In essence, we gain self-respect through discipline and closeness to others through love. Discipline must always have within it the element of love. "I care enough about you to force you to act in a better way, in a way you will learn through experience to know, and I already know, is the right way." Similarly, love must always have an element of discipline. "I love you because you are a worthwhile person, because I respect you and feel you respect me as well as yourself.

[P]atients, no matter what their psychiatric complaint, suffer from a universal defect: they are unable to fulfill their needs in a realistic way and have taken some less realistic way in their unsuccessful attempts to do so.

Therapy is a special kind of teaching or training which attempts to accomplish in a relatively short, intense period what should have established during normal growing up.

Sessions which do not bear directly on the patient's problems are not as wasted as long as they relate to his growing awareness that he is a part of the world and that perhaps he can cope with it. When values, standards, and responsibility are in the background, all discussion is relevant to therapy.

Because the patient must gain responsibility right now, we always focus on the present.[...] The present, the right now, is the critical task, not the easy job of recounting his historical irresponsibility and looking for excuses. Why become involved with the irresponsible person he was? We want to become involved with the responsible person we know he can be.

In Reality Therapy emotions and happiness are never divorced from behavior. Gaining insight into the unconscious thinking which accompanies aberrant behavior is not an objective; excuses for deviant behavior are not accepted and one's history is not made more important than one's present life.

In Reality Therapy, therefore, we rarely ask why. Our usual question is What? What are you doing - not, why are you doing it? Why implies that the reasons for the patient's behavior make a difference in therapy, but they do not. The patient will himself search for reasons; but until he has become more responsible he will not be able to act differently, even when he knows why. All the reasons in the world for why he drinks will not lead an alcoholic to stop.

All aberrant behavior is either an attempt to evade or an inability to take the responsibility of doing right, of fulfilling our basic needs.

If there is a medical analogy which applies to psychiatric problems, it is not illness but weakness.While illness can be cured by removing the causative agent, weakness can be cured only by strengthening the existing body to cope with the stress of the world, large or small as this stress may be,