Abstract
In clinical practice it is essential to enlist a variety of theories and yet have some focus and grasp of the theories so that one can be effective in what one tries to do. That is to serve a client population by exploring methods that have worked for other clinicians in treating clients who are similar. Reality therapy is possibly one of the most employable theories in the context of alternative education. It is a theory that reflects on the errors of the expansion of economic thinking and rejects what does not find confidence in reality. Existential theory is also effective as people do more than perceive and feel, they also wonder and dream. With people-centered therapy the therapist learns through practice that empathy and tolerance is one of the best ways to assist in fostering a positive interaction between the clinician and the client.
I. Introduction
In this paper I will be discussing three theories that will directly and formatively influence my practice. After some considerable thought and research I have specifically chosen three theories to utilize as they should serve my clients most effectively and carry great functional insight. The three theories are: Reality Therapy, Existential Therapy and Person-Centered Therapy.
I will be going through each individual theory separately to give it enough depth that would be useful for a study of this size. Afterwards, in my summary I will be providing linkages to induce more cohesion and effective understanding for future practice. Throughout I will be shaping this paper with examples of how the three theories will work to make me most helpful to my client population which is primarily composed of, alternative education high school students, who are often but not limited to gang members, students with court orders, and young mothers.
II. Reality Therapy
Reality therapy has been utilized since the mid-1960s; it is formulated on the premise that people can change their thoughts and that through the fostering of wider and stronger consciousness a person can make better choices for achieving good aims and achievements.
It is primarily adapted to clinical practice by Dr. William Glasser and is one of our centuries’ great examples of success in putting theory to practice through adaptation and honest evaluation.
According to Glasser(1985), “Students do not get involved in long-term learning because they are threatenened or rewarded by teachers. They make this effort only if what is being taught satisfies them, just as we answer a phone, not because it rings but because it satisfies us to answer. “(241) Satisfaction is a crucial term here, it addresses our sociality instead of our supposed ‘rational person’ type of personality description, which focuses too much on an analysis of punishments and rewards.
It is due partially to our sociality that we even begin to learn and it is through emotional connection that satisfaction occurs. This is very different from stimulus-response theory so clearly Glasser is not merely exchanging old terms for new. With S-R theory people are entirely rationally motivated and there is a lot missing from their picture of people. Their picture of what people are is rather robotic compared to the social yet individual people that we are.
In practice the traditional application of rewards and punishments in the classroom setting doesn’t work and focusing on leveraging external pressures to build discipline works even less effectively. People are not so easily motivated but satisfaction is the greatest motivator and so this theory allows me to individualize my practice by stressing the question of what motivates my client(s) and makes them feel satisfied enough to keep on going.
Glasser(1985) spends a lot of time criticizing externally motivated programs because they focus on objectivity and apply so-called ‘universal’ standards that are usually only universal in that they don’t fit anyone.(241-246) The benefit of an internally driven practice is that a lot has to correspond to who the person is but also respect needs to occur both ways. Rules need to be clearly laid out as well as basic guidelines. To respect a person and know a person you have to start with a foundation of basic rules that will allow them to not flounder in the environment they are in.
The discipline and punish strategy does not work because the punishments are usually too abstract to really get students motivated without satisfaction to do something. Once in awhile it’s possible to get a few results but these results will be limited and will not hold over time. While it’s hardly a challenge to persuade students that education does matter and it’s already clear to them that they’ll make more money and most likely enjoy a more high-quality level of living if they finish their education, these are long-term incentives that don’t hold in light of internal struggles with a lot of competing things in their lives that are often also in some way related to financial troubles.
As Glasser(1985) explains from working with educational structures, “The only way we can motivate students in school is to teach them that school is a place where, to a reasonable extent, their basic genetic instructions or needs can be satisfied.”( 243) While security and survival are genetic needs; to want to survive we have other needs for “friendship, freedom, fun and power.”(Glasser, 1985, 243) Students who are most well-behaved tend to get these needs satisfied in the environment that they are in and most successful environments may consciously or unconsciously satisfy these needs to ensure for productivity and the continual achievement of aims.
These needs are not always easy to satisfy, however: friendship can be satisfied by having people pair up to work on projects, freedom can be satisfied by allowing students some input into choosing some segment of the curriculum or even how it is to be taught, fun can be satisfied by encouraging teachers to be more expressive and the students as well at certain recommended times, and power by encouraging students in some ways ironic to do service work. For power is often conceived as exploiting someone, i.e. robbing someone, stealing, even killing another person but power can be had if one is useful and beneficial to other people’s lives.
There is necessarily some consideration of the biological as a lot of these students are without secure housing or even without security of food.(Caterino, 2008) Alternative schools should take the instability in their lives into account and strive to provide compensation when the biological can be minimized analytically but not in reality. Sometimes, medication as well as food vouchers and referrals to temporary but safe housing options would be worthwhile to implement so that my clients would receive more than just warmth, cohesion, and psychological satisfaction.
While of course school is a place for learning students can’t tolerate it when it’s just a place for learning and are unmotivated, angry, and just pass a lot of time without doing anything. Eliciting student engagement is necessary and by sticking to these four foundational needs of friendship, freedom, fun and power. It is very possible that motivation will improve and students will both keep on attending as well as actively learn so that they can progress and start working to making money in legitimate ways.
III. Existential Therapy
Where reality therapy deals more with concrete motivations tied to our genetic makeup that requires motivators of a social origin, existential therapy is more philosophical and addresses issues like meaning, value and making sense of life and personal problems. Because philosophy is too abstract to ground it adequately, psychologists have focused less on epistemology and more on embracing a view that human behavior is motivated by meanings of the world for the individual and that these meanings influence “how any given individual actually functions in any particular situation so much dependent upon factors in previous development and on the way the present situation appears to him.”(Wall, 1979, 246) For some of the students, life is terrible and every day is filled with dread for what will come, they are more or less living in an existential crisis. There is often a vague anxiety that is quite impossible to control and this is also supremely existential, and according to Freud, is incredibly hard to treat as it lacks a definite object.(Stolorow, 2007, 373)
Often times this dread is tied to “knowing too much” and for some it seems that a return to a more innocent time would be precisely what they want if they could have it but often times they can’t so they act out and behave destructively because something has been taken away from them as something else has been given but this is hardly a gift to be craved for the sake of health.(Widmer,1960, 14) A lot of my clients probably got exposed to too much for a person of any age, traumatic behavior often results in reactions that are challenging to predict but generally self-destructive to varying degrees. Their trust component has been in a way shattered and it must be rebuilt, this could take a lot of time but through state institutions and services as well as non-profit contributions it’s not impossible to get someone who has even been tortured many times over to recede from the horrors and focus on improving life and making life meaningful. Confidence and trust need to be re-built to put people back on a more even-playing field, so they can feel again and be responsive to treatments like reality therapy where they’ll have to bond and secure satisfaction from the work they do in class as well as in the ‘real world.’
IV. Person Centered Therapy
In person centered therapies, the work is extremely client-centered and operates when the following “five conditions are met:
-When the client perceives himself as faced by a serious problem;
-When the therapist is a congruent person in the relationship, able to be the person he is
-When the therapies feels an unconditional positive regard for the client;
-When the therapist experiences an accurate emphatic understanding of the client’s private world and communicates this;
-When the client to some degree experiences the therapists congruence, acceptance, and empathy.” (Lunsford, 1979, 146-147)
This theory may be the most problematic of the three but it could be used more as a technique that would help build trust and self-confidence in the client. Possibly it is better adjusted to people who tend to be a bit too judgmental as this is the model for the robotic therapist who cannot judge and can only adore as well as emulate. While it certainly contains components that are worthy of striving for, many studies have shown that increased confidence without boundaries can create criminals who are just more confident about ‘getting away with it.’ It’s not just self-confidence that’s important to consider here. There’s also the factor of what are they self-confident about. If they’re confident about being the best gang member on the block or about being able to steal money well that’s not a good thing to encourage. However, if they’re self-confident about always attending class and getting great grades, within an educational framework that’s a wonderful thing to encourage.
The crucial thing to take from person-centered therapy is unconditional acceptance, which is hard to give and hard to maintain. Our desire to understand often leads us to diagnose before we even have enough information, and the “condition of empathy challenges the general assumption in the field that psychodiagnosis is essential for effective psychotherapy.”(Elliot & Frierer, 1957, 286)
The clients would probably appreciate constructive criticism but most of all it needs to be attached to acceptance that what they said or did is true and that it should have been said. To judge is too often to disgrace and to be forgiven that can be grace.
Acceptance furthermore, “seems more honest and less manipulative than understanding. “I understand you” too often means: I have analyzed you, categorized you, figured you out, probed your secrets-so that I can manipulate you.”(Glatthorn, 1972, 18) Acceptance furthermore functions as a binding force, an accepting environment gives people more freedom and power. They feel free to express themselves and still be free from ridicule or criticism, they feel safe to sometimes impose hard to hear things on others. A lot of people shield from telling someone what’s wrong because they’re actually quite worried about offending the other person or causing the person pain. A therapist who is able to convincingly express to the patient that what they say will not negate the respect they have for them as a person because they accept and want them to know some aspect of great yet humble acceptance. That would be a therapist to really effect change in someone’s life because they can emphasize and help resolve a lot of issues by just being accepting while also providing the kind of talk that a person most needs to hear.
V. Summary
With all three theories making their contribution a student should have the capacity to do what they do want; to graduate, and enter into the workforce to lead a good life. With reality therapy a person can be treated like a realistic person who has deep-seated genetically based needs. With existential therapy a person can be encouraged to think for themselves and figure out why they act like life has no meaning and why they expect so often to encounter doom that they end up creating it. With person-centered therapy one is encouraged to be much more tolerant and emphatic, this is important as well as the client will probably not talk or trust if this does not happen to a more significant degree. All three have their own flaws but this is why methods are not always wrong, but wrong only when applied singularly and without reflection.
Reference List
Glasser, W. (1985). Discipline Has Never Been the Problem and Isn’t the Problem Now. Theory into Practice, Vol. 24, No. 4, 241-246.
Widmer, K. (1960). The Existential Darkness: Richard Wright’s “The Outsider”, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 1, No. 3, 13-21.
Lunsford, A. (1979) Aristotelian vs. Rogerian Argument: A Reassessment. College Composition and Communication, Vol. 30, No. 2, 146-151
Glatthorn, A. (1972) The Student as Person. Theory and Practice, Vol. 11, No. 1, 17-21
Caterino, L. (2008) Using Reality Therapy to Treat Sexually Abused Children. PsychCritiques, Vol. 53, No. 7, No Pagination Specified
Stolorow, R. (2007) Anxiety, authenticity, and trauma: The relevance of Heidegger’s existential analytic for psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 2, 373-383.
Elliot & Friere. (2007) Classical Person-Centered and Experiential Perspectives on Rogers. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, Vol. 44, No. 3, 285-288.