Cover sheet for written assignment
Student’s Name: Date: 07-2012
Instructor: Christine Wilkey
Course No. and Title: HS 330 Human Services Techniques: Casework Methods
Assignment: Unit 13/ Applying Theory to HS Intervention
End of Semester Date: 06-2012
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Comments to the Instructor:
1. Reality therapy is an approach used to help individuals or groups develop new modes of behavior by accepting responsibility for their actions and learning how to satisfy their needs appropriately. It is most often used with youth offenders, adult legal offenders, mental patients, and disturbed children. In institutional settings, where people have similar problems, reality theory is usually applied in group settings.
There are four major principles that reality therapy has:
1. Everyone is viewed as having two basic emotional needs. One is the need to love or be loved. The second is the need to feel worthwhile about self and others.
2. Only the present or future behavior can be changed. The focus is on what the person is doing now. The therapist asks what not why behavior occurs.
3. It deals only with reality, or what exist as fact, not what should have been.
4. Teaching responsibility to fulfill ones needs without depriving others of the opportunity of fulfilling their needs.
Special learning procedures are used in reality therapy. The worker builds a trusting relationship with the consumer to help him face reality. The worker does not provide sympathy and must model responsible behavior. Although the worker rejects the unrealistic behavior, he is accepting of the consumer and maintains involvement by giving praise or disapproval for consumer’s behaviors. He teaches the consumer ways to fulfill their needs in more effective and responsible ways. As a result of this procedure, there are three basic steps followed in reality therapy. First, the consumer identifies...
