Pinning Down the Vague Client: Moving from Complaints to Solvable Problems

Clients arrive at your office with a collection of nouns when we require a series of verbs. They describe their lives using abstract states such as depression, low self esteem, or lack of communication. These words act as a fog that obscures the actual interactions taking place between people. We know that a problem described as an internal state is a problem that cannot be solved by a strategic intervention. You must convert these nouns into observable actions. If a client says she is depressed, you do not ask her how long she has felt that way. You ask her what she does when she is being depressed. You ask her what her husband does when he sees her being depressed. We recognize that a problem is only well defined when we can see the sequence of behaviors that maintain it.

I once worked with a young man who claimed he had a social phobia. This label suggested a fixed internal defect that required lengthy exploration. I refused to use his terminology. I asked him to describe the last time he felt this phobia. He told me he was at a coffee shop and wanted to ask for a refill but felt paralyzed. I asked him to describe his posture in that moment. He said his chin was tucked into his chest and his hands were deep in his pockets. We did not discuss his fear. We discussed his chin and his pockets. I instructed him to return to the same coffee shop the next day and keep his chin level with the counter for three minutes without ordering anything. By changing the physical behavior, we changed the social interaction. The phobia disappeared because the behavior that constituted the phobia was replaced by a different action.

We must insist that a problem involves at least two people. Even when a client comes in alone, we treat their complaint as a part of a social system. A man who says he is an alcoholic is describing a behavior that involves his wife, his employer, or his drinking companions. You must ask who discovers him when he is drunk. You must ask what that person says and what the client says in return. Jay Haley taught us that the symptom is a message within a relationship. If you change the relationship, the symptom no longer has a function. You must find out who is being protected or punished by the symptom. If a mother complains that her son is lazy, you must ask what she does to keep him in bed. If she says she does nothing, you ask who cooks his breakfast and at what time. You are looking for the sequence that makes the laziness possible.

You will encounter resistance when you demand specificity. Clients often feel that their abstract labels are a profound truth about their identity. They want you to validate their diagnosis. We do not validate diagnoses. We define problems. When a client tells you they have a personality disorder, you should respond as if you have never heard the term. You might say, I am not familiar with how you specifically use that word. Tell me what you did this morning that you categorize as part of this disorder. This forces the client to move from a static identity to a series of choices and actions. You are looking for the point where the client interacts with another person.

I worked with a woman who said her marriage was a failure. This is an enormous, heavy abstraction that gives a practitioner no place to begin. I asked her to tell me about the last time she realized the marriage was a failure. She said it was on a Sunday morning. Her husband was reading the newspaper and she was drinking coffee. I asked what specifically happened next. She said she asked him if he wanted more coffee and he did not look up. He simply grunted. I asked what she did then. She said she went into the kitchen and cried. Now we have a solvable problem. The problem is not a failed marriage. The problem is a specific sequence: the wife offers a gesture of care, the husband provides a minimal response, and the wife withdraws to cry alone. You can design a directive for that sequence. You can tell the husband to grunt three times for more coffee and once for no coffee. You can tell the wife to join him in his silence until he speaks first. These are concrete interventions.

We use the initial interview to move through four distinct stages as described by Jay Haley. You must first ensure everyone is comfortable. Then you must get a statement of the problem. You then observe the interactions between the people present. Finally, you set a goal for change. The transition from the problem statement to the interaction stage is where most practitioners fail. They stay in the room of ideas rather than the room of actions. You must be relentless in your pursuit of the sequence. When a father says his daughter is rebellious, you ask him to show you how she rebels right now in your office. If she refuses to speak, that is the rebellion. You then address the father. You ask him what he usually does when she refuses to speak at home. If he says he yells, you have your sequence.

You must listen for words that end in -ity or -ness. Words like hostility, anxiety, or helplessness are traps. They invite you to think about the client’s internal state. We do not care about the internal state as much as we care about the external result. If a client says they have high anxiety, you ask them to demonstrate the physical movements of that anxiety. I had a client who showed me how he tapped his foot rapidly whenever his boss entered the room. I told him he was doing a fine job of signaling his boss to stay away. I then instructed him to tap his foot even faster, but to do it only before the boss arrived. This paradoxical instruction changed the function of the foot tapping. It was no longer a symptom of anxiety. It was a chore he had to perform.

We believe that a well formed problem is one that can be counted or observed by a third party. If you cannot see it on a videotape, it is not a problem yet. You must act as the director of this videotape. Ask the client where the camera would be positioned. Ask what the actors are saying. If the client says the actors are feeling sad, you correct them. You say, the camera cannot see sadness. What is the actor doing that makes the audience know they are sad? Are they looking at the floor? Are they wringing their hands? Use this metaphor to sharpen the client’s own perception of their behavior. This process of operationalizing the complaint is the intervention itself. By the time the client can describe the problem in behavioral terms, they are already looking at it from a strategic distance.

I once worked with a corporate team that complained of a lack of transparency. They spent an hour using this word without defining it. I stopped them and asked for a specific example of a time when the transparency was missing. One employee said he found out about a project change through a coworker rather than his supervisor. We now had a concrete failure in the chain of command. We did not need to talk about transparency. We needed to change the rule for project announcements. You will find that most large, abstract complaints crumble into small, manageable behavioral sequences once you apply enough pressure.

You must be careful not to accept the client’s metaphors as reality. If a man says he is at a dead end, you do not ask him how he will find a new road. You ask him what wall he is currently staring at and who built it. We use the client’s language to lead them back to the room where the behavior happens. If he says the wall is made of his wife’s silence, you ask him how he tries to climb that silence. Does he shout? Does he leave the room? Each answer gives you another piece of the sequence. Your goal is to map the entire circuit of the problem until you find the one point where you can insert a directive that breaks the loop.

We see the client’s initial complaint as a ticket for admission, not a map of the territory. The ticket says anxiety, but the territory is a man who avoids his wife by staying late at the office. The ticket says ADHD, but the territory is a boy who has discovered that he can get his parents to stop arguing if he causes a distraction at school. You must look past the ticket. You must observe the social function of the behavior. Ask yourself who would be most inconvenienced if this symptom disappeared tomorrow. The answer to that question will tell you who else needs to be involved in the solution.

You should avoid asking why a behavior occurs. The word why invites the client to provide more abstractions and justifications. It leads back into the history of the problem rather than the current function. Instead, ask how and what. How do you start an argument? What do you do when she stops talking? These questions keep the focus on the present interaction. We are looking for the mechanics of the current situation. If a client tells you they do not know why they are unhappy, you tell them that is excellent. You tell them you do not need to know why. You only need to know how they manage to stay unhappy for so many hours of the day.

I had a client who claimed she was a chronic procrastinator. She talked about her fear of failure and her childhood. I told her I was interested in the physical act of procrastinating. I asked her what she did instead of her work. She said she cleaned her kitchen floor with a hand towel. I told her that she was not procrastinating. She was a professional floor cleaner who happened to have an office job. I gave her a directive to clean her floor only with a toothbrush for one hour every time she delayed a report. This made the behavior so tedious that the office work became the easier option. We solved the problem by defining it as a choice between two specific physical tasks.

We recognize that the practitioner’s primary tool is the ability to maintain a focus on the solvable. You cannot solve a person’s history. You cannot solve their personality. You can only solve what they do with their hands, their feet, and their mouths in relation to others. When you have pinned down the vague client, you have moved them from a state of being to a state of doing. This is the foundation of strategic therapy. You are not a listener of stories. You are an observer of sequences and a designer of new behaviors. Every question you ask must be a step toward a concrete, observable goal that the client can achieve before the next time you see them.

You must remember that the client’s vagueness is often a protective measure. It keeps the practitioner at a distance and prevents any real change from occurring. By remaining abstract, the client remains safe from the risk of trying something different. Your job is to make the abstraction uncomfortable. You do this by being more concrete than the client. If they speak of the heavens, you speak of the dirt. If they speak of their soul, you speak of their schedule. I once had a man tell me his spirit was crushed. I asked him if his spirit felt crushed while he was brushing his teeth or only while he was driving to work. He laughed, but he admitted it was only during the commute. We then discussed what he listened to on the radio. The crushed spirit was actually a reaction to a specific talk show. When he changed the station, his spirit was no longer crushed.

We do not accept the idea that change must be difficult or slow. Change is often a simple matter of breaking a sequence. However, you cannot break a sequence you have not identified. This is why the first half of your first session must be a relentless interrogation of the mundane. You must know the exact time the client wakes up. You must know who speaks first. You must know who makes the coffee. These small details are the materials from which you will build your intervention. Without them, you are merely two people talking in a room. With them, you are a strategist preparing a move.

You must watch the client’s body as they speak. When they move from an abstract label to a specific memory, their posture changes. They might lean forward or move their hands to describe a scene. This is your cue that you are getting closer to the solvable problem. If they remain slumped and speak in generalities, you are still in the fog. You might say, you are telling me about your life in general, but I want to hear about your life in particular. Tell me what happened at ten o’clock this morning. This demand for the particular is the most powerful tool in your office. It strips away the labels and leaves only the behavior.

I once worked with a woman who said she was overwhelmed. I asked her to list every single thing she had to do that day. We wrote them down. There were fourteen items. I asked her how long each item took. The total time was five hours. I told her she was not overwhelmed. she was simply a poor estimator of time. We spent the rest of the session looking at her watch. By the time she left, she was no longer overwhelmed because the word no longer applied to her list. She had fourteen tasks and plenty of time to do them. You must be willing to be this literal. You must be willing to ignore the emotional weight of the word and look only at the facts of the schedule.

We define success as the moment the client performs a new action that interrupts the old sequence. You cannot set a task for a vague problem. You cannot tell a client to be more confident. You can, however, tell a client to keep their head up while walking through a doorway. You cannot tell a couple to love each other more. You can tell them to eat dinner without the television on for three nights. These are the building blocks of change. Your expertise lies in your ability to see these small actions buried beneath the client’s large complaints. You are a prospector looking for the gold of behavior in the mountains of talk.

You will know you have reached a well formed problem when the client can answer the question, how will we both know when this is fixed? If the answer is, I will feel better, you have not finished your work. You must push further. You must ask, what will you be doing that will show me you feel better? If they say, I will be going to the gym, you have a goal. If they say, I will be arguing less with my mother, you ask for the specific number of minutes they will spend in the same room without a fight. This precision is the hallmark of the strategic tradition. It protects you from the trap of endless conversation and it protects the client from the frustration of unclear expectations. Every session should end with a clear understanding of what will be different in the client’s physical world before the next meeting. This is not a matter of hope. This is a matter of design. We are not interested in the client’s insight into their problem. We are interested in the client’s ability to follow a directive that makes the problem impossible to maintain. If you can define the problem behaviorally, you can solve it strategically.

We start with the premise that every symptom is a social act. You cannot understand a husband’s sudden inability to drive a car without looking at who takes the wheel when he sits in the passenger seat. When we see a symptom, we look for the hierarchy it supports or disrupts. A symptom is a move in a game that involves at least two other people. You must identify the primary triad. This is usually a child and two parents, or a husband, a wife, and an overinvolved mother-in-law. We do not look at the interior states of these people. We look at the sequence of their interactions. You ask yourself what happens immediately after the symptom appears. If the wife gets a panic attack and the husband stays home from his bowling league, the panic attack has functioned as a command. It is a command that the husband cannot ignore without looking like a monster. We call this the power of the weak.

I once worked with a twenty-two year old man who developed a persistent, hacking cough that had no medical basis. He had dropped out of his final year of university and moved back into his parents’ home. His mother spent her entire day monitoring his breathing and preparing herbal infusions. His father, a man who usually worked long hours at an engineering firm, began coming home early to discuss his son’s health. The cough had successfully reorganized the family hierarchy. The son was now the central figure who dictated the schedule of the adults. My first task was not to treat the cough but to disrupt the sequence. I told the father that the son’s recovery depended on his mother spending more time outside the house to allow the son to breathe independently. I instructed the father to take the mother to a cinema three nights a week, leaving the son alone. When the social sequence changed, the cough became unnecessary, and it disappeared within fourteen days.

Strategic therapy requires you to be comfortable with the exercise of authority. We do not negotiate with symptoms. You give directives that force a change in the family structure. Jay Haley observed that people in a hierarchy are often caught in a struggle over who defines the relationship. A symptom is a way of defining a relationship while denying that you are doing so. When a wife says she cannot go to a party because of her depression, she is defining the relationship as one where the husband must stay home and care for her. However, she can claim that she is not doing this on purpose. She says the depression is doing it to her. You bypass this denial by prescribing the symptom. This is a core strategic move. You take the behavior that the client claims is involuntary and you turn it into a required task.

You tell the wife that she must be depressed for exactly two hours every morning from eight until ten. You instruct her to sit in a specific, uncomfortable wooden chair in the kitchen. She is to do nothing but be depressed during those two hours. She cannot read, she cannot watch television, and she cannot talk to her husband. If the husband tries to comfort her, she must tell him that she is busy working on her depression and cannot be disturbed. By making the symptom a chore, you strip it of its spontaneous power. It is no longer an excuse to control her husband. It is now a tedious job that you have assigned her. If she follows your instruction, she is proving that she can control the timing and the nature of the depression. If she refuses to sit in the chair because she wants to go for a walk, she has cured herself in order to disobey you.

We use the ordeal to make the symptom more difficult to maintain than it is to give up. This is not a punishment. It is a requirement that the client perform a constructive but arduous task every time the symptom occurs. Milton Erickson often used this technique with insomnia. I applied this to a woman who suffered from compulsive checking of her front door locks. She would spend forty-five minutes every night turning the deadbolt back and forth. I told her that she could check the lock as many times as she wished. However, for every time she turned the lock after the first time, she had to stand in her garage and practice her golf swing for thirty minutes without a ball. She hated exercise and she hated the cold garage. After three nights of swinging a golf club in the dark at two in the morning, her interest in the security of the front door diminished. The cost of the symptom had become too high.

You must be precise when you issue an ordeal. You do not suggest it as a possibility. You mandate it as the only way forward. You tell the client that since they cannot stop the behavior, they must at least make it productive. I once told a man who could not stop criticizing his wife that he had to polish all the silver in the house every time a harsh word left his mouth. He had to use a specific brand of polish and a small, soft cloth. He had to work until every fork and spoon shone like a mirror. You are looking for a task that the client perceives as a greater nuisance than the symptom itself. When the symptom appears, the ordeal must follow immediately. There can be no exceptions.

We also use indirect directives when the client is too oppositional for a direct command. If you tell a rebellious teenager to stop arguing with his father, he will argue with you instead. You do not tell him to stop. You tell him that he is arguing incorrectly. You instruct him that if he wants to prove he is an adult, he must only argue with his father on Tuesday and Thursday evenings for fifteen minutes. You give him a stopwatch and tell him he must keep the argument focused on a single topic, such as the lawn or the trash. You are now the one in charge of the arguing. By following your rules for how to argue, he is acknowledging your authority. You have moved the conflict from a spontaneous outburst to a managed performance.

You must watch the client’s body language the moment you give a directive. If they agree too quickly, they are likely lying to you. If they argue and protest, you know you have hit the mark. We value the protest because it shows the client is taking the directive seriously. I often wait until the very end of a session to deliver the most important instruction. I stand up, walk toward the door, and give the directive as if it were an afterthought. This prevents the client from having the time to debate it with me. They leave the room with the instruction ringing in their ears. You do not want them to analyze the instruction. You want them to perform it.

We do not care if the client understands why they are doing what they are doing. Insight is a luxury that often interferes with change. In the strategic tradition, we believe that the action creates the change in the mind, not the other way around. You do not wait for a man to feel confident before you tell him to ask a woman for her phone number. You tell him to ask for five phone numbers from five different women by next Tuesday. You specify the exact words he must use. You tell him to expect rejection. When he performs the action, his view of himself changes because his behavior has changed. You are the architect of that behavioral change. Your success is measured by the change in the social sequence, starting with the very first directive you issue in the room. If the husband’s eyes flicker toward his wife for permission before he answers your question, you already know who is in charge of the symptoms.

When you observe that subtle exchange of permission between a husband and a wife, you are witnessing a structural defect in the family hierarchy. We understand that a symptom is often the only way a person can exert influence within a rigid or confused social system. Your task is to reconfigure that hierarchy through action rather than explanation. If you try to explain the power imbalance to the couple, they will likely use your explanation as a new weapon in their existing conflict. You must instead issue a directive that requires a different organizational structure to be performed. I once worked with a couple where the wife complained that her husband was entirely passive and could not make a single household decision. However, whenever he attempted to choose a restaurant or a weekend activity, she would provide a list of reasons why his choice was flawed. She was effectively the commanding officer of his passivity. I instructed the husband to make three secret decisions over the following week. He was not to tell his wife what they were until after they had been executed. One of these decisions involved him purchasing a piece of furniture for the living room without her consultation. By following this directive, the husband had to occupy a space of authority, and the wife had to occupy a space of acceptance. The symptom of passivity vanished because the structure that required it had been disrupted.

We focus on the present interaction because the history of a problem is a collection of memories that you cannot change. You can change the way people behave toward each other this afternoon. When a client brings you a story about their childhood to explain why they cannot speak up at work, you acknowledge the story briefly and then return to the mechanics of their current workplace interactions. You ask them to identify which foot they lean on and where they look when the supervisor speaks. You are looking for the physical manifestation of the hierarchy. If the client says they look at the floor, you give them a directive to look at the supervisor’s left earlobe instead of their eyes. This is an Ericksonian maneuver. It is a slight deviation that is easier for a resistant client to achieve than direct eye contact. It breaks the old sequence of submission without triggering the anxiety of a direct confrontation. Once the client changes one small physical element of the interaction, the entire sequence begins to reorganize.

You must remain the person in charge of the session at all times. If the client attempts to take control by being more expert than you or by proving their problem is unsolvable, you must use their resistance as the engine of change. We do not fight resistance. We encourage it or redirect it. We use the follow-up session as a diagnostic tool. If the client followed the instruction to the letter, you know they are cooperative and you can move toward more direct structural changes. If they failed to follow the instruction, you must decide if they are being oppositional or if your directive was not sufficiently precise. You do not criticize the client for failing to follow a directive. You take the blame yourself. You tell the client that you must have given the instruction poorly or that you overestimated their current strength. This maneuver maintains your authority while preventing a power struggle. It also places a burden on the client to prove they are stronger or more capable than you suggested, which often leads them to follow the next directive more carefully.

You must be precise in your language when giving these instructions. You do not suggest that a client might want to try a new behavior. You tell them exactly what to do, when to do it, and for how long. You use their own words to frame the task. If a client calls their anxiety a buzzing in their ears, you use that word. You might tell them to listen to that buzzing for ten minutes every hour on the hour. You are moving them from being a victim of a sensation to being a person who can summon and dismiss that sensation on a schedule. We avoid the trap of seeking the client’s permission to be directive. If you ask a client if they would like a homework assignment, you have already lost your position in the hierarchy. You are the expert who knows how to solve the problem. You deliver the directive as a necessary part of the cure. If the client asks why they must do something that seems nonsensical, such as counting the tiles on their bathroom floor, you tell them that the reason will become clear once the task is completed. You are looking for a behavioral result, not an intellectual agreement.

I once worked with a young man who was failing out of college because he could not stop playing video games. His parents were paying his tuition and were constantly lecturing him about his future. The more they lectured, the more he played. The sequence was clear: the parents’ over-functioning was being met by the son’s under-functioning. I told the parents they must stop talking about school entirely. Instead, I instructed them to ask their son for help with their own technology problems every evening at the exact time he usually started playing his games. I told the son that he was required to spend at least one hour teaching his parents how to use various apps. This moved the parents into a position of needing the son’s expertise, and it moved the son into a role of responsibility. It also physically removed him from his computer during his peak gaming hours. The school performance improved not because we discussed his motivation, but because we reordered the family’s evening interactions.

Termination is a strategic move. You do not wait for the client to feel perfect. You look for the moment when the problematic social sequence has been replaced by a functional one. You might suggest a longer interval between sessions to see if the client can maintain the change without your direct intervention. If they return and report a relapse, you do not treat it as a failure. You treat it as a necessary part of the process. You might even tell the client that they changed too quickly and that a small relapse is a sign that they are integrating the change more thoroughly. This prevents the client from becoming discouraged and keeps the focus on the long-term structural reorganization. We are always watching for the moment the client takes credit for the change. When a client says they decided on their own to stop arguing with their boss or to start exercising, you do not remind them of the directives you gave. You agree with them. You tell them that you are impressed by their initiative. Our goal is not to be recognized as the source of the change, but to ensure the change happens and remains in place within the client’s social circle.

When you sit with a family, you must observe who speaks for whom. If a mother answers every question you direct at her teenage daughter, you are seeing a structural violation that maintains the daughter’s symptomatic behavior. You do not point this out. Instead, you might ask the mother to go to the waiting room to find a specific magazine for you while you speak to the daughter alone. This is a physical intervention that establishes a temporary perimeter. When the mother returns, you do not report what the daughter said. You keep that information as a private bond between you and the child, which alters the power balance away from the mother’s over-involvement. Every movement you make in the room is a tactical choice designed to test and then reorganize the client’s reality. Success is not found in the client’s insights but in the fact that they are now behaving in ways that make the old symptoms unnecessary. You observe the way the father now sits in his chair with his shoulders back and realize the hierarchy has finally stabilized and the problem has been solved through simple action. We must always remember that the client’s own external environment is the ultimate judge of the therapeutic intervention’s total durability.