Reality therapy, as the name implies, attempts to help by strengthening a person's practical understanding of reality and by encouraging concrete planning that will bring about an improved sense of personal adjustment to reality. It emphasizes a very practical, feet-on-the-ground focus on the present: a person's past experience cannot be rewritten. Reality therapists do not believe in the essential value of psychoanalytic interpretation, dream analysis, nondirective counseling, or intellectual {155} insight. A reality therapist focuses on the present, specifically on attempts patients may now be making to become more successful _from their own points of view_. If a patient is not able to make definite plans of this kind and cannot sustain a commitment to them, the focus of reality therapy will be to encourage the patient to begin to do this. It is an approach that believes that a strong sense of personal identity can come only from _doing_: if an individual is able to develop a degree of self-responsibility that is solid and enterprising, a feeling of personal success and effectiveness will follow. Reality therapists are opposed to making diagnoses. A diagnostic label frequently adds a burden to individuals who are already burdened by emotional, family, or adjustment problems. Glasser notes, for example, that being labeled a schizophrenic "can be worse than the disease as far as incapacitating one in the course of life's activities."[4] [4] William Glasser and Leonard M. Zunin, "Reality Therapy," in Raymond J. Corsini, ed., _Current Psychotherapies_ (Itasca, IL: F. E. Peacock Publishers, 1979), p. 329. Reality therapists can resist diagnosing and labeling their clients because their approach claims that personal psychological difficulties, except those due to physical illness (see Chapter 8), result from a lack of personal discipline and responsibility. People are often caught in the habit of blaming their failures on their families, their lack of opportunity, their race, poverty, and other outside forces. It is a habit with a dead end: it ignores the potential success that can come from initiative motivated by responsibility and moral courage. As Ernest Hemingway said when asked if he ever anticipated failure, "If you anticipate failure, you'll have it." THE EXPERIENCE OF REALITY THERAPY It isn't hard to gain a feeling for what reality therapy is like. These are the basic principles of the approach: The relationship between therapist and client must be personal. The therapist tries to make clear that he is a genuine person who has, in some areas of his life, been able to plan effectively and to develop a sense of personal success.