therapist as strength finder

Most therapy sessions revolve around problems. That's the contract, after all. Client arrives with a problem, therapist helps solve it. The dance is familiar—each week peeling back layers of anxiety, trauma, and neuroses in search of understanding and healing.

But what if, for just one session, we stopped?

What if, instead of digging into what's broken, we explored what's working?

This is what I discovered recently —a deceptively simple insight that challenges the fundamental premise of how we help others heal.

The Problem with Problems

When someone walks into a therapist's office, they immediately become "the client with depression" or "the person struggling with anxiety."

Their identity becomes intertwined with their diagnosis, their struggle, their pain.

Week after week, therapist and client return to these problems, studying them from every angle. There's value in this approach, certainly. Understanding is often the first step toward healing.

But it creates a peculiar dynamic. The relationship itself becomes defined by pathology. The lens through which the therapist sees the client narrows to focus only on what's broken.

What would happen if we widened that lens, even temporarily?

Taking a Problem Vacation

A problem-free session isn't about denial or toxic positivity. It's not pretending problems don't exist. Rather, it's creating deliberate space to explore the client as a whole person—with strengths, abilities, passions, and resources that exist independently of their struggles.

This space allows both client and therapist to breathe. To remember that the person sitting in the chair is more than their diagnosis, more than their trauma, more than the issues that brought them to therapy in the first place.

In the world of Solution Focused Brief Therapy—pioneered by George, Ratner, and Iveson—this approach isn't just a nice break. It's transformative.

Why does it work?

Seeing the Whole Person

When we focus exclusively on problems, we create a peculiar tunnel vision. The client becomes a constellation of symptoms rather than a complex human being with a rich internal life.

A problem-free session disrupts this pattern. Suddenly, the therapist sees that the anxious client is also a talented artist. The person with depression is also a devoted parent with a deep capacity for love. The trauma survivor is also someone who finds daily moments of joy in small rituals.

This shift in perspective isn't just cosmetic. It fundamentally alters how the therapist understands and engages with the client. It creates space for new approaches, new solutions, new pathways forward.

And the client feels this shift too. Being seen as a whole person rather than a collection of problems is itself profoundly therapeutic.

Mining for Hidden Resources

Every person has hidden resources—internal strengths and external supports they may not recognize in themselves. A problem-free session becomes a mining expedition for these overlooked assets.

Maybe the client who struggles with confidence at work is actually remarkably courageous in other contexts. Maybe the person who feels isolated has actually built meaningful connections they don't fully appreciate. Maybe the individual who feels perpetually overwhelmed has actually developed impressive coping strategies they use without conscious awareness.

These discoveries aren't trivial. They're the raw materials from which sustainable healing is built.

As therapists, we can use these insights to help clients transfer strengths from one area of life to another. We can point to evidence of their resilience when they're feeling defeated. We can remind them of their demonstrated capacity to overcome when they feel stuck.

From Hopelessness to Possibility

There's something insidious about focusing exclusively on problems. Over time, it can reinforce a client's sense that they're fundamentally broken, that healing is impossible, that they'll always be defined by their struggles.

A problem-free session counters this narrative. It reminds both client and therapist that within the same person who suffers also lives someone who succeeds, creates, connects, and thrives.

This shift from deficit-focused to strength-focused thinking doesn't happen in a single session. But even one problem-free conversation can plant the seed of possibility, challenging the client's belief that they are nothing more than their problems.

And possibility is the antidote to hopelessness.

The Fork in the Road

As therapists, we face a critical choice with each client:

We can proceed as if they are helpless without us—as if our expertise and insight are the only path to their healing.

Or we can recognize that they are active participants in their own recovery—people with agency, wisdom, and resources that exist independently of our professional intervention.

The first path creates dependency. The second creates partnership.

The first path may feel good for the therapist's ego. The second actually serves the client.

A problem-free session makes this choice explicit. It demonstrates our belief that the client is more than their struggles—that they bring valuable strengths and insights to their own healing process.

The Dance of Recognition

What happens in these problem-free conversations is a peculiar kind of alchemy. By acknowledging what's right with a client rather than what's wrong, we help them recognize themselves in a new light.

Many people who come to therapy have internalized a narrative of brokenness. They've come to identify so strongly with their struggles that they can no longer see their strengths clearly, if at all.

But when a therapist—a trained professional whose job is to see and understand—points to these strengths with genuine appreciation, something shifts. The client begins to reclaim parts of themselves they've forgotten or discounted.

This isn't just feel-good encouragement. It's inviting the client to expand their self-concept to include not just what's broken but also what's intact—what's always been working, perhaps quietly in the background.

The Practicality of Success

A problem-free session also serves a practical purpose.

By identifying past successes—times when the client faced similar challenges and overcame them—we create a roadmap for current challenges.

What strategies worked before? What personal qualities helped them navigate difficult terrain in the past? What external supports made the difference?

These aren't academic questions. They're practical ones that yield actionable insights.

When a client can recognize and replicate previous successes, they tap into an internal wisdom that's far more powerful than any technique a therapist could teach.

The Courage to Pause

It takes courage for a therapist to pause the problem-focused work of therapy. There's an unspoken pressure to justify our professional existence by continuously addressing pathology.

But sometimes, the most therapeutic thing we can do is stop treating the client as someone who needs to be fixed.

This doesn't mean abandoning the important work of addressing trauma, anxiety, depression, or other legitimate struggles. It means creating balance—remembering that healing happens not just by understanding what's broken but by strengthening what's whole.

In my training as a therapist, this insight has been transformative. It's changed how I see my clients, how I structure our sessions, and how I understand my role in their healing journey.

I no longer see myself solely as a problem-solver but also as a strength-finder. Not just as someone who helps clients understand their pain but as someone who helps them rediscover their power.