Brief Strategic Therapy: What It Is And How It Works
Many people believe that going to psychotherapy involves exploring aspects of the past that have defined our personality and even our psychological vulnerabilities. In fact, the most common stereotype of the typical psychologist is that of an individual who constantly asks questions about what our childhood was like, over a long series of sessions that become a habit, rather than a necessity.
However, this vision of psychotherapy is outdated: today, most mental health professionals put a lot of effort into addressing the patient’s problem as it presents itself in the here and now, in order to provide quick solutions. without the need to reconstruct the past.
Brief Strategic Therapy, which is currently based mainly on the works of Giorgio Nardone and Paul Watzlawick, is an example of these efforts to help patients by focusing the issue on the present. In this article we will see what it is and what principles it is based on.
To understand what Brief Strategic Therapy is, it is important to know that it is included in a broader category, brief psychotherapy.
The concept of brief psychotherapy is used to refer to a wide variety of therapeutic proposals whose objective is to obtain concrete and objective results in a period that is as limited as possible so that patients can benefit from having their needs met as soon as possible.
Said this way, the reason for brief psychotherapy seems to obey pure common sense. Isn’t one always trying to obtain satisfactory results in the quickest way? In theory, the answer to this question is yes. In practice, however, this is somewhat more complicated than it seems, especially if we focus on what psychotherapy has been historically.
And although today the work of applied psychology (and, consequently, psychological therapy) does have to do with obtaining results by optimizing the use of resources and available time, a few decades ago this did not happen. It was so clear.
From the perspective of psychoanalysis, for example, which became the dominant paradigm in psychotherapy in the first half of the 20th century, to help patients it was necessary to delve deeply into their unconscious processes, and even question their true reason for doing so. He goes to therapy whoever he says he is. And beyond the direct followers of Sigmund Freud, other forms of psychotherapy influenced by psychoanalysis also adopted part of this working philosophy according to which psychotherapy is a process of change without a clear end, or even for life.
In opposition to these approaches, brief psychotherapy is much more pragmatic and focused on solving specific problems and defined from the first sessions through dialogue between therapist and patient. For this reason, Brief Strategic Therapy inherits this way of working and tries to provide concrete answers to very limited needs.
What is Brief Strategic Therapy?
Brief Strategic Therapy is a model of psychological intervention in patients developed by researchers Paul Watzlawick and Giorgio Nardone in the second half of the 20th century and which is currently still being studied to know what type of psychological problems and disorders it can be used effectively. .
The working mechanism by which Brief Strategic Therapy is governed It consists of detecting what is the vicious circle of behaviors that is keeping the problem to be treated alive, in order to be able to “undo” that wheel that turns by itself due to its own influence on the patient’s actions, and give this person the opportunity to adopt new ones. habits to start from scratch.
That is why Brief Strategic Therapy focus your efforts on the present because if it pointed mainly to the past, the development of the problem to be addressed would always be several steps ahead of the therapist’s inquiries and this loss of time would increase the risk of failing to help the patient.
Thus, Brief Strategic Therapy requires having a global vision of the way in which the psychological disorder or behavioral dysfunction is expressed in the present, on the one hand, and a plan to intervene in the present problem without forgetting that it is a vicious circle. in which all its parts must be taken into account at the same time (that’s where the word “strategic” comes from).
Ideas and principles of this psychological intervention
In summary, the ideas from which Brief Strategic Therapy is based are the following.
1. Perception is key
As occurs in cognitive-behavioral therapy, in Brief Strategic Therapy it is assumed that the way in which the patient interprets reality explains at least in part why the disorder or dysfunction to be treated arises.
2. The problem maintains itself
Another characteristic aspect of Brief Strategic Therapy is that sees what needs to be solved as a combination of three types of behaviors that feed back on each other: behavioral patterns of perception, behavioral patterns of emotional management, and maladaptive cognitive patterns.
3. The problem is in the present
As we have seen, from this type of psychotherapy there is no point in obsessing over what happened in the first years of the patient’s life, but it is more practical to know what the problem is like in the present, since that is what must be solved. Furthermore, this will allow us to see what behaviors the patient puts into practice to try to weaken their problem have the opposite effect, reinforcing it.
As we have seen, there are two names that stand out especially when it comes to understanding what Brief Strategic Therapy is: Giorgio Nardone and Paul Watzlawick. To finish, let’s look at a couple of small summaries about who they are.
Paul Watzlawick
The psychologist Paul Watzlawick (1921 – 2007) was one of the main exponents of radical constructivism, a philosophical movement that emphasizes subjectivity and the way in which it creates apparently objective phenomena. Therefore, he wanted to investigate how different ways of perceiving things affect our actions.
Furthermore, Watzlawick was one of the most prominent researchers at the Mental Research Institute of Palo Alto California, and one of the founders of the Brief Therapy Center.
Giorgio Nardone
Giorgio Nardone (1958 – ) is the Director of the Strategic Therapy Center of Arezzo, Italy For years he collaborated with Paul Watzlawick to develop the theoretical and practical foundations of Brief Strategic Therapy.
