Solution Focused Practice Around the World

Kirsten Dierolf, Debbie Hogan, Svea van der Hoorn, Sukanya Wignaraja, Kirsten Dierolf, Debbie Hogan, Svea van der Hoorn, Sukanya Wignaraja

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429649127
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Solution Focused Practice Around the World provides an exploration of the diverse uses of SF and offers fascinating insights into how the Solution Focused approach is currently used in many applications around the globe.

Bringing together prominent authors, practitioners and trainers, the collection is divided into five sections: theory; therapeutic applications; working with children and adolescents; coaching and working with organisations. Originating from the first international conference on Solution Focused practice spanning all applications of the approach, the chapters provide a grounding in the theory and practice, and an exploration of the breadth and depth of Solution Focused therapy.

All practitioners of the Solution Focused approach globally as well as those working in the wider fields of therapy, social work, education, coaching and human resources will benefit from this text and the applicability of the inherent theories to their area of expertise.

Chapter 1

Listen to the music

Guy Shennan, Sander van Goor and Jonas Wells

Overture

Music is often used as a beginning. The overture was originally the instrumental introduction to an opera, while in the cinema the term refers to a piece of music setting the mood for a film before its opening credits roll. National anthems are played before sporting contests, and fanfares introduce important people or events. However, it is less common for music to be used at the start of a piece of writing, especially an academic one, so this opening paragraph stood out:

We begin with a musical reference, an unusual academic practice perhaps, but a helpful starting point in our thinking to try and “capture” a mood or a sentiment, within which our subsequent analysis emerges. “Downpressor man”, written by Peter Tosh of Bob Marley and the Wailers, depicts elites who oppress and exploit people, but who will one day suffer for their actions …

(McKendrick & Finch, 2017, p. 287)

The mood these authors wanted to capture is one that fitted their concerns about social workers being drawn into a “security safeguarding” role within a national counterterrorism policy, and if you were to listen to the Peter Tosh song, you might well think they succeeded. We also want to capture a mood, though a very different one. This article is, in part, a celebration of the use of music in Solution Focused practice, and its authors are all helping professionals, of different kinds, who use this positive approach. So which song might we begin with, to provide the right sort of setting for what we wish to convey?

We have chosen “I Can Help” by Billy Swan, as it provides a positive counterpoint to the potentially oppressive role a social worker might play, signified by the Peter Tosh song. There is also a disarming simplicity in Swan’s straightforward offer – “If you need a hand, I can assure you this, I can help” – that also fits the Solution Focused approach. We have used music to help create a desired atmosphere in various contexts in which we work, including training courses and conferences, and we began our workshop at the 2017 Frankfurt conference with “Take It Up” by the band World Party, which we hoped would be an uplifting song for people to listen to as they arrived. We invite you, too, to consider what music might fit the beginnings of the various pieces of work you are engaged in.

Introduction

Playing music to begin is just one of many ways in which music can be used as a therapeutic or educational resource. It can have either a central role, as in music therapy (Wigram, Pedersen, & Bonde, 2002), or be more of an adjunct, for example, in the ways songs can be used within a Solution Focused approach (Shennan & Wells, 2014). In this chapter we are going to focus on listening to music and how this can benefit the different types of work that we do.

We will argue that everyone has musical ability, which can be brought to their music listening, and that this ability is a resource we can utilise with clients or in our training. Listening to music can help us listen to our clients, whom it can also help in their everyday lives. For listening to music can have beneficial effects, as we will see, and we will show how these effects can be amplified by bringing music and conversation together, as we did in the first of our two exercises in Frankfurt. Our second exercise involved listening together in a group, which can be a powerful experience, and on which we will share some thoughts. This exercise also acted as an experiment in relation to music being played to accompany another activity, in this case reflection on a given question. We will discuss some of the results of this experiment and connect this with related uses of music as a means of “accelerated learning” (Smith, 1998). We will end with some more music, sharing a useful resource comprising a collection of Solution Focused songs, and selecting one song to bid you, the reader, farewell.

Musical ability

If you can walk you can dance, if you can talk you can sing.

(Zimbabwean proverb)

When we talk about musical ability, we are usually referring to making music, through playing an instrument or singing. People who think they are not musical often say things like, “I cannot keep to the rhythm” or “When I sing, I’m completely out of tune”. If you say things like this, we want to congratulate you on your musical ability. You are able to hear, feel and recognise that the rhythm you are playing is different, or that the tone is out of tune, and musical perception is another aspect of our ability. Not keeping time or being out of tune can happen from a lack of practice, or practising in a way that is not right for you, and the fact that most people recognise rhythm and melody shows that we are all musical beings. In fact, only 4% of people in Western Europe and North America have significant problems in recognising and processing melody and rhythm (Honing, 2009). This minority is said to have amusia, a musical disorder that appears mainly as a defect in processing pitch, though it also encompasses musical memory and recognition (Pearce, 2005).

Benefits of listening to music

Our abilities in perceiving music are helpful to us, as research tells us that music has an influence on our brains, both when we make music and when we listen to it (Croom, 2012). You do not have to be a musician to listen to music. We are all experts in listening to music even without any conscious knowledge of musical rules. Music affects our minds and our bodies. We have all experienced the effect that music can have on our emotions or on the atmosphere around us. It affects our memories too. Listening to music can transport us back to a holiday, or to a special person or event. We also know that it can stimulate our muscles and encourage us to move, as well as help us to relax, rest, and even feel safe. Music, in fact, transcends the mind-body divide in a way that other modes of communication, that focus on words or pictures, do not.

The benefits of music also arise from its social qualities. Musical engagement, whether through making or listening to music (Small, 1998, coined the nice term “musicking” to encompass both activities) can “positively strengthen one’s social bonds with others” (Croom, 2012, p. 6). It facilitates social interaction and cultural expression, and functions as a tool for motivating collective as well as individual actions (Krueger, 2014, p. 1). We have all experienced the differences that music can make to us and our lives. If this is the case for us, then so it will also be for the people with whom we work.

Listening to music and listening to our clients

We can see too that we are musical beings from the variety of ways in which we use music in our speech, including tempo, volume, melody, staccato, legato and timbre. This helps us to communicate the emotional message we want to express and also makes clear when a sentence begins and ends (Honing, 2009). The musicality added to content such as “Well done!” or “That’s so good of you” helps others to be clear when we are giving them compliments, which will sound different from warnings, such as: “Stop doing that!” or “Be careful!” And the musical elements will be different again when saying something romantic to a partner.

We can focus on these musical elements when we are having conversations with our clients. Luc Isebeart (2017) of the Korzybski Institute in Belgium refers to “de papegaaitechniek” – the parrot technique – to refer to how we fit our way of speaking to that of our clients, to complement how we echo their content. By matching the musical aspects of their speech, using their tempo, pitch, timbre, melody, volume and rhythm, we can connect more deeply and enable our clients to feel heard in a musical way. Listening in this way enables us to truly listen to the richness of what the client is telling us.

“What difference has that music made to you?”

As Solution Focused practitioners, we engage in conversations with our clients, and we know how powerful talking and listening can be. We do both in a very specific way. We ask questions that encourage our clients to focus on positive differences in their lives, and, influenced by the seminal work of Milton Erickson (O’Hanlon, 1987), we utilise, by listening carefully for them, the resources they bring to the conversation. We want to share with you how we brought all these ideas together in an exercise we created for our Frankfurt workshop, which drew on people’s musical interests and listening abilities. It is an activity you will easily be able to integrate into your work with your clients.

Participants formed groups of three and each person took a turn to play a piece of music that had made a difference to them. We were utilising the fact that almost everyone now carries a smart phone with them, which is likely to contain favourite songs or music. All three participants listened to a couple of minutes of the music together, and then the person who had chosen the music was asked by one of the other two to talk about the differences it had made to them. The third person then shared some reflections on what they liked about listening to the music and the subsequent conversation revolved around the differences it had made. Everyone had a chance to swap roles and share music, questions and reflections.

We were fascinated by the effect that listening to these pieces of music, and discussing their effects, had on the workshop participants. Picture the scene and remember that this was a world conference: among the 30 or so participants, most regions of the world were represented, and most people did not know each other very well. Yet, after a relatively short period of time, the groups came back energised by the activity. In the ensuing discussion, a consensus was reached around the emergent experience, to the effect that they had connected closely with each other, some saying that they had made friends for life, simply through sharing music that had made a difference to them. It seemed also that the exercise had been experienced as useful irrespective of people’s contexts.

One reason we listen to music is to elicit powerful feelings (Krueger, 2014) and it was interesting to hear about what led to the choices people made. The music chosen reflected times associated with strong emotions, from times that were very tough to those that had been joyful. Playing just a brief portion of music evoked such feelings together with their original context – with interpersonal aspects being a particularly important part of this – and several people reported the resulting conversations to be deeply personal. Listening to music is also an embodied experience, and this was reflected in some comments, and in the ways the exercise merged stories, feelings and something expressed through the body, all within significant social contexts. It was striking how listening to music together made it easier to then talk about such personal content with strangers in a short space of time.

Group listening – and an experiment

The second exercise of the workshop continued the theme of listening to music together, expanding this to the whole group listening to one piece of music. There is a difference between listening alone at home to music and listening with a large number of people in a concert hall. We wondered whether we could utilise the powerful effect of the latter to support or enhance a Solution Focused activity. We decided to perform a sort of experiment, by playing a piece of music twice, with a different instruction to the group on each occasion. First, we asked the group to simply listen to the music, and as they did so, to be mindful of their thoughts and emotions. The music we chose was “Quiescence” by Avishai Cohen, a piece of great and simple beauty. One piano repeated a simple melody, while another in a lower key pondered between two notes, some simple hi-hat drumming meandered in the background and a single trumpet added gloss and depth. The tempo was mindful, though not slow. On the second occasion, the group was invited to reflect, while the music was playing, as follows: “As you are listening to this music, reflect on how music might be useful in your work”.

After playing the music twice, the participants shared their experiences, in particular of the differences between the two times the music was played. Most people reported that, while they had enjoyed just listening to the music, they found the second time confusing. It had been difficult, and for some impossible, to simultaneously listen to the song and reflect on the question. Although what they had been invited to reflect on was thought to be potentially useful, this had got in the way of listening to the music. Perhaps what happened here simply reflects that it is not possible to focus on two things at the same time. Other uses of music suggest there might have been a different way to deliver the second instruction, which might have had a different effect.

Before we consider some of these, let’s end the account of this second exercise with a comment from one participant at the end of the discussion, which connects to something we said above: “This exercise was very useful to me. I learned that I must listen to my clients as I listen to a piece of music I love!”.

Music to aid learning

Dhority (1991) developed various uses of music to aid language learning. He noticed that while teaching his students, playing classical music in the background “helped group attunement and rapport”, and provided “a cohesive element” (p. 95). Certain ways in which he uses music relate to our experiment.

In a “concert session”, the teacher makes two presentations of the same material, first in an “active concert” and then in a “passive concert”. In the first, the teacher delivers the material in a dramatic fashion, fitting his or her tone to the music, so that the spoken text and music are wedded closely together, and the music is a partner to the text rather than being in the background. The idea is that this helps to “carry” the text to the receptive learners (and into their brains), who are reading the text while silently listening to the teacher and music. In the passive concert, typically accompanied by slower music, the teacher reads out the same material but in a more natural way, following the semantics of the text rather than the rhythms of the music. This time the students are invited to close their eyes and listen in a relaxed way to the mixture of words and music, unconcerned either with meaning (bearing in mind they are listening to the new language they are learning) or with whether the text or music is foregrounded.

Dhority’s work was not empirically based, other than on his observations that students benefited from music being used in these ways, and involved speculations about its effects on the brain. In a more recent “accelerated learning” account, which draws on hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Editors’ Biographies
• Contributors’ Biographies
• Introduction to “utilising the everyday in SF practice”
• 1. Listen to the music
• 2. Music as unifying language for a co-creative process: A community art project with a street piano illustrates the Solution Focused approach
• 3. Developing Solution Focused games
• 4. How to use text messages as a dialogue tool in Solution Focused conversations
• 5. Sharing experiences in a Solution Focused way: Reflections and learnings from the first two EBTA summer camps
• 6. Introduction to Solution Focused theory
• 7. Stretching the world: A friendly explanation of SF practice
• 8. Recursive Frame Analysis (RFA) as a research tool for mapping professional helping conversations
• 9. The extended iSelf
• 10. Narrow and wide ways of solution-growing
• 11. Solution Focused markers in programmes for youths
• 12. Introduction to SF in organizations
• 13. Clean Space and Solution Focus
• 14. Meta for solutions: How metaphors are simply unavoidable when focusing solutions
• 15. Being and doing SF as an organisational coach
• 16. How a Solution Focused approach helps a CEO
• 17. Solution Focused work with conflicts: The know and how of Solution Focused mediation
• 18. Room the bloom: Let’s have the right meetings! Meeting culture development in brief
• 19. Solution Focused therapy
• 20. On Metamorphoses: Three different questions, or variations on a theme
• 21. The Thesaurus of useful explanations
• 22. Short-term Solution Focused group intervention for refugee torture survivors
• 23. Solution building with children
• Index