Reality therapy (RT) is an approach to psychotherapy and counseling. Developed by William Glasser in the 1960s, RT differs from conventional psychiatry, psychoanalysis and medical model schools of psychotherapy in that it focuses on what Glasser calls psychiatry's three Rs: realism, responsibility, and right-and-wrong, rather than symptoms of mental disorders. Reality therapy maintains that the individual is suffering from a socially universal human condition rather than a mental illness. It is in the unsuccessful attainment of basic needs that a person's behavior moves away from the norm. Since fulfilling essential needs is part of a person's present life, reality therapy does not concern itself with a client's past. Neither does this type of therapy deal with unconscious mental processes.
The reality therapy approach to counseling and problem-solving focuses on the here-and-now actions of the client and the ability to create and choose a better future. Typically, clients seek to discover what they really want and how they are currently choosing to behave in order to achieve these goals. According to Glasser, the social component of psychological disorders has been highly overlooked in the rush to label the population as sick or mentally ill. If a social problem causes distress to a person, it is not always because of a labelled sickness, it may sometimes just be the inability to satisfy one's psychological needs. Reality therapy attempts to separate the client from the behavior.
History
Reality therapy was developed at the Veterans Administration hospital in Los Angeles in the early 1960s by William Glasser and his mentor and teacher, psychiatrist G. L. Harrington. In 1965, Glasser published the book Reality Therapy in the United States. The term refers to a process that is people-friendly and people-centered and has nothing to do with giving people a dose of reality (as a threat or punishment), but rather helps people to recognize how fantasy can distract them from their choices they control in life. Glasser posits that the past is not something to be dwelled upon but rather to be resolved and moved past in order to live a more fulfilling and rewarding life. By the 1970s, the concepts were extended into what Glasser then called "control theory", a term used in the title of several of his books. By the mid-1990s, the still evolving concepts were described as "choice theory", a term conceived and proposed by the Irish reality therapy practitioner Christine O'Brien Shanahan at the 1995 IRTI Conference in Waterford, Ireland and subsequently adopted by Glasser. The practice of reality therapy remains a cornerstone of the larger body of his work. Choice theory asserts that each of us is a self-determining being who can choose (many of our) future behaviors and hold ourselves consciously responsible for how we are acting, thinking, feeling, and also for our physiological states. Choice theory attempts to explain, or give an account of, how each of us attempts to control our world and those within that world.
Approach
According to Glasser, human beings have four basic psychological needs after survival: the most important need being to love and be loved by another person or group for a feeling of belonging; the need for power, through learning, achieving, feeling worthwhile, winning and through being competent; the need for freedom, including independence and autonomy while simultaneously exercising personal responsibility; the need for fun, pleasure seeking enjoyment and relaxation is also a very important need for good psychological health.
One of the core principles of reality therapy is that, whether people are aware of it or not, they are always trying to meet these essential human needs. These needs must all be balanced and met for a person to function most effectively. However, people don't necessarily act effectively at achieving these goals. Socializing with others is one effective way of meeting the need to belong. But how a person chooses to interact with and gain attention and love from others is most often at the root of their psychological dismay. Reality therapy stresses one major point—people are in control of what they are currently doing in their lives whether or not it is working in their favor toward meeting their basic psychological needs for power, belonging, fun and freedom. And it is through an individual's choices that he or she makes change happen for the better or worse.