The continuity principle stipulates that through all stages of disaster, management and treatment should aim at preserving and restoring functional, historical, and interpersonal continuities, at the individual, family, organization, and community levels. Two misconceptions work against this principle and lead to decisional errors: the "abnormalcy bias" which results in underestimating victims' ability to cope with disaster, and the "normalcy bias" which results in underestimating the probability or extent of expected disruption. This article clarifies these biases and details the potential contributions of the continuity principle at the different stages of the disaster.

Following Gottfried's (1980) suggestion that strategies serve as unifying concepts for different psychotherapies, an attempt is made to define a corpus of strategic rules for choosing and defining goals, locating strategic points, actively searching for the client's responses, dealing with resistance, exploiting or creating propitious timings, mobilizing allies, concentrating the therapeutic influence, stabilizing partial achievements, dealing with competing demands, retreating after failure, and changing the therapeutic framework when needed. Each principle is illustrated by interventions from different therapeutic orientations. It is proposed that the principles serve as the rudiments for a common psychotherapeutic language."Strategy" and its related terms are everywhere in the psychotherapeutic scene: "strategic therapy," "tactics of change," "opening and closing moves," "the battle for initiative' "indirect attacks," and so on. The very vagueness of these terms adds to their popularity. One may use them without commiting oneself to any specific theory or treatment method. In this they represent truly the zeitgeisfs recoil from the absolute claims of individual schools and systems (Omer & London, 1988). Fuzziness, however, is a short-lived advantage for theoretical concepts; it ends by cloying to the palate. "Strategy" will share the fate of all fads and fashions unless it become more clearly