Asking to Borrow Money From My Clients.

Imagine you’re talking to someone you’ve just met.

You’re telling them about your life. Maybe you’re describing a problem you’ve been wrestling with for months. You’re explaining what’s been going wrong, what you’ve tried, what you’re worried about.

And then, suddenly, they say:

“So… if you woke up tomorrow and the problem was solved, what would you notice first?”

You might reasonably think: Excuse me?

This is one of the strange things about Solution-Focused Brief Therapy. We sometimes ask people to imagine a future in which the very thing that brought them into therapy is no longer a problem.

It can be a surprisingly strange request.

I recently read an article by therapist and researcher Tom Strong that gave me a new way of thinking about this. He compares introducing the famous “miracle question” to something much more ordinary: asking someone to borrow money.

Think about it. If you’ve just met someone, you probably wouldn’t launch into:

“Hi. Nice to meet you. Can I borrow $200?”

You’d probably work your way there.

You’d have a conversation. You’d establish some context. You might say something like, “This is a little awkward to ask…” You’d make the request in a way that gives the other person a chance to understand what you’re asking and decide how they want to respond.

In other words, you’d bridge to the strange question.

I think about this sometimes when I’m practicing SFBT.

Because from the therapist’s side of the room, asking someone to imagine their life going remarkably well can occasionally feel a little like asking to borrow money.

Okay, we’ve been talking about your divorce, your anxiety, your loneliness, and the fact that you haven’t felt like yourself for six months. And now I’m going to ask you to imagine waking up tomorrow completely satisfied with your life. Just go with me here.

There is an art to making that transition.

And I think this matters because therapy shouldn't require you to suspend your disbelief or play along with your therapist's favorite questions.

If a question feels strange, you’re allowed to think it’s strange.

You’re allowed to say, “I don't know.”

You’re allowed to say, “That’s impossible.”

You’re even allowed to say, “I have no idea where you're going with this.”

In fact, those responses can be useful. The goal isn't to convince you that everything is going to be fine. It isn't to put a positive spin on something painful. And it certainly isn't to pretend that your problems aren't real.

The idea is a little different: sometimes, when we spend a long time describing what isn't working, it becomes difficult to notice what would be working.

So I may ask you to imagine it.

What would you notice?

What would you be doing differently?

What would other people notice about you?

What might feel different in an ordinary Tuesday afternoon?

Not because I expect you to magically know the answers.

But because there may be something useful waiting in the attempt to imagine them.

And maybe that's one of the things I like about SFBT: the therapist isn't simply asking, “What's wrong?” and then trying to fix it.

We're also asking, sometimes rather awkwardly:

“What would you like your life to look like instead?”

And then we're trying to have a conversation about that together.

So if your therapist asks you a strange question, you don't have to worry that you've missed something.

It may just be that we're asking to borrow $200.

And we're trying our best to make the request in a way that makes you want to hand us the wallet.