Need of the hour -36
Retirement Therapies
-J.P.Bharathi
Counselling Strategies for Managing Pre-Retirement Anxiety:
People who experience pre-retirement anxiety must be counselled and psychologists or counsellor offer many therapies to overcome stressful feelings.
- Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy (R.E.B.T): Rational Emotive Counselling is suitable counselling therapy for imparting rationality in adult employees regarding their sensitivity of retirement. In retirement period, perception is very critical because it greatly affects behaviour. Retirement should not be permitted to prompt anxiety, panic and depressive behaviours. Instead, it should be viewed as natural process of life and should be accepted in positive manner. Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy is a cognitive-behavioural therapy which proves to be useful to change perceptions on retirement. REBT can be offered on individual or group basis.
Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy is based on the postulation that human beings have inbuilt quality for both rational or straight thinking and irrational thinking. People have inclining attitude for self-preservation, happiness, thinking and verbalising, loving communion with others, growth and self-actualisation. They also have tendencies for self-destruction, escaping of thought, procrastination, endless repetition of errors, fallacies, intolerance, perfectionism’ and self-blame, evading of actualising growth potentials.
- Major Irrational Beliefs:
Demandingness or Absolutism: Inflexible, dogmatic, extreme beliefs signalled by words such as should, must, have to, and need to.
Demand for Love and Approval from nearly everyone, one finds important.
Demand for Success or Achievement in things, one finds important.
Demand for Comfort or nearly no frustration or discomfort.
REBT is not just a set of techniques, it is also a comprehensive theory of human behaviour. REBT proposes a ‘biopsychosocial’ explanation of action. It can be said that humans are imperfect. In this situation, rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy help employees accept themselves as individuals who will continue to make mistakes; yet at the same time learn to live more at peace with themselves.
REBT proposes that human beings defeat or ‘disturb’ themselves in two main ways: (1) by holding irrational beliefs about their ‘self’ (ego disturbance) or (2) by holding irrational beliefs about their emotional or physical comfort (discomfort disturbance).
There are some assumptions of REBT proposed by Ellis (1979):
People condition themselves to feel troubled instead of being habituated by external sources. In the pre-retirement counselling, the counsellor using the REBT counselling strategy needs to tell the yet-to-retire workers not to condition themselves to feel disturbed because of what they are going to face after their retirement.
People have the biological and cultural propensity to think dishonestly and to unnecessarily disturb themselves. In this supposition, the REBT counsellor needs to say the yet-to-retire workers not to think illegally so as not to disturb themselves unnecessarily, rather, they should think positively because life will be pleasant for them after retirement.
People have the capability to change their intellectual, sensitive and behavioural processes. They can select to react differently from their usual patterns. They can adjust in distress situations and train themselves so that they can eventually remain slightly disturbed for the rest of their lives. In this assumption, the REBT counsellor must counsel the pre-retired workers to reject to allow themselves to become distressed, and to train themselves like investing part of their present salary so that they can eventually remain minimally disturbed for the rest of their lives, even after retirement.
Ellis indicated that people’s thinking considerably affects their feelings and behaviours. The REBT counsellor needs to inform the yet-to-retire workers not to be involved in the thinking that will affect their feelings and behaviours depressingly especially at the time of retirement.
- Reality Therapy (RT):
This theory was proposed by William Glasser. Reality therapy is based on the dogma that people choose their behaviour and are therefore responsible not only for what they are doing but also for how they think and feel. The basic viewpoint of Reality Therapy is shared by the existential approach and Rational Emotive Therapy. The common objective of this therapeutic system is to create conditions in which people who are going to retire may develop the psychological power to assess their present behaviour and, if it does not meet their needs, and to acquire more effective behaviour. This method of learning effective behaviour is facilitated by the application of the basic principles of reality therapy which includes a warm, accepting counselling environment and numerous counselling measures.
In reality therapy, counsellor offers counselling or psychotherapy which attempts to help clients admit responsibility for their behaviour. Its Main intent of reality therapy is to explain clients more appropriate patterns of behaviour. It helps clients in meeting their basic needs more successfully. The overall goal of the reality therapy is for individuals to find more effective ways of fulfilling their needs for belonging, power, freedom, and fun. Glasser emphasized that counselling comprises of helping clients learn ways to recuperate control of their lives and to live more peacefully. This includes confronting clients to scrutinise their action, thinking, and feeling and to figure out if there is a better way for them to function.
Reality therapy focuses on what clients are aware of and then helps them to increase their level of consciousness. As people become aware of the unsuccessful behaviours they are using to control the world, they are more open to learning alternative ways of behaving. Additionally, individuals need to have a fair amount of identity. “A successful” identity is attained by becoming involved with life in a manner that allows the individual to fulfil the basic need of: (a) Feeling worthwhile towards self and others, and (b) To love and be loved. Individuals suffer when they ineffectively fulfil any of these needs. This anguish is expressed in irresponsible behaviour.
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