“It’s all in your mind. Every moment of your life is what you make it. Pain. Love. Fear. Happiness. You choose to feel each of them. So choose to be happy, Franklin. Choose to be happy! ‘Cause happiness is a state of mind.”
The psychology espoused in “Small Apartments” may seem counterintuitive. Sure, any self-help book will tell you that happiness comes down to choices, but what about the converse? If we choose happiness, we must also choose unhappiness. This was the message of renown psychiatrist William Glasser, the father of an approach to counseling called Reality Therapy, who died last month (August 2013) at the age of 88. In his 1998 book “Choice Theory,” Glasser wrote: “We choose everything we do, including the misery we feel.” So why would people pick suffering over happiness when both are mere matters of choice?
According to Glasser’s theory, people are driven to fulfill five basic needs for survival, love/belonging, power, freedom, and fun. When unable to successfully meet a psychological need, unhappiness may result...but unhappiness doesn’t just happen. The choice to express discontent through symptoms of depression, anxiety, or other “disorders” is our best effort (at least at the time) to regain the sense of control that may be missing from our lives. Humans are, according to Glasser, inherently social and creative beings; when our needs are unmet the creative system of the mind goes to work to resolve the resulting frustration. We then choose to think, feel, and behave in ways that let others know we’re struggling and in need of help and support (we might also choose misery to restrain our anger or as means of avoidance—more on these aspects in future posts).
Of course, we usually don’t realize we are responsible for our unhappiness while we’re experiencing it. As Glasser wrote, “When we depress, we believe we are the victims of a feeling over which we have no control.” In his work, Dr. Glasser used education, not medication, to help people overcome their problems by teaching them to make better choices to satisfy their needs. Critics have argued Glasser’s theory was overly simplistic, even naïve…after all, the psychiatric establishment views mental illnesses as diseases of the brain which require strong psychoactive medications to treat. But to Glasser, the “mental illness model” reinforces the concept of patients as victims and undermines the foundation of the “mental health model”: the ability live a happier life by learning, as Franklin in “Small Apartments” learned, to make more effective choices.
