C H O I C E T H E O R Y William Glasser, M.D. To my wife, Carleen This book is as much hers as mine. I wrote it, and she gave input to every page, literally to every word. I love her very much and wish I had the words to describe our marriage. But in Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy had the words, and I quote to describe what we have together: This good fellowship—camaraderie—usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstances permit its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death—that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the oods drown, besides which the passion usually called by the name is as evanescent as steam. CONTENTS Preface PART I The Theory CHAPTER 1 We Need a New Psychology CHAPTER 2 Basic Needs and Feelings CHAPTER 3 Your Quality World CHAPTER 4 To tal Behavior CHAPTER 5 Compatibility, Personality, and the Strength of the Needs CHAPTER 6 Conict and Reality Therapy CHAPTER 7 Creativity PART II The Practice CHAPTER 8 Love and Marriage CHAPTER 9 Trust and Your Family CHAPTER 10 Schooling, Education, and Quality Schools CHAPTER 11 Choice Theory in the Workplace PART III The Application CHAPTER 12 The Quality Community CHAPTER 13 Redening Your Personal Freedom APPENDIX: The William Glasser Institute INDEX Acknowledgments Books by William Glasser Copyright About the Publisher Preface how important good relationships are to a HIS BOOK IS ABOUT successful life. In it I state that, if we are not sick, poverty stricken, or suering the ravages of old age, the major human problems we struggle with—violence, crime, child abuse, spousal abuse, alcohol and drug addiction, the proliferation of premature and unloving sex and emotional distress—are caused by unsatisfying relationships. This whole book is both an explanation of why this happens and what to do to get along better with one another. I focus on four major relationships, all of which are in obvious need of improvement. These are husband-wife, parent-child, teacher-student, and manager-worker. I make the claim that if we do not improve these relationships, we will have little success in reducing any of the problems in the previous paragraph. For me to make such a broad claim may be considered presumptuous but, just before this book went to press, I was pleased to nd recent research that strongly supports my thesis that adolescents, especially, need good parent-child and teacher-student relationships if they are to avoid self-destructive behaviors. The September 10, 1997, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)includes an article entitled “Protecting Adolescents from Harm,” which describes the rst ndings from the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health. The most signicant nding was: “Parent-family connectedness and perceived school connectedness were protective of every health risk behavior measure except history of pregnancy.” The research does not as yet go into how to improve these two important relationships, but it does show clearly that this is the direction in which to go—and that is the subject of this book. I would suggest that the researchers also focus on how husbands and wives can achieve more marital satisfaction, which I think is a vital factor in achieving child-parent connectedness. Years ago, a priest I knew in Chicago, by the name of Father John, said something I have never forgotten: “The best thing parents can do for their children is love each other.” As you read this book you will note that I do not use the word “connectedness.” Although I use “satisfying relationships,” I can see no dierence in the terms. I encourage you to read the JAMAarticle if you want to see for yourself how strongly it supports what I say in this book. PART I The Theory CHAPTER 1 We Need a New Psychology ask all the people in the world who are not UPPOSE YOU COULD hungry, sick, or poor, people who seem to have a lot to live for, to give you an honest answer to the question, “How are you?” Millions would say, “I’m miserable.” If asked why, almost all of them would blame someone else for their misery—lovers, wives, husbands, exes, children, parents, teachers, students, or people they work with. There is hardly a person alive who hasn’t been heard saying, “You’re driving me crazy…. That really upsets me…. Don’t you have any consideration for how I feel? … You make me so mad, I can’t see straight.” It never crosses their minds that they are choosing the misery they are complaining about. Choice theory explains that, for all practical purposes, we choose everything we do, including the misery we feel. Other people can neither make us miserable nor make us happy. All we can get from them or give to them is information. But by itself, information cannot make us do or feel anything. It goes into our brains, where we process it and then decide what to do. As I explain in great detail in this book, we choose all our actions and thoughts and, indirectly, almost all our feelings and much of our physiology. As bad as you may feel, much of what goes on in your body when you are in pain or sick is the indirect result of the actions and thoughts you choose or have chosen every day of your life. I also show how and why we make these painful, even crazy, choices and how we can make better ones. Choice theory teaches that we are much more in control of our lives than we realize. Unfortunately, much of that control is not eective. For example, you choose to feel upset with your child, then you choose to yell and threaten, and things get worse, not better. Taking more eective control means making better choices as you relate to your children and everyone else. You can learn through choice theory how people actually function: how we combine what is written in our genes with what we learn as we live our lives. The best way to learn choice theory is to focus on why we choose the common miseries that we believe just happen to us. When we are depressed, we believe that we have no control over our suering, that we are victims of an imbalance in our neurochemistry and hence that we need brain drugs, such as Prozac, to get our chemistry back into balance. Little of this belief is true. We have a lot of control over our suering. We are rarely the victims of what happened to us in the past, and, as will be explained in chapter 4, our brain chemistry is normal for what we are choosing to do. Brain drugs may make us feel better, but they do not solve the problems that led us to choose to feel miserable. The seeds of almost all our unhappiness are planted early in our lives when we begin to encounter people who have discovered not only what is right for them—but also, unfortunately, what is right for us. Armed with this discovery and following a destructive tradition that has dominated our thinking for thousands of years, these people feel obligated to try to force us to do what they know is right. Our choice of how we resist that force is, by far, the greatest source of human misery. Choice theory challenges this ancient Iknow- what’s-right-for-you tradition. This entire book is an attempt to answer the all-important question that almost all of us continually ask ourselves when we are unhappy: How can I gure out how to be free to live my life the way I want to live it and still get along well with the people I need? From the perspective of forty years of psychiatric practice, it has become apparent to me that all unhappy people have the same problem: They are unable to get along well with the people they want to get along well with. I have had many counseling successes, but I keep hearing my mentor, Dr. G. L. Harrington, the most skillful psychiatrist I’ve ever known, saying, “If all the professionals in our eld suddenly disappeared, the world would hardly note their absence.” He was not disparaging what we do. He was saying that if the goal of psychiatrists is to reduce the misery rampant in the world and to help human beings get along with each other, their eorts have hardly scratched the surface. To begin to approach that goal, we need a new psychology that can help us get closer to each other than most of us are able to do now. The psychology must be easy to understand, so it can be taught to anyone who wants to learn it. And it must be easy to use once we understand it. Our present psychology has failed. We do not know how to get along with each other any better than we ever have. Indeed, the psychology we have embraced tends to drive us apart. In the area of marriage alone, it is clear that the use of this traditional psychology has failed. I call this universal psychology that destroys relationships because it destroys personal freedom external control psychology. The control can be as slight as a disapproving glance or as forceful as a threat to our lives. But whatever it is, it is an attempt to force us to do what we may not want to do. We end up believing that other people can actually make us feel the way we feel or do the things we do. This belief takes away the personal freedom we all need and want. The simple operational premise of the external control psychology the world uses is: Punish the people who are doing wrong, so they will do what we say is right; then reward them, so they keep doing what we want them to do. This premise dominates the thinking of most people on earth. What makes this psychology so prevalent is that those who have the power—agents of government, parents, teachers, business managers, and religious leaders, who also dene what’s right or wrong—totally support it. And the people they control, having so little control over their own lives, nd some security in accepting the control of these powerful people. It is unfortunate that almost no one is aware that this controlling, coercing, or forcing psychology is creating the widespread misery that, as much as we have tried, we have not yet been able to reduce. This misery continues unabated not because we have thought it over and decided that controlling others is best. It continues because when people do not do what we want them to do, coercion and control are all we think of using. It is the psychology of our ancestors, our parents and grandparents, of our teachers and leaders, of almost all the people we know or know about. Coercion, to try to get our way, has been with us so long that it is considered common sense, and we use it without thinking about it. We neither care where it came from nor question its validity. If external control is the source of so much misery, why is it the choice of almost all people, even powerless people who suer so much from it? The answer is simple: It works. It works for the powerful because it often gets them what they want. It works for the powerless because they experience it working on them and live in hope that they will eventually be able to use it on someone else. The lowest people on the totem pole look up more than they look down. But even more so, the powerless accept it because as miserable as they may be, they believe that they are not free to choose otherwise. They further believe, usually correctly, that to resist would be worse. So one way or another, most people are doing many things they don’t want to do. For example, many women stay in abusive marriages because they think leaving would be worse. Alone, they fear they would be unable to support themselves, lose their children, might still suer abuse, and maybe risk their lives. Many continually entertain the hope that if they stick it out, things will get better. But this book is about much more than why people stay and accept external control. It is about the fact that the belief in and use of external control harms everyone, both the controllers and the controlled. For example, the abusive husband also suers (though not as much as his wife and family). He, too, is a victim of external control psychology. In choosing to do what he does, he loses any chance for happiness. This psychology is a terrible plague that invades every part of our lives. It destroys our happiness, our health, our marriages, our families, our ability to get an education, and our willingness to do high-quality work. It is the cause of most of the violence, crime, drug abuse, and unloving sex that are pervasive in our society. This book is all about this human toll and how it can be reduced by both learning why external control is so harmful and how a new, pro-relationship theory can replace it. Choice theory is an internal control psychology; it explains why and how we make the choices that determine the course of our lives. Choice theory is a complete change from what has been common sense to what I hope will become, in time, a new common sense. This change is not easy. It can happen only through learning what is wrong with external control psychology and the overwhelming reasons to replace it with choice theory as we deal with the people in our lives. As we attempt to do this, we will continually ask ourselves: Will what I am about to do bring me closer to these people or move us further apart? How we use this basic question and what would be possible if we did are the heart and soul of this book. What I do in this book is question the basic psychology of the world, and I have no illusions that it is an easy task. To begin to realize the existence of this psychology and how harmful it is to our lives, we need to take a look at some of the misery we suer because we depend on our common sense even when it becomes apparent that it isn’t working. For example, using the only psychology you know, you punish your teenage son for not doing his schoolwork by grounding him on weekends. But after you ground him, he still doesn’t do his homework, and to make matters worse, you have a sullen teenager hanging around the house all weekend. After a month, you begin to think: Why am I doing this over and over? There must be a better way. It may take a while to come to this realization because punishing your son is so much a part of your common sense that it doesn’t feel like a choice. It feels right. It’s what a good parent does in this situation—it’s probably what your parents did to you—and you are