When the Problem IS the Solution: Recognizing Attempted Fixes That Backfire

When a client enters your office, they do not bring only a problem. They bring a history of failed solutions. These solutions are the very things keeping the problem alive. We often see families who are stuck in a cycle where the harder they try to fix a behavior, the more that behavior persists. You will notice this when a parent describes their efforts to help a depressed teenager. The parent offers encouragement, suggests social outings, and provides constant reassurance. The teenager responds by withdrawing further. The parent then increases the frequency and intensity of the encouragement. This is what we call more of the same. The parent has defined the problem as the teenager’s sadness, but the clinical problem is actually the parent’s repetitive attempt to cheer the teenager up. In strategic therapy, we do not look for the root cause of the sadness in the past. We look at the current sequence of interaction that prevents the sadness from resolving naturally.

We view the social system as a self regulating mechanism. When one person moves, the others move to maintain a specific balance. If a wife complains that her husband is irresponsible with money, her solution is often to take over all the financial planning. She tracks every cent and questions every purchase he makes. Her husband responds by becoming even less responsible because he knows his wife will catch any mistake. He might even hide receipts or lie about spending to avoid her scrutiny. His secrecy then justifies her increased surveillance. The solution of the wife and the problem of the husband are two sides of the same coin. You cannot change one without interrupting the other. Your task is to identify this loop and find the point of most effective intervention.

I once worked with a man who suffered from chronic insomnia. He had spent three years trying every possible method to force himself to sleep. He took supplements, he followed strict evening routines, and he spent hours lying in the dark trying to relax his muscles. His solution was the act of trying to sleep. As we know, sleep is a natural process that occurs when one stops trying to stay awake. By making sleep a goal, he turned his bedroom into a place of performance anxiety. The more he focused on the need for rest, the more alert his brain became. I told him that his problem was not a lack of sleep, but an excess of effort. I instructed him to stay awake on purpose. I gave him a specific task: he was to sit in a hard chair in his living room and read a technical manual that he found exceptionally boring. He was forbidden from going to bed until he could no longer keep his eyes open. Even then, he was to set an alarm for five in the morning and begin the manual again if he woke up. By prescribing the very thing he feared, which was being awake and bored, I removed the pressure to sleep. When he stopped trying to solve the insomnia, the insomnia vanished.

You must be precise when you map these sequences. You ask the client to describe a specific episode from start to finish. You want to know who said what and what happened next. If a manager tells you they have a difficult employee who refuses to take initiative, you ask the manager how they handle that refusal. The manager might say that they provide detailed instructions and check in every hour to ensure the employee is on track. You then see the pattern. The manager’s over functioning allows the employee to under function. The manager’s solution is the reason the employee has no room to take initiative. You would instruct the manager to give a vague assignment and then become unavailable for the rest of the afternoon. This forces the employee to make a choice: either do nothing and face the consequences or find a way to complete the task independently.

We do not provide these instructions because they are logical in a traditional sense. We provide them because they are strategically necessary to break a cycle. Most clients have already tried the logical approach. If the logical approach worked, they would not be in your office. As practitioners, we value the outcome over the explanation. You do not need the client to understand why their solution is failing. In many cases, an explanation only gives the client more material to use in their existing pattern. You want the client to behave differently. If you can change the behavior, the feelings and thoughts will follow. This is the opposite of the traditional view that insight leads to change. In our tradition, change leads to insight, or sometimes, change occurs and insight is never necessary.

I worked with a couple where the wife felt that her husband did not contribute enough to the housework. Her solution was to criticize him and then do the work herself while acting martyred. He responded by doing even less, as he felt he could never satisfy her standards anyway. The more she criticized, the more he retreated into hobbies outside the home. I instructed the wife to go on a strike, but a very specific kind of strike. She was to continue doing her own laundry and cleaning her own space, but she was to stop doing anything for him. When he ran out of clean shirts, she was to remain cheerful and tell him she was sure he could handle it. She was not allowed to complain or act angry. By removing the criticism and the service simultaneously, I took away his reason to retreat. He was forced to confront the reality of his own laundry without the buffer of her anger to blame for his unhappiness.

You must watch for the moment the client describes their failed solution with a sense of pride or moral necessity. They might say they have been very patient or that they have tried everything a good parent should do. This is a signal that the solution is deeply embedded in their identity. When a solution is tied to a person’s sense of being a good person, it is much harder for them to give it up. You will need to frame your intervention in a way that respects their intent while redirecting their action. You might tell a self sacrificing mother that she is so dedicated to her son that she must now try the most difficult task of all: allowing him to fail so that he can finally learn how to succeed. This reframes her withdrawal of help as an act of even greater sacrifice.

We recognize that the family system often organizes itself around a symptomatic member. The symptom becomes the focal point that keeps the family together or prevents a more difficult conflict from surfacing. If a child develops school phobia, the parents may stop fighting with each other to focus on the child’s crisis. Their solution is to provide constant support and stay home from work to be with the child. This solution maintains the school phobia because the child senses that their recovery would lead back to the parental conflict. You identify the function of the symptom by looking at what would happen if the problem disappeared tomorrow. If the disappearance of the problem would lead to a divorce, the school phobia is a solution to the marriage. You must address the sequence of the parents’ overprotection to allow the child to return to school.

I recall a case of a young woman who had frequent panic attacks. Her parents’ solution was to monitor her breathing and call her ten times a day to check on her status. This constant monitoring served as a reminder that she was fragile and incapable of managing her own physiology. I instructed the parents to start a ritual where they would sit with her for fifteen minutes every morning and encourage her to have the biggest panic attack possible. They were to coach her to breathe faster and try to make her heart race. By making the panic attack a scheduled, encouraged event, we moved it from the category of an uncontrollable catastrophe to a boring chore. When the daughter tried to panic on command and failed, she realized she had more control than she thought. The parents stopped their constant check ins because the morning ritual replaced the need for ongoing surveillance.

You will find that the most effective interventions are often the ones that seem the most counterintuitive. You are not looking for a fix that makes sense to the neighbors. You are looking for a fix that interrupts the specific sequence you have observed. We do not worry about being liked by the client in the traditional sense. We worry about being effective. Your authority comes from your ability to see the pattern that the client is blind to. When you point out that the fire they are trying to put out is being fed by the very water they are throwing on it, you change the entire clinical situation. You must be prepared to stand firm when the client tells you that your suggestion sounds crazy. You simply tell them that their sane approach has not worked for five years and perhaps it is time to try something different. The persistence of the problem is the only justification you need for a radical intervention. A mother who constantly reminds her son to do his homework is a mother who is currently doing her son’s worrying for him. As long as she worries, he does not have to. Your intervention is to stop the mother from worrying so that the son can begin.

You tell the mother that her reminders are a form of theft. You explain that every time she tells her son to start his homework, she steals his opportunity to feel the natural pressure of a deadline. By taking the burden of his schedule onto her own shoulders, she ensures he remains a child who does not need to look at a clock. We call this a reframe. You are not asking her to be less helpful. You are asking her to stop being a thief of her son’s maturity. This shift in definition forces the mother to view her helpfulness as a hostile act against her son’s development. If she continues to nag, she must admit she is intentionally keeping him young. If she wants him to grow, she must endure the discomfort of his potential failure.

We know that a system resists change through the homeostatic pull of these established roles. When you interrupt the cycle, the family will try to recruit you back into the old pattern. The mother might call you between sessions to report that her son has not touched a book in three days. You do not offer comfort. You do not tell her that everything will be fine. Instead, you emphasize the danger of her interfering now. You tell her that if she speaks even one word about school, the entire progress of the last week will vanish. You make her silence the most important task of her life. I once worked with a corporate manager who spent sixty hours a week fixing the errors of his subordinates. He complained of exhaustion, yet he refused to delegate because he believed his team was incompetent. I told him that his staff stayed incompetent because he provided a safety net that prevented them from hitting the floor.

I instructed this manager to commit one intentional, subtle error in his own work every day for a week and allow his staff to find it. This was a direct violation of his professional identity. By making an error, he forced his team to become more vigilant. If they missed the error, he saw the true extent of the problem. If they found it, he had to congratulate them for being more observant than he was. This intervention changed the hierarchy. He was no longer the perfect overseer. He became a human being who required a competent team to support him. You apply this same logic when a client presents with a symptom that they claim is involuntary. If a man says he cannot stop his hand from shaking, you do not try to calm him. You ask him to see if he can make the hand shake even faster.

We use the prescription of the symptom to move the behavior from the realm of the involuntary to the realm of the voluntary. If the client can make the hand shake faster, he is now in control of the shaking. If he refuses to make it shake faster, he has stopped the behavior through an act of will. In both cases, the symptom has lost its power as an autonomous force. You must be precise with your delivery. You do not suggest that the client try to shake. You command the client to shake for exactly five minutes by the clock. I used this with a woman who suffered from sudden bouts of weeping that she could not explain. I told her she was clearly not weeping enough. I instructed her to set an alarm for ten o’clock every morning and weep for fifteen minutes.

She had to sit in a specific, uncomfortable wooden chair in her kitchen and focus entirely on her sadness. If she felt like stopping after five minutes, she was forbidden from doing so. She had to continue until the fifteen minutes were complete. By the third day, she found the task of weeping to be an annoying chore. The spontaneous weeping disappeared because the scheduled weeping was too much work. We are making the symptom a burden rather than a relief. This is the foundation of the ordeal. You attach a task to the symptom that is more difficult than the symptom itself. The task must be constructive but arduous. If a client complains of insomnia, you do not discuss his sleep hygiene. You give him a directive.

You tell him that if he is not asleep within twenty minutes of hitting the pillow, he must get out of bed. He must then spend the next hour scrubbing the bathroom floor with a small brush or polishing every piece of silverware in the house. He is not allowed to read or watch television. He must perform manual labor. When the hour is up, he may return to bed. If he does not fall asleep immediately, he must get up and scrub again. The client soon finds that his body would rather sleep than clean the house at three in the morning. I had a client who used this method to stop a repetitive grooming habit. Every time he picked at his skin, he had to walk up and down ten flights of stairs. After three days, the urge to pick disappeared because the prospect of the stairs was too exhausting.

You must remain the expert in the room who understands that logic is often the enemy of change. If you try to reason with a client about why they should stop a behavior, you are engaging in a debate. We do not debate with clients. We give instructions that bypass their resistance. If a client tells you they cannot follow your instruction, you do not argue. You apologize for being too demanding and then give an even more difficult task. You might say that perhaps they are not yet ready to change, and therefore they should increase the symptom by ten percent this week to better understand it. This puts the client in a double bind. If they increase the symptom, they are following your instruction. If they decrease the symptom, they are proving you wrong by getting better.

We often see this in couples who argue about money. One partner is the spender and the other is the saver. The saver nags and the spender hides receipts. You break this by telling the saver that they must give the spender fifty dollars every week to be spent on something completely useless. The saver must watch the money be wasted and say nothing. The spender must spend it even if they do not want to. This removes the thrill of the rebellion for the spender and forces the saver to practice the very behavior they fear. You are rebalancing the power in the relationship by prescribing the conflict. You are not looking for the couple to understand their childhoods. You are looking for them to change how they handle a fifty dollar bill on a Tuesday afternoon.

Your authority as a practitioner comes from your willingness to be misunderstood. You are not there to be liked or to be seen as a wise counselor. You are a technician of human interaction. When a client asks you why they must perform a seemingly nonsensical task, you tell them that the explanation will only make sense after the task is finished. You hold the mystery. If you explain the strategy, you ruin the effect. The client’s conscious mind will try to subvert the intervention if it understands the mechanics. We rely on the fact that the social system is more powerful than the individual’s stated intentions. A man may want to stop drinking, but if his wife’s only role is to be the martyr who saves him, she will unconsciously trigger his next binge. You must give her a different role.

You tell the wife that her husband’s drinking is a sign that she has been too strong for too long. You tell her that she needs to show him her own weaknesses so he can find a reason to be strong for her. You instruct her to have a minor breakdown over something small, like a broken toaster, and ask him to handle it because she simply cannot. This forces the husband into the role of the capable protector. When he is busy fixing the toaster for his distraught wife, he is not thinking about the bottle. We observe that the most effective interventions are those that feel like a slight shift in the existing weight of the family’s own machinery. A small change in the sequence of an interaction can lead to a total reorganization of the hierarchy. Clinical success is the result of interrupting a predictable pattern with an unpredictable requirement.

You must master the one-down position to manage clients who are determined to defeat an expert. We use this stance to bypass the competitive urge of a client who responds to every suggestion with a reason why it will not work. When you present yourself as slightly less than competent, or perhaps as someone who is quite puzzled by the complexity of the case, you remove the target for the client’s opposition. I once worked with a corporate vice president who had a reputation for firing consultants and humiliating his staff. He came to me for insomnia, but spent the first twenty minutes explaining why my clinical training was likely insufficient to understand a man of his intellect. I did not defend my credentials. I told him that he was right: I found his case remarkably intimidating and I was not sure if I possessed the specific type of genius required to solve his problem. By placing myself in the one-down position, I forced him to take the lead. He spent the rest of the hour trying to convince me that I was more capable than I looked. He eventually followed my directives because he wanted to prove that his choice of a practitioner was not a mistake.

We maintain this posture throughout the intervention phase to keep the responsibility for change on the client. If you take too much credit for a client’s improvement, you invite a relapse. The client may subconsciously feel the need to prove that they are still in control by failing once more. You can prevent this by attributing every success to the client’s unexpected strength or to a lucky coincidence. When a couple reports that they stopped arguing for an entire week, you do not congratulate them. You express a mild concern that they may be moving too fast. You say: “I am worried that you are suppressing your natural disagreements, and I wonder if the explosion next week will be worse because of this period of calm.” This is the technique of restraining change. We use it to make the client defend their progress. When you warn a client against changing too quickly, they will often improve even faster just to show you that your fears are unfounded. I once told a young woman with a hand-washing compulsion that she should not try to stop yet. I suggested that she should wash her hands for an extra ten minutes each day to ensure she was fully ready to give up the protection the ritual provided. She returned the following week and told me she had disobeyed me by cutting her washing time in half. She felt a sense of triumph because she had defeated my cautious advice.

You must also pay close attention to the way hierarchies are organized within a family or a workplace. Problems often arise when a person at a lower level of the hierarchy attempts to protect or control someone at a higher level. We see this in families where a child becomes the emotional caretaker for a depressed parent. The child’s symptomatic behavior, such as failing school or getting into trouble, often serves as a distraction that forces the parent to function. You cannot solve the child’s problem without first correcting the hierarchy. I worked with a family where a fourteen-year-old girl refused to eat. Her father was an alcoholic who had been sober for only two months. The mother was terrified that the father would drink again if any stress occurred. The daughter’s refusal to eat was a way to keep the mother focused on her rather than on the father’s sobriety. I instructed the father to take full charge of the daughter’s meals. I told the mother she was forbidden from entering the kitchen when the father was there. By placing the father in a position of authority over the daughter’s problem, I forced him to be the competent parent. The daughter began eating because she no longer needed to provide a distraction to keep the mother and father together.

We use metaphor to communicate with the client’s unconscious mind when direct instruction is likely to be met with resistance. You can tell a story that is structurally similar to the client’s problem without ever mentioning the problem itself. This allows the client to find their own solution without the interference of their conscious defenses. I once worked with a man who was unable to make a decision about whether to marry his girlfriend of six years. He was a master gardener. Instead of talking about commitment, I spent the entire session asking him about the process of transplanting a tree that had grown too large for its pot. I asked him what would happen to the roots if they remained cramped for too long, and how much risk was involved in moving the tree to a larger space in the garden. We discussed the specific timing of the move and the necessity of firming the soil around the new location. He came back two weeks later and told me he had proposed to his girlfriend. He never made the connection between our talk about the tree and his marriage, but the metaphor provided the necessary framework for his decision.

You must be prepared to use the “ordeal” to make the symptom more difficult to maintain than to give up. We do not try to talk a client out of a symptom: we make it a chore. If a client has insomnia, you do not suggest relaxation. You instruct them to get up and wax the floor every time they wake. I once told a man with self-pity to give twenty dollars to a political cause he hated whenever he moped. He soon found it easier to focus on his own daily goals.

As you move toward the end, you must handle the termination strategically. We do not have a sentimental closing. Instead, you should predict a relapse. You tell the client: “You have done well, but I suspect in three months you will have an urge to return to old habits.” I once told a man that his recovery was likely a temporary fluke caused by the pleasant weather. He spent the next year staying active just to prove me wrong. We observe that a client who leaves with a secret resentment toward your pessimism is less likely to relapse than one who leaves with gratitude for your wisdom. Every successful intervention must eventually be forgotten by the client so they can claim the credit for their own health and emotional stability.