On this occasion, our former student Maribí Pereira talks to us about the approach to brief strategic therapy, as well as its differences from other therapies.
What is Brief Strategic Therapy?
Brief strategic therapy is a problem-solving-focused psychotherapeutic model, developed by Giorgio Nardone. It bases its foundations and applied practice on a scientific research basis. It is a brief intervention that takes less than 20 sessions and is concerned, on the one hand, with eliminating the symptoms or dysfunctional behavior for which the person sought therapy, and on the other hand, with producing a change in the modalities according to which the patient constructs their own personal and interpersonal reality. Its key lies in using what patients bring with them to help them address their own needs so that they can make their lives satisfactory.
This therapy does not use definitions such as “normality” or “patology,” but rather emphasizes the functionality or dysfunctionality of people’s behavior and their way of relating to their own reality. In this sense, to change a problematic situation, it is not necessary to uncover the original causes, but working on how this is maintained in the present allows breaking the vicious cycle that was established between attempted solutions and the persistence of the problem, working on the present rather than the past, on how the problem works rather than why it exists, on the search for solutions rather than causes. Training in brief strategic therapy is included in ISEP’s Master’s in Third-Generation Therapies.
Objectives of Brief Strategic Therapy
The objective of intervention in Brief Strategic Therapy is the shift of the subject’s observation point from their original rigid and dysfunctional position (revealed in attempted solutions) towards a more flexible and functional perspective, with greater possibilities for choice. To effectively achieve this objective, the intervention is active and prescriptive and should produce results from the first session, since if this does not happen, the therapist is able to modify their own strategy based on the client’s responses, until finding the ideal one to guide the person to a definitive change in their problem situation.
The theory and practice of brief strategic therapy developed in the 1970s thanks to the publication of the articles “Brief therapy: focused problem resolution” by Weakland, Fisch, Watzlawick, and Bodin (1974) and “Brief Therapy: two´s company” by De Shazer (1975). The first of these works was carried out within an established limit of ten sessions, and researchers noted that 72% of treated cases achieved treatment objectives or showed significant improvements in an average of seven sessions. In the second cited work, there was no pre-established session limit; however, those who asked for a session forecast were told “the fewest possible” (Watzlawick and Nardone, 2015).
Differences between Brief Strategic Therapy and Other Therapies
Regardless of the therapist’s orientation (Watzlawick and Nardone, 2015):
– Brief therapy defined by temporal limits.
– Brief therapy defined as a way to solve human problems.
– Change in one part of the system (the patient) leads to changes in the system as a whole (the other people involved).
The fundamental premises of treatment in brief strategic therapy are based on (Watzlawick and Nardone, 2015):
– Difficulties seen as annoyances that characterize daily life and that patients call “problems.”
– Disorders consist of difficulties in recurrent and ineffective attempts to overcome these “annoyances.”
– Solutions are the behavioral and/or perceptual changes that the therapist and patient construct to modify the “difficulties.”
The construction of solutions is based on (Watzlawick and Nardone, 2015):
– The almost immediate acquisition of the ability to describe the behavioral aspects of the patient’s state; and the difficulty some have in doing so.
– Fixation on involuntary aspects.
– Ease of introducing the description of other significant people who try to comfort/support the patient (and sometimes unintentionally harm them more).
– Difficulty for some patients who, due to their life history, complain that they have good reasons to be depressed compared to others.
– States of depression in some patients related to something they are sure will happen (or not happen) in the future.
Examples of Patients Treated with Brief Strategic Therapy
For example, a patient claimed that they “had always been depressed.” When the therapist asked what made them think they were depressed, the patient replied that they knew because sometimes they had “good days.” Then, the therapist asked the patient to describe what was different on those “good days,” and especially, what different things they did (Watzlawick and Nardone, 2015).
The patient’s allusion to the existence of exceptions to the rule of “always being depressed” led to the description of behaviors, perceptions, and ideas that, in their understanding, would not occur on “bad days.” Then, the therapist asked the patient to predict, before going to sleep, what kind of day the next one would be, and, if they predicted a bad day, upon waking in the morning they should do something they would normally have done on a “good day.” In the third session, the client commented that predictions of “bad days” had notably decreased (Watzlawick and Nardone, 2015).
Therefore, according to Brief Strategic Therapy… “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes” (Marcel Proust).
Discover more about this type of therapy and others included within third-generation therapies with ISEP and obtain the Master’s degree in Third-Generation Therapies.