Choice Therapy

By understanding the drives for SURVIVAL, POWER, LOVE, BELONGING, FREEDOM, and FUN in people, we become more conscious of the need for our world to be a Quality World of our choosing.

The Eleven Axioms of Choice Theory

1. The only person whose behaviour we can control is our own.

2. All we can give another person is information

3. All long-lasting psychological problems are relationship problems.

4. The problem relationship is always part of our present life.

5. What happened in the past has everything to do with what we are today, but we can only satisfy our basic needs right now and plan to continue satisfying them in the future.

6. We can only satisfy our needs by satisfying the pictures in our Quality World.

7. All we do is “behave”.

8. All Behaviours are Total Behaviours and are made up of four components: Acting, Thinking, Feeling and Physiology.

9. All TOTAL Behaviours are chosen, but we only have direct control over the acting and thinking components.

10. We can only control our feeling and physiology indirectly through how we choose to act and think.

11. All TOTAL Behaviour is designated by verbs and named by the part that is the most recognizable. 

A MASTERFUL ILLUSTRATION

An aging master grew tired of his apprentice complaining, and so, one morning, sent him for some salt. When the apprentice returned, the master instructed the unhappy young man to put a handful of salt in a glass of water and then to drink it.

"How does it taste?" the master asked?

"Bitter," spit the apprentice.

The master chuckled and then asked the young man to take the same handful of salt and put it in the lake. The two walked in silence to the nearby lake, and once the apprentice swirled his handful of salt
in the water, the old man said, "Now drink from the lake."
As the water dripped down the young man's chin, the master asked, "How does it taste?"

"Fresh," remarked the apprentice.

"Do you taste the salt?" asked the master.

"No," said the young man.

At this, the master sat beside this serious young man who so reminded him of himself and took his hands, offering, "The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less … the amount of pain in life remains the exactly the same. However, the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things . . . Stop being a glass. Become a lake."

[Unknown]

Respect

Respect

This starts with the individual’s sense of self and that sense of self is the by-product of very early developmental experiences. 

Its clearest defining qualities are related to time and how time and interaction with affective adults was spent … with those who reflect how that individual was viewed during the child’s first 30 to 60 months of life. 

It Is True That: it is a necessity that we must first have respect for ourselves … it then follows naturally … that we have to have respect for the rules we chose to live by … which we agree to … and conduct our living accordingly and build our social order around. 

On the other hand if we do not have this sense of respect instilled at a very early age ... then ... it is with great effort and difficulty that we will move through our lives. 

Respect is something that is purely experiential … it can be obtained anytime … but first we must know what it is that we are looking for … and then … where it is we must search to find it.  12 Step programs help enormously ... formalized, regimented and searching. Other self help programs like A Course In Miracles or the Artist’s Way are equally as helpful in the exploration of self. The stage one and two work of recovery is often referred to as the original pain work or the family of origin.  It is difficult and most will try their best to avoid it hoping that if they circle around it then it won’t bother them any longer. Scott Peck points out in the Road Less Travelled that The Way Out Is Through.

The book Iron John asks the question “Where is the Key hidden?”

One of life’s conundrums is that sooner or later we get our selves involved in attempting to make something happen … where; the solution to the problem needs a necessary ingredient of respect for the task to come to completion.

Now the complexity of life sets in because most of us don’t carry the necessary tools to cause the respect to be there as part of the solution … it somehow got overlooked … the task at hand that should not be all that difficult becomes a very difficult task. 

The Basics of the concept is:  A person cannot respect themselves unless he knows the truth of them.

For most the truth about us is lost back in our early begins … at times and places where we simply had to begin to pretend to be someone else other than just ourselves to be able to get along in our families of origin ... That Hurt(s). 

It is also true that our every effort is to maintain the lid on this painful thing so that it does not get out and hurt us again.  The problem is that (neurotic) defense strategies themselves become more painful than the pain they were masking but our only defense to pain is to build another neurotic structure … mask … false self … to protect us from the pain of our reality.

Finding our lost self-respect is a prerequisite to healing; something a kin to Peter Pan recovering his lost shadow from Wendy’s drawer. 

Now we have a place to look … and a direction to go in.

Who Did You Have To Pretend To Be When You Were A Kid?

Roles

Roles relate to:

§  The jobs we do both inside and outside. The masks we wear either within or without the family structure are designed for us to be the people or character that we need to be in particular situations. Situation orientated

§  And are often determined by our perception of a need or needs either within the community or within the family or both. Strategies develop upon which is perceived to need to come first for the family or the system. 

§  Please Note; just because it is what you think the family needs or what the family says its needs - does not make it healthy 

§  The healthy roles we play provide us with our opportunities for learning and spiritual growth.  Unhealthy roles provide opportunities for learning also.  The spiritual component is not present in unhealthy roles. Roles can be channels for expressing the truth about ourselves and our needs and our feelings.  The emphasis is on “can be.” 

§  The intrinsic problem with the social role system is that we are trained into a role or roles at a very early age long before we have any appreciation of its value or its possible effects on us later in life. This role training predetermines who we think we are.

§  This socialization aspect as a result of the role, contributes to the predetermination of the Roles we will find  acceptable to adopt in life within both the family and the community during our adult years.  It actually removes the facility of real choice from us and leaves us with a form of pseudo choice that really is not choice at all.

§  This social role system training often demands that we give up our true self ... or is a defense strategy ... for the sake of the greater need of the system. This need to give us up to the greater system is a survival strategy.  By doing so we will have a much greater possibility to survive.

§  At this point many variations on a theme can transpire but most can be lumped under the umbrella of adaptation.  For some it is a kind of grab and run modus operandi for needs fulfillment and this requires many roles or faces and often a complete disregard for the well being of others in the same system. In the extreme this is often referred to Narcissistic Depravation

Thus we cannot nurture our lost self unless we leave home figuratively and for some, literally. 

We leave home by giving up our scripts and rigid unhealthy roles.  Those that were defined for us by the system because of its need to survive and Not the individual’s. 

Those rigid unhealthy roles denied us our authenticity and we played these rigid roles out of misplaced loyalty to our dys­functional family - community system(s).  We got a sense of power and control from these roles, but they have cost us dearly.

Logically it is understood that each of us is an unique individual. 

We were born to be ourselves.  That much is true. But what the hell does that really mean.

To actually accomplish this, one must separate from the family systems designations and from our par­ents' (parents in the extended form include school teacher .. actually anyone the parent has abdicated authority to, to raise the child) beliefs and opinions about us.  This is often called negotiating your adolescence. 

Jesus Christ was strong in affirming the impossibility of finding God, much less ourselves, unless we left home.  Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to put sons against fathers and daughters against mothers ... And a man's foes shall be those of his own household."

Leaving home means:

•        separating from our family system. 

•     giving up the idealizations and the fantasy bond of being forever protected by our parents or their stand-in(s).. surrogates .. such as employers or social systems or friends or spouses. 

Only by leaving and becoming separate, negotiating your adolescence/freedom of self can we have the choice of having a true relationship.  This most basic of relationships .. with our parents .. demands separation and detachment for any possibility of a healthy relationship.

PLSE NOTE:  For some, because of abuse issues it may be necessary to create some distance for a time from our family or its surrogate.  For those who've been badly abused, you will have to make a prudent evaluation of how close you can get to your family or surrogate without violating your own boundaries.