---
title: "Attempted solutions: how to map them in your first session"
canonical: "https://strategictherapy.eu/mapping-attempted-solutions/"
lang: en
description: "Every client arrives already trying something. How to map that attempted solution in a first session, with a worked example and the commonest errors."
author:
  name: "Maurizio Iengo"
  url: "https://strategictherapy.eu/author/strategictherapy/"
  title: "Psychologist"
  registration: "Ordine degli Psicologi della Regione Campania 9624"
date_published: 2026-09-19
date_modified: 2026-09-19
publisher: "Strategic Therapy"
section: "Foundations"
keywords: "attempted solutions mapping"
---

# Attempted solutions: how to map them in your first session

> Every client arrives with a solution already running. Naming it precisely, not naming the diagnosis behind it, is most of the assessment this model asks for.

## In short

- An attempted solution is the specific repeated behaviour a client uses to manage a problem.
- Mapping means pinning down what was tried, by whom, how often, and what followed each time.
- Partners and parents usually run attempted solutions of their own, in parallel.
- The commonest error is stopping at the first solution named instead of the one that keeps repeating.

Ask a new client what the problem is and you get a noun. Anxiety. The arguing. His temper. Ask what she’s tried and you get a verb, repeated. The verb is what you are there to treat.

## Why the attempted solution outranks the diagnosis

A diagnosis tells you what a problem is called. It says very little about what keeps it going in this particular life. Two people with identical panic diagnoses can be maintaining them through completely different machinery: one avoiding every place an attack once happened, the other scanning her own pulse for the first irregularity. [The strategic model](https://strategictherapy.eu/?p=34) treats that machinery as the target of early sessions.

## A structure for the interview

Three questions, in this order, pushed for specifics each time.

1. What happens in the last concrete episode you can describe? Not “I get anxious”, but what you did in the ten minutes before, during and after.
2. What have you tried in response, and what has anyone around you tried? Push past the first answer. Clients name the most recent tactic, not the one they have been repeating for years.
3. What do you notice happens right afterwards, every time? This is where the loop usually becomes visible to the client herself, often for the first time.

Add a fourth wherever a partner, parent or sibling is involved: what do they do when the problem shows up? Family members run attempted solutions of their own, and those can hold a problem up as firmly as the client’s. Stanton’s (1981) work on integrating structural and strategic approaches turns on this point. A well-meaning parent’s compensations quietly become part of what the therapist then has to work around.

## A worked example

A man in his thirties describes recurring doubts about whether he locked the car. He checks twice before leaving, again from the window, and most nights walks back down three flights to check a third time. Asked what happens straight after each check, he says: “For about ten minutes I feel fine. Then it starts again.”

The checking is not evidence that he cannot control the doubt. It is what keeps the doubt supplied, because every check teaches him that uncertainty requires action and that certainty is the only acceptable resting state. Saying this out loud, in his vocabulary, does more work than any account of how the doubt began.

## Where mapping goes wrong

Three errors account for most failed maps.

The first is stopping at the solution the client names first, which is almost always the most recent and most visible one, without asking what she did before that stopped working, and before that.

The second is accepting a vague verb. “I try to relax” is not a map. What does she do with her hands, her breathing, her phone, her evening?

The third shows up with couples and families: mapping only the identified patient and missing that a partner’s fix has become part of the same circuit. That territory belongs to [couples stuck in escalation](https://strategictherapy.eu/?p=46), and it is where a single-person map most often fails.

Once the pattern is named clearly, one decision remains. A [direct prescription](https://strategictherapy.eu/?p=41) asking the client to do something different, or, where the solution is too rigid for a direct request to land, [a paradoxical one](https://strategictherapy.eu/?p=39). The map you build in the first hour is what tells you which.

## How long mapping should take

Longer than feels comfortable, and less long than it can absorb. Fifteen to twenty minutes of a first hour is usually enough to establish the pattern with the specificity a prescription needs.

Stop when you can state the loop back in one sentence and the client recognises it. Continuing past that point turns assessment into history-taking, and history-taking is the thing this model is trying not to do.

## Frequently asked questions

### What's the difference between a symptom and an attempted solution?

The symptom is what the client suffers from. The attempted solution is what she, or the people around her, do about it. Two clients with the same symptom can be maintaining it through entirely different solutions, and will need different interventions.

### What if a client can't name what she's tried?

Drop the general question and ask about the last bad episode in concrete detail. Most clients can describe what they did in a specific instance even when they cannot summarise a pattern.

### Should you map the family's attempted solutions too?

Yes, wherever others are involved in managing the problem. A parent's reassurance or a partner's monitoring often runs alongside the client's own solution and can matter as much.

## References

1. Watzlawick P., Weakland J., Fisch R. (1974). Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution
2. Weakland J. H., Fisch R., Watzlawick P., Bodin A. M. (1974). Brief therapy: Focused problem resolution. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.1974.00141.x
3. Stanton M. D. (1981). An integrated structural/strategic approach to family therapy