Discover your full potential with Adlerian Therapy! Overcome feelings of inferiority and build a fulfilling life with a sense of community and equality.
Adlerian Therapy
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Every school of thought in psychology proposes different reasons as to why human beings can be in pain, why we lead unsatisfying lives and can be riddled with intense consistent
emotions. Some of these ideas filter into our everyday language. Inferiority complex, overcompensation and superiority complex all come from Individual Psychotherapy.
Individual psychotherapy was proposed by Alfred Adler. Adler believed the following core tenants:
1. All human beings are born with innate (normal/natural) inferiority feelings. This inferiority is experienced as an infant and child because we are born so dependent and with such a lack of knowledge that when we engage with the world we feel incapable or inadequate.
2. Human behavior is therefore driven by the need to compensate for that weakness by learning different skills, abilities to then feel superior. (superior in relation to our inferiority not superior in relation to each other).
3. When the journey of compensating is filled with love and nurture, the child learns the courage to be imperfect by accepting weakness and strengths.
4. Due to different life circumstances, be it family dynamics, situations, or cultural barriers, the feelings of inferiority can be too intense and feel impossible to overcome and the individual can either get trapped into overcompensation (perfectionist tendencies), develop an inferiority complex, or hid his/her feelings of inferiority with a superiority complex. Any of these will create a great difficulty in relating and will isolate the individual.
Within Adlerian psychotherapy, the goal is for the client to feel competent and connected. This is achieved through three principal objectives:
1. Decrease intense feelings of inferiority
2. Remove superiority complex
3. Promote feelings of community and equality.
These goals are achieved by helping the client locate what memories and beliefs create the intense inferiority feelings, and identify core beliefs about self/other/world and analyze behaviors/choices. The therapist does this by questioning the motives, thoughts and feelings behind the person's behavior, making the implicit explicit, and making known the client’s lifestyle so that it can be adapted.
