• A mother explains that her son “makes no effort at all”.
• An adolescent replies that his parents “never understand anything”.
• A partner insists that the other “doesn’t communicate”.
• A team says it is blocked by “a toxic colleague”.

All of this looks like a problem. Yet from a strategic and systemic point of view, these are often definitions of the problem, that is to say constructions already worked over, repeated, defended, verified and sometimes rigidified by the system itself.

Or rather, understanding from within the equation already on offer. If the practitioner adopts the initial definition just as it is brought to them, they risk adding their intelligence, their empathy and their techniques to the organisation that is already maintaining the problem. They then become one more actor in the same loop.

Yara Doumit defines the problem as a tension produced by an unwanted gap between two states bearing on the same question:

The problem is therefore not merely a fact; it is a tension organised around a gap, an expectation and a meaning.

From difficulty to problem: when the solutions become the organisation

A difficulty rarely presents itself as a “problem” from the outset. In the beginning there is an incident, a discomfort, a mismatch, a breakdown in adjustment. A child stops working. A couple can no longer manage to talk. A family tenses up around an adolescent’s evenings out. A person avoids a situation. The system then tries to adapt. It corrects, insists, explains, reassures, monitors, threatens, withdraws, negotiates, dramatises or minimises.

These adjustments are normal. They belong to the ordinary variability of a living system. The problem takes shape when these attempts fail to produce the expected effect and their repetition ends up organising the difficulty instead of resolving it. At that point, the members of the system are no longer simply living through a difficulty; they begin to produce hypotheses about what is going on.

• The mother thinks: “My son is being oppositional.”
• The son thinks: “My parents are never really there for me.”
• The father thinks: “My wife protects him too much.”
• The school thinks: “The family doesn’t set enough boundaries.”

Each one selects a hypothesis, then begins to verify it. And since human perception is rarely neutral, each notices far more of the clues that confirm their hypothesis than of those that might refute it.

The system thus enters a kind of circular investigation. Everyone believes they are searching for the truth of the problem, but everyone is also helping to stabilise a version of the problem. The more the mother monitors, the less recognised the son feels. The more the son shuts down, the more the mother sees confirmation of his opposition. The more the father hardens his stance, the more convinced the adolescent becomes that he is not understood. The problem then becomes an organisation of reciprocal confirmations.

What the client brings is not just a story: it is an attempt at enrolment

When a person arrives in session, they do not merely recount “what happened”. Often without being aware of it, they try to draw us into the perceptual logic that allows them to keep standing. They show us the facts, but also the grid through which those facts are to be read. They implicitly offer us a place: witness, judge, repairer, ally, translator, expert, advocate, arbiter.

This is where the initial request becomes clinically delicate. It may seem clear: “Make him change”, “Help me stop suffering”, “Tell her she is going too far”, “Our child has to understand”. But a clear request is not necessarily a workable one. Yara Doumit distinguishes in particular forms of request that can keep the intervention stuck in ineffectiveness if they do not transform: fulfilling a mandate, sharing, or delegating.

An adolescent mandated by his parents may come along “so that everyone will leave him alone”. A partner may come “to prove that they have tried everything”. A parent may come to “deposit” the full weight of their suffering without yet being available to modify the relational organisation. A patient may delegate: “Tell me what to do”, while keeping intact the very definition of the problem that has rendered all the previous prescriptions ineffective.

The facts are not the problem

One of the most useful propositions for therapists is this:

The problem arises from their qualification, their arrangement, their insertion into a logic of meaning. The same event can become proof of love, a sign of abandonment, an act of domination, clumsiness, betrayal, a symptom, protection or a desperate attempt at connection. The qualification of the facts configures the problem, whereas the facts themselves can be read differently depending on the frames of reference brought to bear.

This distinction profoundly changes the clinical position. When parents say: “He isn’t doing his schoolwork”, the fact may be accurate. But that fact does not yet say what the problem is.

• Is it a problem of ability? Of loyalty? Of autonomy? Of protest? Of shame?
• Of position among siblings? Of struggle against a parental expectation experienced as intrusive?
• Of an attempt to exist as something other than “the problem child”?

Likewise, when a couple says: “We argue all the time”, the factual statement is not enough. The arguing may organise a bond, avert a separation, maintain a hierarchy, protect against a riskier intimacy, allow each partner to keep hoping that the other will finally provide the expected proof.

The clinical error: doing more of the same equation

The major trap consists in treating the initial request as though it were already the right definition of the problem. A mother says: “My son doesn’t want to do anything.” If the therapist steps into that definition, they will look for ways to motivate the son, to strengthen parental authority, to reduce the opposition. That can sometimes help. But if the definition is itself part of the problem, the intervention produces more of the same.

The system has already tried. It has explained, punished, negotiated, threatened, begged, encouraged. It may have consulted, read, sought advice. The attempted solutions have already selected certain variables: willpower, obedience, understanding, effort, love, respect. If the practitioner takes up the same variables, even with greater finesse, they risk arriving at the same result.

The strategic resolution method invites the opposite: defining the problem “in solvable terms”. This step consists in selecting the relevant data, constructing a plausible explanation and offering the client a definition that makes a path towards a result possible.

Defining in solvable terms: neither too close nor too far

A good therapeutic redefinition must meet a delicate condition: it must be close enough to people’s experience for them to recognise themselves in it, yet different enough from their initial definition to open up a new space for action.

This formulation does not deny the facts. It encompasses them. It does not say that the mother is wrong, nor that the son is right. It shifts the problem from the individual to the organisation of the attempts. It makes the problem treatable: it becomes possible to intervene on the way proof is demanded, on the moments of escalation, on the sequences of verification, on the exceptions, on the conditions for recognition.

With a couple, instead of “she is too critical” or “he runs away”, one might propose: “You seem caught in a cycle in which the more one of you seeks an explicit response, the more the other tries to preserve their freedom by withdrawing; and the more they withdraw, the more urgent the demand becomes.” Here again, the redefinition turns two individual faults into a relational dance.

Zoom in, zoom out, then recompose

The practitioner’s work often consists in alternating three movements.

A clinical compass for not clinging to the request

In the first sessions, the therapist can keep a simple compass in mind.

This definition must not be a verdict. It is a working hypothesis accurate enough for the system to agree to explore it. The client’s adherence to this definition is a decisive moment, for it marks the shift from a position of enduring the problem to a position of agreeing to take part in its resolution.

Conclusion: the therapist does not solve the problem presented, but helps to construct a solvable problem

The therapeutic art does not consist in discovering the “real problem” hidden behind the false one. That formulation would still be too linear. It is rather a matter of co-constructing a definition of the problem that allows the system to escape its own impasses.

The problem is not what arrives in session in the form of a convincing story. It is not only the child who refuses, the partner who flees, the parent who controls, the patient who avoids. The problem is the relational and meaning-making organisation that has turned a difficulty into a repetitive loop, and then that loop into an identity.