This column will change your life

The miracle cure for life's problems? More of what you're already doing

In difficult times, it’s easy to feel at the mercy of big forces, but we’re more resourceful than we think

“What brings you here?” is the question, according to cliche, with which therapists always begin a first session with a client (or did, anyway, until sessions all moved on to Zoom). But in the 1970s, a therapist based in Milwaukee, Steve de Shazer, began to experiment with another approach. Instead of the standard question – which is pretty much destined to get clients detailing their problems – he started asking what not having problems would look like. Over time, one version of this inquiry became codified as the Miracle Question, which runs as follows: “Suppose that one night, while you were asleep, there was a miracle, and this problem was solved. How would you know? What would be different?”

To be honest, this sort of thing raises my hackles. It smacks of magical thinking, and positive visualisation, and somehow catapulting yourself out of the real circumstances of your life (including your rung on the economic ladder) into a realm of unalloyed bliss. But that wasn’t what happened. More often than not, Shazer’s clients came up with strikingly modest visions. In their imagined miracle worlds, one client might wake up and realise she looked forward to the day, instead of dreading it. Another would find that when she talked to her children, they responded; another might find herself standing up to a workplace bully.

Perhaps part of the reason was the shift in viewpoint caused by looking for signs of change, rather than ways to change. This jolts you out of a first-person perspective into a third-person one – from where it’s also often easier to identify practical next steps you might take.

Even more intriguingly, Shazer, and his wife, Insoo Kim Berg, with whom he went on to found “solution-focused brief therapy”, realised not only that their clients knew what a solution would look like, but that it was often already happening, if only occasionally. A parent who felt they couldn’t cope any more manifestly was coping, some of the time. The couple who fought all the time could remember a pleasant shared evening three months ago. The agoraphobe who never left the house except to buy milk was evidently doing something right: she managed to buy milk, after all. Even when serious depression made life feel joyless, moments of joy could usually be called to mind. (As the Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa liked to say: “Everyone loves something, even if it’s only tortillas.”)

Or, to quote one team of solution-focused therapists, we humans are so imperfect that “we cannot even do our problems perfectly: however chronic, serious, debilitating or complex they are, there are always times when they are less debilitating”. In other words: you must know what to do, because you’re already doing it. So do more of that!

This is an especially useful thought in times like these, given that anyone reading this is likelier than usual to have some problems – and to feel that they are wholly at the mercy of vast natural or economic forces that dwarf their inner resources. Left-of-centre types are more prone to this, I suspect, as we rail at the notion that pull-your-socks-up personal responsibility is a panacea. It isn’t. But the Miracle Question is a reminder that there are, nonetheless, things you could do to make life better. In fact, you’re almost certainly already doing them.

Read this

The therapist Linda Metcalf explains how to discover the problem-solving strategies you already know, but don’t know you know, in her book The Miracle Question.