Name of Strategy or Intervention
The Miracle Question in Couple and Family Therapy
Introduction
The miracle question is an intervention used to explore clients’ hidden resources or solutions for their present problems. When therapists ask a miracle question, they build a good story line and lead the clients to envision how different their life would be if a miracle happened over night. Clients’ answers to the miracle question usually bring insights for themselves and help define the goals of therapy.
Theoretical Framework
The miracle question, along with scaling question and exception question, are key techniques in solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT), which is a goal-oriented, future-focused approach created by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg in the early 1980s (de Shazer et al. 1986). One of the assumptions of SFBT is that clients are capable of constructing their own solutions to improve their current situation (de Shazer 1985; de Shazer et al. 2006). Clients are viewed as...
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References
Berg, I. K., & Kelly, S. (2000). Building solutions in child protective services. New York: Norton.
de Shazer, S. (1985). Keys to solution in brief therapy. New York: Norton.
de Shazer, S., Berg, I. K., Lipchik, E., Nunnall, E., Molnar, A., Gingerich, W., & Weiner-Davis, M. (1986). Brief therapy: Focused solution development. Family Process, 25(2), 207–221.
de Shazer, S., Dolan, Y. M., Korman, H., Trepper, T. S., McCollum, E. E., & Berg, I. K. (2006). More than miracles: The state of the art of solution focused therapy. New York: Haworth Press.
Ramisch, J. L., McVicker, M., & Sahin, Z. S. (2009). Helping low-conflict divorced parents establish appropriate boundaries using a variation of the miracle question: An integration of solution-focused therapy and structural family therapy. Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, 50(7), 481–495. https://doi.org/10.1080/10502550902970587.
Strong, T., & Pyle, N. R. (2009). Constructing a conversational “miracle”: Examining the “miracle question” as it is used in therapeutic dialogue. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 22(4), 328–353. https://doi.org/10.1080/10720530903114001.
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Yu, F. (2019). Miracle Question in Couple and Family Therapy. In: Lebow, J.L., Chambers, A.L., Breunlin, D.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49425-8_1072
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49425-8_1072
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