Bringing Therapy to You - The Miracle Question
I’m almost done my first year of my master in counselling and I’ve loved digging deeper into different counselling theories and therapies. While I’m not boxing myself in to any given theory, Solution Focused Theory has so far felt the most like home to me. I could write a whole piece on that, but for today, I wanted to talk about one of the “interventions” or tools used in Solution-Focused theory. Let’s be real, therapy is not cheap, and therefore isn’t accessible to everyone who wants it or needs it. So I thought I would bring the therapy to you - no gate keeping here! Everyone deserves to have access to wellness and health strategies so today let’s talk about “The Miracle Question”.
The miracle question is a question asked by the therapist to the client and so let’s pretend I’m your counsellor. For the sake of this, think about one “issue” or “problem” that you might bring to counselling. Maybe it’s depression, maybe it’s work-life balance or relationship struggles. Keep that in your mind.
Now I want you to open your mind a bit - we’re going to need you to use some imagination for this. Tap into your inner child and your creativity and imagine you go to bed tonight, and after you fall asleep, in the middle of the night, a miracle takes place. This miracle makes your problem disappear. But it happens while you are asleep so you don’t even know it’s happened. So now it’s the next morning and you wake-up. What would be the first sign to you that something has happened, that something is different?
Are you still with me? The goal of the question is to help you narrow down the problem to really specific details. Instead of saying “well I would wake up and not be depressed” a counsellor might ask “how would you know you aren’t depressed?”
It’s not an easy question, and it’s not meant to be, but it can help take a big goal like “not be depressed” and turn it into smaller achievable steps to one day get you to that bigger one. Perhaps you would answer, “I would wake up and feel excited about my day.” That allows you to explore in a bit more detail what would make you feel excited.
The cool thing about the miracle question is that, while the question is always almost the same, the answer never is. The answer is as unique and complex as people and our problems. It’s also not about your therapist having the answer for you - your therapist is there to help guide you on your own journey of discovering what you need and how you can implement small change - emphasis on the small.
What did you come up with when you were reading? Did you think of any small steps you could take to journey towards wellness? For me, my small step yesterday was going for a walk. It was sunny and warm and I knew I needed some fresh air and so I just went for a short walk around the block.
What do you think of the miracle question? Do you think it would be helpful for you?
Until next time,
B