Brief Strategic Therapy (BST)

Last update By C. Moretto Sunday Jun 14 2009 17:05

Pieter Lastman - Hippocrates visiting Democritus - 1622

Brief strategic therapy 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 (88% of cases solved; average length of treatment: 7 sessions).

Brief Strategic Therapy takes care of

“how” human systems build their problems,

“how” these problems are maintained for a long period of time, and

“how” it is possible to fight these problems using brief and focalized interventions.

From this perspective a strategic intervention is:

• brief,
• targeted on the problems or the objectives,

and oriented towards:

• the extinction of the symptoms,
• a change in the subject’s perception of self, others, and the world, and
• the achievement of goals.

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, 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 him or her to the understanding of what were the matrixes of his/her problem.