Suppose a miracle happened

"If it isn't broken, don't fix it. If it works, do more of it. If it's not working, do something different." Steve de Shazer gave those three rules to a whole school of therapy, and they are today's key.

De Shazer was a jazz saxophonist from Milwaukee who became a social worker. Insoo Kim Berg grew up in Korea, trained as a pharmacist, and came to the United States in 1957, where she traded pharmacy for social work in Wisconsin. They married, and in 1978 they opened the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee, where over the next decade they did something nearly backward from the field around them. Therapy at the time went looking for the problem, its roots and its reasons. De Shazer and Berg watched for the exceptions. The Tuesday the couple didn't fight. The morning the drinking didn't start. If the problem wasn't happening every minute of every day, then the person already knew how to do something else, and the work was to notice what, and do more of it. "Problem talk creates problems," de Shazer liked to say. "Solution talk creates solutions."

Berg's story of the method's best-known question is that it came from a client, not from a textbook. A woman worn down by everything said that only a miracle would help, and Berg, instead of arguing, asked her to suppose one did. Tonight, while you sleep, the problem is gone. You don't know it yet. What's the first small thing you'd notice tomorrow morning that tells you? The woman began to describe an ordinary day, in detail, and in the describing she found she already had pieces of it. That became the miracle question. With it came the scale: on a line from zero to ten, where ten is the morning after the miracle, where are you today, and what would half a step up look like? Sessions ran short, often a handful in all, and the second one opened with two words: what's better? De Shazer died in Vienna in 2005, at sixty-five, and Berg in Milwaukee two years later, at seventy-two; the approach they built is taught now in clinics and schools on several continents. The research on it is fair rather than spectacular: modest, consistent gains, strongest for ordinary troubles of behavior and mood.

It's a Healing key because this month is for naming what's hidden, and the most overlooked thing in a hard season is the evidence that it isn't total. Vault Human coaches and doesn't treat; if the trouble is deep or long, the door is a solution-focused therapist. The practice is for everyone. Stop asking why the problem is here. Ask when it isn't, and what you're doing then.