What Is Strategic Family Therapy?

Strategic family therapy is also known as "strategic intervention." It was DD Jackson and J. Harry who first adopted and developed home treatments. They believe that the process of psychotherapy is like a struggle for power between the patient and the healer. The key to the problem is who controls who is in the family system. The patient is often the controlling party, leaving other members of the family at a loss.

Strategic family therapy is also known as "strategic intervention." One of the home treatments. It was first founded by Don D. Jackson (1920-1968) and Jay Douglas Haley (1923-2007). The method emphasizes that the psychotherapy process is like a power struggle between the patient and the healer, and who can gain dominance becomes the core of the problem. In a family system, the patient is often the controlling party, leaving other members of the family at a loss. It is argued that the patient's symptoms are at the core of the problem and are caused by disagreements or disagreements among members of the family system. The task of the healer is to come up with a strategy to change this balance of power in order to establish relationships and rebuild the various members of the family

Structural-strategic home remedies have become the two most commonly used theoretical models of home system therapies in the late 1970s. The main point of structural family therapy is: To understand the individual, we must understand the communication mode of the individual's family. To reduce or eliminate the individual's symptoms, we must first make structural changes in the family. The goals of structural family therapy are to: (1) reduce the symptoms of dysfunction; (2) change the structure of the family by changing the rules of family interaction and establishing healthier boundaries. ^[2]

These two models of structure-family strategy therapy are trying to find the structure of the problem of dysfunction in the family; the establishment of boundaries, debalancing, reconstruction, and guidance are all part of these two theories in implementing family therapy. Neither of these therapies focuses on explaining or exploring an individual's past experience. Instead, the role of the therapist in structural-strategic family therapy is to connect with family members, thereby blocking their original mode of communication, reorganizing their family's hierarchy or subsystems, and helping family members develop more flexible or More effective communication models come. ^[2]

Harry's interest is not to form a treatment theory that is different from the structural model, but to apply specific methods of strategic family therapy to the treatment practice to alleviate problems in the family. This can be seen from the treatment model adopted by Madanes when treating families with sexual crimes. Madanes incorporated a humanistic perspective into the process of strategic treatment by emphasizing the supportive role of treatment and the individual's desire to be loved. ^[2]