When realities are meaningful, we develop an appreciative consciousness of values. When relationships are recognized and appreciated, we grow individually, socially, and spiritually. Our most closely held values are ideally cultivated within the context of personal experience thriough relationships.

William Glasser was an American psychiatrist. His theories were arrayed largely in opposition to conventional mainstream psychiatry. Where the prevailing tradition was to focus on classifying psychiatric syndromes as "illnesses" and prescribe psychotropic medications to treat mental disorders, Glasser believed that people sometimes process their frustrations in unhealthy ways, acting out due to a lack of any meaningful personal connection with the most important people in their lives.

Glasser's emphasis was on education and in developing frameworks for finding and following healthy therapeutic direction. After being thrown off the staff at a VA hospital due to his anti-Freudian beliefs, He worked as a staff psychiatrist at a school for delinquent youth. There he developed many of the ideas that became the basis for what he called reality therapy. He authored and co-authored many influential books on mental health, counseling, school improvement, and teaching.

At the heart of Reality Therapy is Control Theory, and the latter is how Glasser often referred to his body of work. By 1996, the theoretical structure evolved into a more comprehensive methodology and it was renamed Choice Theory. From the very beginning, reality therapy, emphasized the present. The goals are to change current behavior, improve relationships, and thereby address the prevailing mental health conditions. Glasser believed that disconnects, from others, are at the core of the unhappiness that ensues, a person's general dissatisfaction with life, and sometimes a variety of physical symptoms, including chemical imbalances.