Advantages And Disadvantages Of Reality Therapy

1. Introduction
According to Glasser (1965), the author of reality therapy, everyone lives both in the real world and their perceived world in the context of five basic needs, which is belonging, power, freedom, fun and survival. Human behaviors are influenced by their perceived world in order to meet five internal forces and control our perception of the external world (Austad, 2009). In other words, the severity of people’s issues reflect the degree to which they are unable to fulfill their drives effectively or have taken more or less some unsuccessful efforts to do so in an impractical way.
Therefore, reality therapy, which based on control therapy and conscious behavior, refers to the process that people are guided to be able to face

Disadvantages of Reality Therapy For reality therapists, the consideration of clients’ unconscious, previous experiences (especially tragic past), the influences of physical environment and significant others is not enough. Reality therapy recognizes the influence of those elements toward behavior but deny that they may be the causes of behaviors. However, everyone lives in their environment. It is irrational to ignore or eliminate the influence of interaction between human and environment and interpersonal interaction. Reality therapy is a therapist-led approach so it is likely to impede growth and progress of clients and become extreme dependence on counselors or a good counselor-client relationship. In other words, clients cannot tackle their issues in essence because it is counselors solve the problem not clients themselves. They may be still unable to fulfill their basic needs after termination of the helping process. Also, since the reality therapist assumes such an important role in the changing process, it requires the therapist to have enough technical skills. However, it is hard to define and measure what enough is. That is, if therapists do not have enough social work skills, the changing process is more likely to