Strategic Therapy & Interventions of New York

Brief Strategic Therapy (BST)

Last update By C. Moretto Tuesday Apr 01 2008 01:01

Brief strategic therapy has represented a Copernican revolution in the field of psychotherapy, by targeting effective and efficient therapeutic solutions to patients’ problems. BST can be defined as: the art of solving complex human problems with apparently simple solutions. Brief Strategic Therapy has proved that although human problems and sufferings can be extremely persistent and complicated, they do not necessarily require equally long and complicated solutions. In fact, the results obtained through well structured and well applied strategic interventions (88% of cases solved; average length of treatment: 7 sessions) prove that it is possible to solve most psychological problems rapidly and effectively.

Communication, change and problem solving are the prevalent areas that brief strategic therapy has developed through years of research and study of clinical cases and organizational corporate contexts.
Brief Strategic Therapy takes care of “how” human systems build their problems, “how” they maintain them for a long period of time, and “how” it is possible to fight these issues using brief therapy or focalized interventions. From this perspective, the objective of a strategic therapist or consultant is to solve, as fast as possible, problems and disorders not only for patients but also for their family and close contexts.

Thus, with this premise, the strategic approach is an intervention that is:

• brief,
• targeted on the problems or the objectives,
• and oriented towards:

                                   1.   the extinction of the symptoms,

                                   2.    a change in the subject’s perception of self, others, and the world, and

                                   3.   the achievement of goals.

By virtue of its characteristics, the strategic model can be applied to clinical problems (individual, couple, or family), as well as to the achievements of specific objectives in other interpersonal situations.
“It’s impossible to not communicate” is the first postulate of human communication (Watzlawick, 1967). Therefore, we must choose to communicate in a casual way and suffer this inevitability, or choose to communicate strategically, and as such, “manage” our communication. It’s because of this postulate that Brief Strategic Therapy was born- to be a more precise application of the theoretical formulations of the Palo-Alto Group and interpersonal and therapeutic communication (Watzlawick-Weakland, 1974; Nardone- Watzlawick, 1990; Watzlawick, Nardone, 1997).

Rather than being based on an a priori theory of the human nature and the analysis of human behaviors, Brief Strategic Therapy is concerned with the way human beings perceive and manage their own reality through their communication with self, others, and the world, and then transforming this reality from dysfunctional to functional. From this perspective, human problems are the product of the interaction of the subject with his reality, and thus, looking for the origin of a problem is often misleading in respect of finding the solutions to that problem. Rather, the solutions of the problem when practically discovered and experienced by the patient, will lead us to the understanding of what were the matrixes of the problem.