Actualizing Therapy

setting is a system for helping people to get in touch with themselves. A basic tenet of Actualizing Therapy is that most people are other-directed rather than innerdirected (Riesman, 1950). They look to the outside— to authorities and people they respect—for “shoulds,” “have tos” and “musts,” not realizing that they could better learn to live from within: to trust their own thoughts, feelings, and bodies. Experiencing one’s self within and expressing one’s self without: This is the process of actualization. Actualizing Therapy incorporates a creative synthesis from many schools of theory and practice in psychotherapy that focus on body, mind, and feelings. From Buber (1951) and Allport (1937, 1961) comes the emphasis on achieving one’s “particularity.” From Maslow (1954) comes the emphasis on self-actualizing as a reasonable goal of psychotherapy. From Leary (1957) and Satir (1966) comes the emphasis on the feeling polarities of anger–love and strength–weakness as core structures in the personality. The goal of Actualizing Therapy is to restore a client’s trust in his own being, and to aid him to become rhythmic and expressive on the feeling polarities in verbal, feeling, and bodily ways. Replacing survival tactics with actualizing growth responses enables the client to handle problems of living with creative self-expression, interpersonal effectiveness, commitment to values, and choice of one’s mission in life.