What is Brief Strategic Therapy?

The basis of Brief Strategic Therapy is that a problem or “symptom” persists due to the fact that solutions to overcome the problem have repeatedly been ineffective, to the point of becoming a vicious circle.

Therefore, the aim of strategic therapy is to interrupt the vicious circle that has developed between attempted solutions and persistence of the problem.

By analyzing ineffective solutions that reveal the structure of the problem, strategic therapy can build upon specific maneuvers, that with the aid of therapeutic stratagems (specific strategic procedures that allow the therapist to go beyond resistance to change), that are able to subvert the pathogenic equilibrium of the system.

Brief Strategic Therapy proposes to induce changes in the modalities in which people have built up their private dysfunctional realities, hence, in their relational, cognitive and emotional organization that are hidden behind their disorder: to solve a problem it is necessary to understand how the perceptive and reactive system work in respect to the reality of the here and now, in the actual situation that the person is living, rather than looking for causes from the past that produced the problem.

It is of fundamental importance to understand “how the problem functions” and not “why the problem exists”.
This usually means that a person, a couple or a family can completely overcome a problem rapidly; usually the necessary time span in overcoming a specific problem is 8-20 sessions.

It is a brief therapy, that on the one side eliminates symptoms and dysfunctional behavior, and on the other produces change in the manner in which a person creates his/her own personal and interpersonal reality, guaranteeing permanent change.

In comparison to traditional psychological and psychiatric theory, a strategic therapist doesn’t use definitions based on psychic “normality” or “pathology”; the strategic therapist moreover bases concepts of theory on “function” and “dysfunction”.

Main difference between traditional psychological theories and Brief Strategic Therapy

The classic rationalist psychological approaches are based on ordinary logic and are withheld by the causal-linear relation, this places cognition prior to action, change becomes an effect of consciousness.

On the other hand the injunctive and suggestive therapies are based on non ordinary logics and circular thinking; this gives greater importance to action since reality has to be constructed throughout action.

Why is it important to distinguish between a Linear Causality and a Circular Causality?

The Linear Causality, present in all the classic theories, explains that there is a direct cause-effect relation between two events. This implies that any kind of explanation or research of an event will involve a deep analysis of the past since the past is the cause of the present.

Along the lines of a Circular Causality concept we discover how there is a relation of reciprocal cause between events. The circular causality gives importance to the information and feedback that underlies the elements. This way the whole process gains a circular shape where there is a reverberating interaction between the different variables; there is no beginning but just an interdependent system of reciprocal influence among the different parts.