Exception Questions: Help For When You Feel Stuck
Feeling like you are stuck in an area of life that you just can’t seem to find your way out of? I’m pretty sure we have all been there. Maybe you feel trapped in a job you don’t like anymore. Perhaps you feel that you cycle around the same issues in your relationship with your partner. Or maybe you can’t get off the wheel of worry and constantly feel stuck in your anxiety. Feeling stuck can lead to hopelessness, anxiety, despair, or depression. When we feel powerless to change our situation, it can become overwhelming and we may just feel like giving up.
In Solution-Focused Therapy, there are techniques that use strategic questions to help find your own solutions that work to get you unstuck. Solution-Focused Therapy focuses on finding solutions instead of constantly analyzing all of the problems. By asking certain questions, Solution-Focused Therapy can help uncover these solutions in your life. For example: Say you are struggling with enjoying your job. It’s becoming easier to focus on all of the negative things about your job and you are dreading going into work every day. Before considering a complete career change, it may help to ask yourself the following questions:
Was there ever a time you felt happy at work? Can you describe that time?
What excited you the most about your job when you first started?
When was the last time you had a good day at work? What happened that day?
These types of questions focus on the exception to the problem. Your problem is that work is not enjoyable anymore, but are there exceptions? When we feel stuck, we tend to become hyper-focused on the negatives and forget that there can be some positive things amidst our problems.
Using these exception questions can help to reframe the problems you’re facing. Now, we are not minimizing your problems by doing this, because sometimes there are real problems that need further action. However, asking these types of questions can help begin to assess if there are other solutions available. Asking ourselves these exception questions can help to open up our minds, take a step back, and evaluate our problems from a broader perspective. Once we begin to see potential solutions, it increases personal feelings of hope because we can begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel. When we grow in hope, it can improve our mood, decrease our anxiety or worry, and motivate us to keep going.
Next time you’re feeling stuck, try using exception questions to see if you can start seeing potential solutions. If you need more help, please feel free to reach out for a free, 20-minute phone consultation.
