Co-crafting Next Steps

Next steps!

What’s the effect of giving therapeutic tasks or homework in single session therapy (SST)?

It’s a favoured practice in many models, to assign post session therapeutic tasks, homework, or worksheets at the end of the session. Yet, in brief narrative informed single-session therapy (SST) we move away from that practice for important reasons. In centering the therapists’ ideas, could we be positioning ourselves as the knower and consequently the participant s the ‘not-knower’? Are we conveying the meta-messages that the therapist is viewing the participant as incapable of coming up with their own ideas or perhaps that their own ideas will not be useful? What might be the effect of this on the participants sense of personal agency? Further, what if the participant attempts the prescribed task and it doesn’t work for them? Could they experience a further sense of personal failure? Last, these assigned tasks that centre the therapists’ ideas risk being contextually and culturally incongruent with the participants life. They lack the specificity that is part of a person’s life and culture. This contextual and cultural gap between prescribed tasks and real life works against success and the usefulness of any sort of next step. For these reasons, I resist prescribing tasks or homework and have sought other ways to extend the influence of the conversation.

In Brief Narrative Practices in Single-Session Therapy, I introduce the Conversation Endurance Map, a guide that assists to build on the conversation by co-developing contextualized, achievable, and relational next steps. Through co-exploration, speculation, audiencing, and addressing constraints, important take-aways from the conversation are revealed. In this process we honour the unique context of each participant and invite the experience of personal agency, allowing the conversation to meaningfully ripple into the everyday.