[3] Wheelis, _How People Change_, pp. 101-102. WHY IS IT SO COMPLICATED? For better or for worse, human nature is a many-splendored thing. It doesn't take an advanced degree in psychotherapy to know that people can have many different kinds of personal problems. This fact, if we appreciate it fully, makes more understandable why there are so many alternative approaches to helping people with their difficulties. In the world of theory, a _model_ is a simplified representation of reality. Your checking account record is a model, in just this sense, of how many real dollars and cents you have in the bank. Here is a much simplified model that represents five main psychological, emotion-laden dimensions of a person: {26} [Illustration: Five main psychological dimensions of a person: feelings, hopes, abilities, relationships with others, and behavior] We see right away that, for the same reasons that there are specialties in medicine--e.g., orthopedy for bones, neurology for nerves, dentistry for teeth--there should be special approaches that focus on different psychological dimensions of the person. Something else you may see is that the five dimensions in the model are not isolated from one another. They interrelate and overlap a good deal. Just as a dentist must know about the orthopedy of the jaw and skull and the neurology of the teeth a neurologist and an orthopedist are expected to know something, though not in great detail, about dentition. Each of us is a unity of what all the medical and psychological specialties study in different ways, plus a good deal more, as artists, writers, theologians, and musicians make evident. That more than 130 distinguishable therapies have now been developed may perhaps strike us, even so, as excessive. But efforts are being made to unify many of these approaches, and this book is one of them. Rather than talking about 130 different approaches, we will center our attention on the main categories into which the many approaches can be sorted.