Strategic Brief Therapy For Panic Attacks

Strategic brief therapy is highly effective in treating panic attacks. This model of psychological intervention helps us to put into practice concrete and innovative solutions to break the cycle of fear, rationalize anxieties and take control of our lives.

It is, moreover, a type of therapy that is performed in a short period of time.

Montaigne said that few things are more frightening than fear itself. This is something that people who suffer from phobias, panic attacks, and a fear that robs impulse and sense of reality itself know all too well.

These situations happen in two types of situations:

• The first is a way of dealing with certain stimuli and situations in a non-assertive and rational way;
• The second, and perhaps more problematic, has to do with the fear of losing control. It is the anguish of experiencing yet again an extreme psychophysiological reaction in which the person believes he or she will suffer a heart attack or even die. These dynamics, as we might assume, are real psychological prisons.

Faced with these types of conditions, we need specific, effective strategies that can improve the patient’s quality of life as quickly as possible.

We want useful (and, if possible, quick) solutions to people’s problems. It is here that strategic brief therapy gains a relevant position among different therapeutic approaches.

The Objectives of Strategic Brief Therapy

Strategic Brief Psychotherapy is a psychotherapeutic model, both original and useful, focused on solutions and developed by Giorgio Nardone. It includes several theoretical foundations of Paul Watzlawick. The pillars on which it is based are:

• Its purpose is to help a person solve seemingly very complicated problems in a simple way;
• It analyzes the solutions that the patient uses to face their situation, looking for the dynamics that are failing. It helps you choose new strategies to break away from everything you’ve used before that didn’t help;
• It is about the patient/client discovering, little by little, skills and resources that until now had been ignored or forgotten. Therefore, it is not about the professional offering their own solutions. It is an alliance between two people in which the specialist facilitates the discovery of the patient’s potential;
• This therapeutic intervention lasts for 20 sessions ;
• On the one hand, dysfunctional behaviors are eliminated. On the other hand, it induces a change in the person in which he or she must build a new personal and interpersonal reality.

Research such as the one carried out by the University of Michigan proves its effectiveness, being especially useful not only for panic attacks, but also for social phobia, obsessions, psychosomatic disorders, depression, eating disorders, etc.

Strategic Brief Therapy for Panic Attacks

Strategic brief therapy for panic attacks aims to move the patient from altered or dysfunctional homeostasis to healthy homeostasis.

It is based on communicative exchange to illuminate a field in which to work, in turn helping people to become aware of their unassertive mental and behavioral approach.

For this, it uses the following strategies:

• It proposes questions to the patient so that he can define more precisely the reality of his problem ;
• It makes use, in turn, of restructuring paraphrases. This technique inherited from Paul Watzlawick is a type of language in which the patient becomes aware of the root of his own problematic events through metaphors, aphorisms and other communicative strategies;
• Strategic brief therapy for panic attacks also seeks to evoke sensations in the patient. Experiences that, of course, facilitate a change in consciousness.
• This therapy seeks to generate an alliance between two people in which the patient will discover the wrong strategies that were carried out, as a first step towards putting more assertive responses into practice.

Example of an intervention

Below, we detail a possible intervention within the framework of strategic brief therapy:

• Problem description phase. The therapist asks the patient how he or she reacts whenever he has a panic attack. Through a series of questions, the person must identify how he acts, what he thinks, whether or not he uses some type of strategy to face the situation;
• With these first sessions, the person should understand the need to bring about change. As Einstein said: “If you are looking for different results, don’t always do the same thing”;
• Prescriptive phase. The therapist generates a paradoxical provocation in order to make the person feel responsible for themselves, so that they start new behaviors. It is recommended to use the “logbook” to write down how her daily life is, when panic attacks appear, what causes them and how she reacts;

• In the next phase, the professional and the patient work on the corrective emotional experience. The purpose is that voluntarily and by discovering the responsibility we have to ourselves, we begin to control (and correct) fear. The patient finally understands that a fire is not put out by adding more wood, but by removing little by little what generates combustion.

Changes then begin to happen.

To conclude, strategic brief therapy for panic attacks is increasingly present today as a widely used type of intervention for these cases.

However, one thing we must understand is that there is no attempt to understand why the problem exists, but rather how it works (doing so would prolong therapy). In this way, it is possible to build concrete and effective solutions for each personal reality.