Reality Therapy

Reality therapy (RT) is an approach to psychotherapy and counseling developed by William Glasser in the 1960s. It differs from conventional psychiatry, psychoanalysis and medical-model schools of psychotherapy by focusing on what Glasser called psychiatry's three Rs, realism, responsibility and right-and-wrong, rather than mental disorders, holding that most people suffer from socially universal human conditions rather than individual mental illness and that failure to attain basic needs moves a person's behavior away from the norm. Because fulfilling essential needs is part of present life, reality therapy does not concern itself with a person's past or with unconscious mental processes, instead focusing on here-and-now actions and the ability to create and choose a better future; counseled people seek to discover what they really want and how they are currently choosing to behave to achieve it. Glasser argued that the social component of psychological disorders has been overlooked in a rush to label people mentally ill, when distress may sometimes reflect only an inability to satisfy psychological needs, and the approach attempts to separate the person from their behavior.