Adaptive Reorientation Therapy (A.R.T.): An Adlerian Model for the Treatment of Emotional Disorders

Abstract

Compelling emotions emerge in a person’s life as adaptive mechanisms to help the individual overcome the challenges that life presents. When one’s lifestyle orientation is characterized by biased convictions and skewed private logic, those compelling, aversive emotions can predominate life and contribute to recurrent and worsening difficulties, many of which are diagnosed as a recognizable clinical condition. Rather than focusing specifically on the expressed symptoms, Adlerian treatment focuses on the lifestyle orientation that necessitates those symptoms. Needed is a reorientation to life that is more optimally adaptive. Adaptive reorientation focuses on the individual’s desired state and helps the individual to adjust lifestyle orientation in a way that it proves more optimally effective.