Reality Therapy

Reality Therapy Reality therapy is a cognitive and behavioral method that helps people take more effective control of their lives and develop the psychological strength to handle the stresses and challenges of life. Although widely applicable in the field of mental health, the ideas and skills have also been successfully applied to the work domain (in coaching, managing, consulting, supervision and education), where it is referred to as ‘lead management’. The ideas and skills focus not only on helping people find solutions to presenting problems and behaviors (the shorter-term, more solution-focused approach), but more importantly, to clearly identify and focus on the underlying cause(s) (rather than continually deal with behavioral symptoms), so that significant and lasting change can emerge. The core of reality therapy is the idea that regardless of what has ‘happened’ to us, what we may have done, or how our ‘needs’ may have been unmet or violated in the past, we can redirect our lives and choose more effective (‘needs-satisfying’) behaviors both today and in the future. Reality therapy was founded by the psychiatrist William Glasser MD in the mid-1960s in two settings: a psychiatric hospital and a correctional institution, both in Los Angeles. Early in his career, Glasser began putting his therapeutic emphasis on the ‘here and now’, helping clients to focus on what he referred to as the ‘current reality’ of their lives, and in particular on helping them better satisfy what he claimed to be ‘the two most important psychological needs that psychiatry should concern itself with today: the need to love and be loved and the need to feel that we are worthwhile to ourselves and others’ (Glasser 1965). Glasser (1998) argued that the continued failure to meet these two human ‘needs’ satisfactorily is the basis of most long-term psychological problems, unhappiness, an array of health-related problems, and much of what is referred to as mental illness.

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