Our five basic
needs.
But the key is what we
WANT.
A workable plan.
Doing: the heart of Reality
Therapy
The key issue of
control.
The solution is in the present
and the future.
Reality Therapy
& Choice Theory
Reality Therapy has been around
since the 1960s when a book of that name was published in the United
States by Dr William Glasser.
The name, though catchy, is easily misunderstood by those who
assume that Reality Therapy has something to do with giving people
``a dose of reality.''
In fact the approach is far more people-friendly and
people-centred than that.
Our Five Basic Needs
Almost all approaches to psychology
assume that people have certain basic needs and, indeed, there is
broad agreement on what these needs are.
In Reality Therapy they are classified under five headings:
- Power (which includes
achievement and feeling worthwhile as well as winning).
- Love & Belonging (this
includes groups as well as families or loved ones).
- Freedom (includes
independence, autonomy, your own 'space').
- Fun (includes pleasure and
enjoyment).
- Survival (includes
nourishment, shelter, sex).
One of the core principles of Reality Therapy is that, whether we
are aware of it or not, we are all the time acting to meet these
needs.
But we don't necessarily act effectively. Socialising with people
is an effective way to meet our need for belonging. Sitting in a
corner and crying in the hope that people will come to us is
generally an ineffective way of meeting that need - it may work, but
it is painful and carries a terribly high price for ourselves and
others.
So if life is unsatisfactory or we are distressed or in trouble,
one basic thing to check is whether we are succeeding in meeting our
basic psychological needs for power, belonging, freedom and fun.
In this society the survival need is normally being met - it is in
how we meet the other four ``psychological'' needs that we run into
trouble.
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But the key is what we
want
Now, nobody ever gets up in the
morning and says, ``I must meet my Love & Belonging need today.''
We are more likely to say something along the lines of, ``I wonder
if Mary is free for lunch today'' or ``Maybe we can get the gang
together on Friday night.'' We want to have lunch with Mary or to
marry John or to go out with our pals on Friday night or we want
"our" football team or "our" political party to win.
So what really drives us as social beings is our wants. We don't
think of our needs as such. We think of what we want, behave to get
what we want, fantasise about what we want and so on.
So while a counsellor in Reality Therapy would check out whether a
client is meeting his or her needs the three basic questions that are
asked are:
- What do you want?
- What are you doing to get what you want?
- Is it working?
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A workable plan
The counsellor helps the client to
make a workable plan to get what he or she wanats.
The essence of a workable plan, in Reality Therapy, is that it is
a plan you can implement - in other words, it concentrates on the
things that are in your control to do:
- Maybe you can't make your spouse talk to you but you can talk
to your spouse;
- Maybe you can't make your teenage son treat you with respect
but you can decide that you will no longer provide a laundry and
catering service to a son who treats you with contempt;
- Maybe you can't make the company give you a promotion but you
can look for a promotion, lobby for it and apply for the job when
it comes up;
In this way, Reality Therapy empowers the client by emphasising
the power of doing what is in your control to do.
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Doing: the heart of Reality
Therapy
Doing is placed at the heart of Reality
Therapy.
Emotions are a wonderful, immediate and ``alive'' source of
information about how we are doing and whether we are happy with what
is going on in our lives. But it is very, very hard to change our
emotions directly.
It is easier to change our thinking: to decide, for example, that
we will no longer think of ourselves as victims or to decide that in
our thoughts we will concentrate on what we can do rather than what
we think everybody else ought to do.
But to practitioners of Reality Therapy changing what we do
is the key to changing how we feel and to getting what we
want.
Indeed, we are sometimes so caught up in anger, depression or
resentment that even changing how we think seems an impossible task -
in such situations a positive change in what we do may be the best we
can manage.
The issue of control is also of great importance in Reality
Therapy. Indeed, the theory underpinning Reality Therapy was, until
recently, called Control Theory: it is now called Choice Theory.
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The key issue of
control
To meet their needs human beings
need control: one person seeks control through position and money;
another wants to control his or her physical space, like the teenager
who bans all parents and parent-like persons from her room; another
wants to chair the committee; another wants an office with a corner
and two windows; another wants two lamb chops, Heinz beans and three
boiled potatoes on the table at precisely 6.30 pm.
Control gets us into trouble in two primary ways: when we try to
control other people, and when we use drugs and alcohol to give us a
false sense of control.
At the very heart of Glasser's Choice Theory is the idea that the
only person I can really control is myself.
If I think I can control others I am moving in the direction of
frustration.
If I think others can control me (and so are to blame for all that
goes on in my life) I tend to do nothing and again head for
frustration.
There may indeed be things that "happen" to us and for which we
are not personally responsible but we can choose what we do about
these things.
Trying to control other people is a mug's game, from the point of
view of Reality Therapy. It is a never-ending battle, alienates us
from others and causes endless pain and frustration.
This is why it is vital to stick to what is in our own control to
do and to respect the right of other people to meet their needs.
We can, of course, get an instant sense of control from alcohol
and some other drugs. Unfortunately, our lives are never more out of
control than when we are drunk or drugged. There are very few people
in this world who ever woke up with a hangover to find that they had
fewer problems than they had when they started drinking the night
before.
Excessive drinking and the use of drugs have to be replaced by
doing something else - and that something else has to have a fair
chance of getting us what we want in life. Many people working in the
addiction field have found this approach useful.
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The solution is in the present and
the future
Counselling is often thought to
involve delving into the past. Practitioners of Reality Therapy also
visit the past but probably to a lesser extent than those who use
other therapies - this is not a criticism of those who use other
therapies, it is simply a way in which Reality Therapy is different.
In Reality Therapy the past is seen as the source of our wants and
of our ways of behaving.
Not only are the bad things that happened to us there but our
successes are there too. The focus of the practitioner of Reality
Therapy is to learn what needs to be learned about the past but to
move as quickly as feasible to empowering the client to satisfy his
or her needs and wants in the present and in the future.
This is because it is our present perceptions that influence our
present behaviour and so it is these perceptions that the Reality
Therapy practitioner helps the client to work through.
It is very much a therapy of hope, based on the conviction that we
are products of the past but we do not have to go on being its
victims.
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