Frances Huber presents at European conference.

Brief Therapy Institute Senior Associate, Frances Huber, presented a workshop at the European Brief Therapy Conference, in Dresden, Germany, last October. The conference venue was the historic church, Dreikšnigskirche, in Dresden. Originally the capital city for the kings of Saxony, Dresden is an historic city on the banks of the Elbe River, with baroque architecture and a colourful history. It is also only a couple of hours from Prague in the Czech Republic (and Frances, along with Michael Durrant and Ian Johnsen, spent a couple of days exploring Prague before the conference).

Along with Swedish colleague, Dr Harry Korman, Frances' presentation was "To break, or not to break ... THAT is the question". Frances and Harry explored the role and power of the "end-of-session break" in Solution-Focused Brief Therapy — the break that therapists sometimes take towards the end of the session, before returning and giving the end-of-session summary, or "message", to the client.

The break stems from the days when therapists routinely worked with teams, behind a one-way mirror, and would take a break in order to consult with the team and then share the team's wisdom with the client. For many therapists, not having a team to consult with has meant that the rationale for, and necessity of, the break has gone. However, both Harry and Frances routinely take an end-of-session break, although they rarely, if ever, have a team. In the development of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, de Shazer and his colleagues (writing in 1986) say, "After 30 to 40 minutes, the therapist excuses himself to consult with the team". However, by 1997, when they are describing what they see as the four "characteristic" or "essential" features of SFBT, de Shazer and Berg include as their third essential feature, "At some point during the interview, the therapist will take a break". Thus, by 1997, de Shazer and Berg saw taking the break as one of the essential or defining features of SFBT, although they no longer explicitly associated it with the presence of a team.

In fact, towards the end of his life, Steve de Shazer remarked, "If I was forced to make the choice ... I would give up the Miracle Question before I would give up taking the break!"

Frances reviewed the history and development of "the break" and suggested we might make sense of it in terms of cognitive psychology's research about the "primacy and recency effect" — that is, in any encounter or episode, we are most likely to remember the last (or most recent) aspects or information and the first (primacy) aspects. (If you are given a list of numbers to remember, you are most likely to remember the few numbers you heard last, or most recently ... however, you are next most likely to remember the numbers that were at the beginning of the list!) Thus, how we finish a therapy session, and how we start a therapy session, may be the two most important considerations in terms of what will have ongoing impact for the client — hence our emphasis on our opening question (Harry Korman refers to it as the Common Project question — "How will you know that coming and talking to me has been helpful for you?") and on the final summary or message — the break and what we say after the break.

Frances and Harry both talked about their own experiences of taking a break and the various ways in which they find it helpful. Harry talked about how a client described the importance of the break ... "It made me know that you cared!"

Frances shared the preliminary results of a qualitative research study she has done — how do clients experience me taking a break in our therapy sessions?

At the end of the third session, clients were asked, "You remember that, each time we have met, I have taken a short break towards the end of our session, thought about what you'd said to me and then come back and shared some ideas with you. You know that I find it helpful to take that break. I'm wondering how helpful my taking that break has been FOR YOU."

"On a scale of 0 to 10, where zero is 'Not helpful at all' and 10 is 'Extremely helpful', how helpful TO YOU has my taking a break towards the end of each of our sessions been?"

With an initial sample of 18 clients, the average rating of how helpful the break was, was 8.6.

CLIENTS found it helpful that the therapist took a break!

Details of all the things clients said were helpful will be forthcoming.

Chris Iveson, from BRIEF, in London, commented about the presentation, "Frances Huber and Harry Korman presented some interesting ideas on 'the break', which they both routinely take before finishing a session. What was clear was that an informed decision to take a break as part of the therapeutic process requires the therapist to take a different position vis-a-vis the client in the whole therapeutic endeavour. As someone who deliberately doesn't take a break (unless there are other people watching the session) I found myself listening with pleasure to two very skilled and committed therapists following a different direction and thought that as long as solution focused practice contains such potentially fundamental divergences it will remain alive and kicking."