Serving You With

Skills for Growing Mentally Healthy Relationships

Most people want to be happy but often do not know how to be in that state.

True happiness comes from having at least one significant relationship in your life that is the way you want it to be. This could be with a significant other or with a parent, a friend or even a co-worker. When our relationships are out of sync. our happiness scale is out of balance.

  • Do you or someone you know struggle with feeling happy?
  • Do you have some high quality relationships in your life or do your relationships tend to drain you more than feed you?

Sometimes our relationships can suck the life right out of us and we wonder why we are unhappy. Sometimes we turn to pleasure seeking behaviors thinking those will help us be happy.

  • Do you know people like this?

What is Reality Therapy?

Reality Therapy was developed by Dr. William Glasser as a method of helping people take more effective control of their life. It was  based on the concepts of control theory and in more recent years  Choice Theory. Choice Theory is an explantation of how people function.

Choice theory explains that in addition to our need to survive, we have four psychological needs  for belonging. power, fun and freedom.  These psychological needs are as important as the physical need  and people who do not know how to meet them effectively experience varying degrees of pain and frustration and tend to become even less effective in all areas of their life.

Reality Therapy is a communication process with two major components: the counselling, coaching, helping environment and specific procedures that lead to changes in behaviour.  Both components are essential and the art of helping is to weave them together in ways that lead a person to evaluate behaviours and decide to try more effective ones that in turn give new direction to life.

When people are not happy, feel out of control, out of place or unsuccessful, they tend to look for reasons outside of themselves. They may blame their past, their spouse, their parents, their job or society at large.  This external focus helps them avoid taking responsibility for the situation they are in and for what they do about it. Reality Therapy ( counselling, coaching , helping with Choice Theory) is designed to help people learn better ways to fulfill their needs.

Want to know more? Contact us: maureen@monctonrealitytherapy.ca