop for two of those years. We have also watched ourselves get more depleted, more uncertain, and more quietly resentful of the day on our calendar that holds the high-conflict slots.
I want to tell you about a conversation I had recently with Elliott Connie, founder of The Solution Focused Universe and co-author of The Solution Focused Brief Therapy Diamond with Adam Froerer, because what he shared on my podcast genuinely shifted how I think about couples work. Most of the clinicians my team and I work with at Growing Self came to coaching psychology not because they had stopped believing in therapy, but because they had run out of room in the problem-focused frame to do the work the way they wanted to do it. The community where that conversation continues for clinicians is the Therapist Growth Collective, and the kind of professional development we built it for is exactly what this article is about.
What I am going to walk through here is the framework Elliott has been refining for twenty years: the philosophy behind it, what the research actually says, the integration question for clinicians trained in Gottman, EFT, or psychodynamic work, and what it looks like to actually practice from a solution-focused stance. The article will give you language and structure. The work of actually applying any of this with a real couple at 10pm on a Tuesday is what working with a community of clinicians is for.
What is solution-focused brief therapy, really?
Solution-focused brief therapy is a hope-descriptive approach to clinical work. Rather than organizing the session around understanding the client’s problem, it organizes around helping the client describe the future they want in enough detail that the path forward becomes visible to them. The therapist’s job is not to solve. The therapist’s job is to make the future legible.
This is a structural reorientation, not a technique swap. In a problem-focused session, the therapist listens for what is wrong, asks questions to clarify the wrongness, and works with the client to map the dysfunctional pattern. In a solution-focused session, the therapist listens for what the client wants, asks questions that thicken the description of that wanted future, and works with the client to articulate it in enough specificity that the next step becomes self-evident. The client is not given advice. The client is given language for a future they already hold.
What makes this work, neurologically and behaviorally, is that the human brain organizes around what it can see. When the wanted future becomes detailed enough to be visualized, behavior reorganizes around making it happen. This is the principle Elliott returns to again and again on the podcast: when people can identify their hoped-for future and have the realistic belief that future can be theirs, their behavior changes. That is the mechanism. Everything else is technique.
The reason this matters for the clinicians we work with at Growing Self is that the framework is teachable, but the stance is the part that takes real coaching to internalize. The questions are not the hard part. The hard part is letting go of the rescue impulse in real time, with a real couple, when you can feel them looking to you for an answer to their problem.
Why understanding the problem might be what is keeping your couple stuck
The premise that effective therapy begins with thorough understanding of the problem is so foundational to most clinical training that questioning it can feel like questioning the work itself. But here is what Elliott Connie argues, and what the SFBT evidence base increasingly supports: with stuck couples, problem-excavation often deepens stuckness rather than resolving it. When you talk to a couple about why they are dysfunctional, the conversation organizes around dysfunction. When you talk to them about what they want, the conversation organizes around possibility. Both conversations shape the room. We get to choose which one we are hosting. (More on when therapy stalls in our archive.)
Elliott uses an analogy on the podcast that lands hard. If you are walking down the street and you get shot with an arrow, does it help you to understand why the person shot you? What direction the arrow came from? What their motivation was? No. The only thing that helps is taking the arrow out. He argues that we have spent decades trying to figure out the trajectory of the arrow when our clients just want to stop bleeding. The session that thoroughly maps the dysfunctional pattern often produces clarity for the therapist while producing exhaustion for the couple. They came in tired. They leave more tired. And they have to come back next week and do it again.
When therapists talk to my team about feeling stuck with a couple, almost every time the underlying issue is not a missing technique. They have already tried more techniques than the couple knows about. The issue is they have been mapping the same problem from different angles for six months, and they are starting to wonder whether therapy is actually working for these particular clients. That gap, between knowing what is not working and knowing what to do next, is exactly where coaching with our team becomes useful. It is hard to think clearly about your own clinical work from inside the room.
The ongoing peer community where this work continues. Real conversations between clinicians integrating coaching competencies, solution-focused stance, and forward-focused practice. Free to join.
Join the Collective →How is solution-focused brief therapy different from Gottman or EFT?
The difference is not primarily technical. Gottman, EFT, and SFBT all have rigorous frameworks and skilled practitioners getting good clinical outcomes. The difference is in the therapist’s stance: what they are listening for in the room, what they take to be the work, and where they put their attention during the first ten minutes of a session.
A Gottman-trained clinician in the first ten minutes is often assessing the four horsemen, the bid patterns, the physiological flooding markers. The work is to teach the couple to interrupt destructive patterns and build skills. An EFT-trained clinician in the first ten minutes is often listening for the attachment cycle, the surface emotion masking the primary emotion, the moments of unmet longing. The work is to help the couple access and express vulnerable emotion in ways that repair the bond.
A solution-focused clinician in the first ten minutes is listening for something different entirely: any hint of what this couple wants their relationship to look like, any evidence that the wanted future is already partially present, any answer to the question “what would be different if this conversation helped?” The work is to help the couple describe, in vivid detail, the relationship they are trying to build, and to scaffold the gap between where they are and where they want to be. None of these stances is right or wrong. They are different jobs, doing different work. The integration question is the interesting one, and it is part of why when clients disengage is often less about the modality than about the fit between stance and couple.
Elliott is clear on the podcast that he is not asking clinicians to abandon their training. He is asking us to add another stance to the repertoire, one that can be especially useful with stuck couples for whom the problem has been deeply, thoroughly understood. The clinicians who borrow from SFBT most successfully tend to be the ones who already do Gottman or EFT well. They have the foundation. They are just integrating a different stance. That kind of integration is hard to do alone. It is the kind of professional development conversation that happens in the Therapist Growth Collective every week.
What does it mean to practice from a solution-focused stance?
A solution-focused stance is the underlying clinical posture from which all SFBT techniques become coherent. Without the stance, the techniques feel awkward and do not land. With it, the questions almost ask themselves. The stance is what shifts before the practice does, and most clinicians who try and fail with SFBT failed because they were doing the techniques without the stance.
Elliott uses an everyday example to illustrate how stance gets installed in us without our noticing. When you greet your partner at the end of the day, you probably hug them or kiss them. You almost certainly do not high-five them. Why not? Not because hugging is objectively more loving than high-fiving. We hug because we have been culturally taught that hugging is the right way to express affection. The same thing happens in graduate school. We learn to investigate the problem because that is the cultural air in our training programs. We did not arrive at it through clinical reasoning. We absorbed it from the room.
A solution-focused stance starts when the therapist becomes aware of the absorbed assumptions and chooses to set them down. It is more about rethinking the medical model than about learning new questions. It is less about pathologizing what is wrong and more about noticing what the client is already doing that is working. The miracle question, scaling, exception-finding, all of these techniques flow naturally from a therapist who has internalized this stance. They feel forced when the therapist is still operating from the problem-focused frame and just trying out SFBT vocabulary.
Our coaching certification program teaches the solution-focused stance as foundational to coaching psychology, and almost every therapist who comes through it tells us the stance shift was the part that took longest and changed their practice most. This is also why so many therapists end up borrowing from coaching psychology once they get exposed to it. The stance maps onto how they already wanted to be working. What therapists should know about coaching goes deeper on this overlap.
Why solution-focused therapy might be a relief for the exhausted couples therapist
Clinician exhaustion is rarely just about caseload. It is about the cost of sustained empathic immersion in distress, especially with couples whose stuckness mirrors the therapist’s own sense of professional stuckness. Solution-focused therapy, when practiced well, asks something fundamentally different of the therapist’s nervous system. You are not absorbing pain in order to metabolize it for the client. You are scaffolding a description of possibility that the client already partially holds. The energy is different.
Over a ten-year career, the difference compounds. Therapists who do exclusively problem-focused work with high-conflict couples often describe a slow erosion that is hard to name. The work feels heavier than it used to. The hard sessions take longer to recover from. Compassion fatigue becomes a structural feature of the practice rather than an occasional episode. This is not a personal failing. It is a predictable cost of a particular kind of therapeutic immersion done at volume, and SFBT offers a different relationship with that immersion.
On the podcast, Elliott names the relationship reframe directly: therapy is a relationship, not an occupation. The implication for therapist burnout is real. If the work is a relationship, then sustainability requires that the therapist remain a whole human in the room, not a vessel for the client’s pain. SFBT’s hope-descriptive stance keeps the therapist whole in a way that problem-excavation often does not. That is part of why so many SFBT-trained clinicians describe the work as a relief, not just a method.
Most therapists who join the Therapist Growth Collective tell us the relief is partially structural. Having other clinicians in the room who get the work. Having permission to talk honestly about what is hard. Having access to teachers who treat your continued development as expected, not as a sign of inadequacy. The conversation about clinician sustainability is one of the ones we host most often, and it is one of the most useful.
The Therapist Growth Collective is the room where these conversations continue. Real peer relationships, ongoing development, and the kind of professional context that makes sustained clinical growth actually possible.
Join the Collective →What does the research actually say about SFBT?
The evidence base for solution-focused brief therapy is substantial and growing. Multiple peer-reviewed meta-analyses have established SFBT as effective across emotional, behavioral, and interpersonal outcomes, often achieving comparable results in fewer sessions than alternative modalities. This is not a small claim, and it is not a contested one within the SFBT research community.
The most authoritative recent reviews are Kim, Smock Jordan, Franklin, and Froerer’s 2019 update in Families in Society, which reviewed the empirical status of SFBT a decade after their first comprehensive analysis, and the 2024 meta-analysis by Vermeulen-Oskam and colleagues in Clinical Psychology Review, which examined the current evidence across a broad set of psychosocial outcomes and moderating factors. Franklin, Zhang, Froerer, and Johnson’s 2017 systematic review in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy added a process-research dimension, examining what is actually happening inside SFBT sessions that produces outcomes.
If the evidence is this strong, why does CBT continue to dominate the conversation? Elliott gives a structural answer on the podcast that is worth taking seriously. CBT is easy to manualize. It lends itself to controlled studies. Researchers gravitate toward modalities that can be standardized for replication, and CBT meets that requirement better than most relational, dialogic approaches do. The result is that CBT appears in vastly more published trials, gets cited more often, and develops a reputation for being the “most evidence-based” modality. None of this is dishonest. It is just structural. The evidence-based reputation tracks publication volume, not necessarily clinical superiority.
For the clinician, the practical implication is that you are not betraying the evidence base by integrating an SFBT stance into your practice. You are working within it. Research literacy is one of the things we work on actively in the Therapist Growth Collective, not because therapists need to become researchers, but because being able to read and engage the literature is part of how we stay competent over a career. Continuing to grow as a clinician includes staying current with the forward-focused, strengths-based evidence base that has developed alongside the problem-focused literature most of us were trained on.
Why reading this article probably is not enough
I want to be honest with you about something. The framework I just walked you through is real and it works. People use it. Clinical lives change because of it. But I would be doing you a disservice if I let you close this article thinking that reading it was the work.
Here is what almost always happens. You read an article like this one. Something clicks. You feel a little hopeful. You make a mental note to try a solution-focused question next time a couple shows up stuck. And then Tuesday at 10pm, the couple is in the room, the energy is hostile, and your training kicks in. You find yourself doing exactly what you have always done because that is what your nervous system has rehearsed for twelve years. You are not unmotivated, and you are not bad at this. You are trying to override a deeply rehearsed pattern, alone, in the exact moments that pattern is most active. That is the hardest possible time to do new behavior. It is almost impossible to do without support.
What works is having other clinicians in your corner who know the work, who you can debrief a hard session with, who can help you recalibrate before the next one. That is what the Therapist Growth Collective is. Not a course. A real ongoing professional community where this kind of work continues, between people who get it. If something in this article landed somewhere specific, that is worth saying out loud to a real colleague. Come see what the Growth Collective looks like. The door is open if you want to.
Where this work continues
Elliott Connie has spent twenty years building the SFBT field, and his work, his books, and his training organization are excellent resources for the technique side of solution-focused practice. The About the Guest section below lists where to find him.
What working at Growing Self has taught me is that the technique is half the work. The other half is the ongoing professional context around it: peer relationships, supervision, the room where you can say what you are actually struggling with and get a real response. The Therapist Growth Collective was built for that, and we would love to have you in it.
Schedule a free consultation conversation, no pressure. Real conversations about your practice, your next career step, and whether what we do here would help you do what you are already trying to do.
Schedule a Free Consultation →About this episode’s experts
Elliott Connie
Licensed professional counselor based in Texas and founder of the largest training organization in the world dedicated to solution-focused brief therapy. Author or co-author of six books on SFBT, including The Solution Focused Brief Therapy Diamond (with Adam Froerer, Hay House, 2023), Change Your Questions, Change Your Future (Hay House, 2024), and the Norton clinical titles The Art of Solution Focused Therapy, Solution Building in Couples Therapy, and Solution-Focused Brief Therapy with Clients Managing Trauma. Trains clinicians internationally through PESI, Psychotherapy Networker, and The Solution Focused Universe. With executive producer Tiffany Haddish, he is also developing a forthcoming show, The Elliott Connie Show.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Licensed psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and Board Certified Coach. Founder of Growing Self Counseling & Coaching. Host of the Love, Happiness & Success podcast (15M+ downloads). 25+ years of clinical practice. Creator of the Growing Self Institute, where she trains licensed mental health professionals in evidence-based coaching psychology.
Resources Dr. Lisa talked about in this episode
Sources cited in this episode
- Kim, J. S., Smock Jordan, S., Franklin, C., & Froerer, A. (2019). Is solution-focused brief therapy evidence-based? An update 10 years later. Families in Society, 100(2), 127–138. https://doi.org/10.1177/1044389419841688
- Vermeulen-Oskam, E., Franklin, C., Van’t Hof, L. P. M., Stams, G. J. J. M., van Vugt, E. S., Assink, M., Veltman, E. J., Froerer, A. S., Staaks, J. P. C., & Zhang, A. (2024). The current evidence of solution-focused brief therapy: A meta-analysis of psychosocial outcomes and moderating factors. Clinical Psychology Review, 114, 102512. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2024.102512
- Franklin, C., Zhang, A., Froerer, A., & Johnson, S. (2017). Solution focused brief therapy: A systematic review and meta-summary of process research. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 43, 16–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmft.12193
