- How to train in strategic therapy: skills, supervision and what to look for in a course
Reading the founding texts gives you the theory. The skill comes from supervised practice against real session tape, and from programs that show you the failures.
- Case study: one session, one shift. A single-session intervention with three-month follow-up
A composite case showing what one strategic session can do when the problem is narrow enough for one meeting to be the whole plan.
- Case study: breaking an OCD checking ritual with a paradoxical prescription
A published case from the strategic literature: a ten-year-old’s reassurance ritual broken with a symptom prescription and a transitional object.
- Case study: a couple caught in a pursue-withdraw loop
A composite case showing how a demand-withdraw sequence can be interrupted by two small agreed changes, without settling whose complaint was more legitimate.
- Case study: ending panic attacks in five sessions with brief strategic therapy
A composite case, built from typical presentations and published protocols, showing a favourable five-session course and why five is not the average.
- Single session therapy: how to make one meeting count
Most clients who see a therapist once did not drop out. For a real share of them, one session was always the plan.
- Parents who try too hard: strategic work with families of anxious children
An anxious child rarely maintains the fear alone. A parent’s reassurance, and an imbalance in who is involved, usually does half the work.
- Couples stuck in escalation: strategic interventions for the therapy room
In an escalating couple each partner’s response is also their attempted solution, and it is precisely what keeps the other’s behaviour running.
- OCD and reassurance seeking: blocking the attempted solution
Checking and asking don’t settle an obsessive doubt. They train the mind to treat doubt as intolerable. How to interrupt that training.
- Panic attacks: a strategic protocol for the first three sessions
In panic disorder the client’s effort to prevent the next attack is usually what keeps the alarm primed. A three-session structure, and what three sessions can’t do.
- How to handle resistance without fighting it
A client who doesn’t do the homework isn’t defying you. She is telling you something about the task you haven’t heard yet.
- The first session as an intervention: a step-by-step structure
In this model the first session is not intake before the work starts. It is the first attempt at change.
- Therapeutic prescriptions that clients actually follow
Most prescriptions fail for the same few reasons. What separates a task a client carries out from one that quietly gets skipped.
- The strategic dialogue: questions that guide the client toward change
A strategic question is not neutral. It is built so that one particular realisation is easier for the client to reach than any other.
- Paradoxical interventions: when to use them and how to deliver them ethically
A paradoxical prescription works because it sounds wrong. That is also why it needs a clearer ethical justification than a straightforward directive.
- Reframing in practice: 10 examples using the client’s own words
A reframe holds only when it’s built from the client’s own language. Ten short examples of the move from a problem-frame to one the client can act on.
- Strategic vs. CBT vs. solution-focused: when to choose which approach
Three brief models, three different targets. What each one asks you to change, and what the head-to-head trials have and haven’t shown.
- From MRI to today: the core principles of strategic therapy you can use tomorrow
The Palo Alto group’s original claims are fifty years old. What they actually said, what Nardone changed, and how well the outcome figures have held up.
- Attempted solutions: how to map them in your first session
Every client arrives with a solution already running. Naming it precisely, not naming the diagnosis behind it, is most of the assessment this model asks for.
- What is strategic therapy? A practical guide for clinicians
Strategic therapy targets what keeps a problem alive, not where it started. What that means in a real session, and how far the evidence actually goes.