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 frequent 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 need.

However, this view of psychotherapy is out of date: today, most mental health professionals put a lot of effort into it. to address the patient's problem as it is presented in the here and now, in order to provide quick solutions without the need to reconstruct the past.

Brief Strategic Therapy, currently based primarily on the work of Giorgio Nardone and Paul Watzlawick, is a sample of these efforts to help patients by putting the focus of the issue in the present. In this article we will see what it is and on what principles it is based.

• Related article: "History of Psychology: main authors and theories"

What is brief psychotherapy?

To understand what Brief Strategic Therapy is, it is important to know that it falls into a broader category, that of 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 the most limited period possible, so that patients can benefit from meeting their needs as soon as possible.

Put like this, the raison d'être of brief psychotherapy seems to obey sheer common sense. Don't you always try to get 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 it is that although today the work of applied psychology (and, consequently, of psychological therapy) does have to do with obtaining results optimizing the use of resources and available time, a few decades ago this was not 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 had to delve deeply into their unconscious processes, and even question whether their true reason for going to therapy is the one they say they it is. And beyond the direct followers of Sigmund Freud, other forms of psychotherapy influenced by psychoanalysis also adopted part of this philosophy of work according to which psychotherapy is a process of change without a clear end, or even for the entire lifetime.

In opposition to these approaches, brief psychotherapy is much more pragmatic and focused on solving specific problems and defined from the first sessions through the dialogue between therapist and patient. For this reason, Brief Strategic Therapy inherits this way of working and tries to give 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 twentieth century and that is currently being studied to know in what type of psychological problems and disorders it can be used in a effective.

The working mechanism by which the Brief Strategic Therapy is governed consists of detecting which is the vicious cycle of behaviors that is keeping the problem to be treated alive, in order to "undo" that wheel that is going turning on its own by its own influence on the patient's actions, and giving this person the opportunity to adopt new habits to start from zero.

That is why Brief Strategic Therapy concentrates its efforts on the present, because if it pointed mainly towards the past, the development of the problem to be addressed would always go in front of the therapist's inquiries and that 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, for a side, 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 (hence the word "strategic").

Ideas and principles of this psychological intervention

In summary, the ideas from which the Brief Strategic Therapy starts are the following.

1. Perception is key

As in the cognitive behavioral therapyIn 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 keeps to 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 into 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. In addition, this will allow us to see what behaviors that the patient puts into practice to try to weaken their problem have the opposite effect, reinforcing it.

The two reference researchers

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. In closing, let's look at a couple of short summaries about who they are.

Paul Watzlawick

The psychologist Paul Watzlawick (1921 - 2007) was one of the main exponents of radical constructivism, philosophical current that emphasizes subjectivity and the way in which it creates apparently phenomena objectives. For this reason, he wanted to investigate how the different ways of perceiving things affect our actions.

Furthermore, Watzlawick was one of the leading 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 Centro di Terapia Strategica in Arezzo, Italy. For years he collaborated with Paul Watzlawick to develop the theoretical and practical foundations of Brief Strategic Therapy.

Bibliographic references:

• Griffin, E. (2012) .A first look at Communication Theory. 8th. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Nardone G. (2016). Panic Attack Therapy: Forever Free from Pathological Fear. Herder: Barcelona.
• Watzlawick, P. & Nardone, G. (2005). Brief Strategic Therapy. Barcelona: Paidós.