Strategic therapy
Strategic therapy is an example of family therapy that endeavors to address certain issues that require a shorter time frame to solve. Even though strategic therapy is viewed as family therapy, it also doubles up as brief psychotherapy. Strategic therapy is often employed to treat or address children or adolescents’ behavior within a family set up. Accordingly, therapists in strategic therapy dictate what happens during the therapy and develop solutions to every arising problem. According to xx, strategic therapists must be actively involved in the therapy process to help their clients find answers to the issues affecting them by designing a strategic plan, execution modalities, and projection of the outcome of each therapy he administers. Moreover, there are five primary stages that therapist must take their client through to establish a long-lasting solution such as the identification of solvable problems, establishing goals, designing the mechanisms of realizing such goals, evaluation of responses and lastly, assessing the results of the therapy.
There are several interventions in strategic therapy which help the therapist to bring about change in his client. Some examples of the interventions include paradoxical intervention and relabeling intervention. In paradoxical intervention, the therapist attempts to change and motivate a family that their expectations, which they believe is difficult to achieve, are actually easily achievable. Understandably, xx argues that a therapist can do so by identifying the issue that the family wants to solve and invites the family to agree on their goals of the therapy. Besides, during such interventions, the therapist helps the family to draw precise plans on how to achieve their goals and significantly discredits any controlling figure of the problem. Once the therapist has discredited the controlling figure, he substitutes him or her with his authority and provides new guidelines on how he and the family intend to address the problem. Lastly, the therapist evaluates the results of the new guidelines and pushes the paradox more to compel the family to rebel and effect new changes.
Conversely, relabeling intervention involves the act of the therapist to change the connotation of the symptom from negative to positive. Accordingly, this intervention helps the family to develop a better way to approach the symptom by having a different conceptual understanding of the problem. Xx opine that giving patients a positive understanding of the system gives them the motivation to work towards change, hence making relabeling intervention a suitable therapy. The intervention gives the client enough confidence to face the symptom by making it look less harmful and concentrates more on the positive aspects of the symptom rather than the negative connotations.
There are several ethical issues that come with strategic therapy especially from the therapist`s end. One ethical issue is the fact that the process can be so manipulative since the therapist does not make the reason for choosing a particular model known to his client. In essence, the client does not actively participate in the selection of the chosen model as it is left to the dictate of the therapist. Furthermore, in an attempt to achieve and actual outcome, the therapist may be tempted to say things that he does not have faith. Besides, various scholars have argued that strategic therapy is inherently manipulative since truth telling may sound disrespectful to the client. In addition to the above, xx opine that result-oriented therapy is largely reliant on client`s subjective truths. In other instances, the client lacks knowledge of the process of strategic therapy and thus the therapist may take advantage of this situation ro administer more than is necessary to appear knowledgeable or to increase the contact hours with the intention of charging service fees. Given the above arguments, it’s evident that the strategic therapy is manipulative to the detriment of the client.