Adlerian Therapy: How It Works, Cost, & What to Expect

What Is Adlerian Therapy?

Adlerian therapy (sometimes called individual psychology) involves helping a person understand the self they created, why it isn’t working as well as they’d like, and choosing to make improvements to their style of life.

Adlerian therapy helps the client identify the errors they’ve made in the development of their style of life, so that they can healthily focus on appropriate compensations for their weaknesses, develop their strengths, feel encouraged about their capacity to create meaning and connections in their life, and to achieve success in a socially useful way.¹

Adlerian Theory

In Alfred Adler’s view, literally everything we do, and all our abilities and efforts, are to achieve one goal, which is both universal and highly unique. The way your mind picks its goal has everything to do with what you unconsciously (and often consciously) believe to be your inferiorities. Often these are imagined inferiorities that end up creating overcompensating goals.

Key Concepts of Adlerian Therapy

Key concepts of Adlerian therapy include the inferiority complex, the superiority complex, and style of life:¹

The Inferiority Complex

The weakness or inferiority we experience immediately and intensely at home as children later has its analog in the process of becoming socialized to broader society. All persons feel inadequate in certain situations, and the cure for feeling inadequate, incompetent, inferior, is a healthy socialization process. Because of this, Adler viewed the whole point of psychology as teaching people how to be socially well-adjusted. Because our inferiority complex develops from our childhood situation into our socialization, social retraining is at the core of overcoming your sense of inferiority.

A great tell for your feeling of inferiority is catching your “I would do X, except for Y” thoughts and statements. Ultimately they point to your doubts about what you can do or are allowed to do; of course it is you alone that disallows yourself from making a change.

The Superiority Complex

As a person works to overcome their sense of inferiority, they strive for superiority—so someone with an inferiority complex is likely to end up with a superiority complex. Our natural striving for superiority, for leaving behind our inferiority, fundamentally creates our personalities and sets the direction and motion of our lives.

A superiority complex can take the form of being overly dependent, exploiting others’ desire for social connection to control them with weakness, or it can take the form of domineering, braggadocious behavior. In either case, the person has falsely assumed that their behavior and situation makes them superior, and their pained mental state, failure to live up to their potential, and lack of social connectedness are the evidence of the error.

Many of us manage to keep our superiority goal in check due to our desire for social connectedness and usefulness, but when we veer toward a complex, we start to see neuroses or even psychoses. Still, even in these cases, as long as the person has a healthy social interest, they can work through their problems.

Style of Life

Before we reach school age we create a “prototype” of ourselves; through it we have our own unique ways of striving to improve upon our felt inferiorities, and will find our own mistakes and successes. The prototype matures into one’s style of life, so if a person is having mental health issues, the change must come in this deeper plan. A healthy style of life involves having enough energy and agency to meet life’s challenges as they arise.¹

It is easiest to see a person’s style of life when they are put in a novel situation. Our minds are flexible enough to change based on their surroundings, but always in the service of the goal of maintaining the prototype of ourselves in order to vanquish our inferiority and be flourishing members of our community.

What can Adlerian Therapy Help With?

Adlerian therapy is meant to tackle all manner of mental health issues, including:^2,3,4,5

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Career issues
• Eating disorders
• Existential concerns

Adlerian Therapy Techniques

Adlerian therapy relies on building self-confidence in the patient, studying older memories, and observing moments and attitudes:⁶

Build Self-Confidence

Adler identified three factors as crucial to therapy having a positive impact:

1. Mutual trust
2. Therapist encouragement
3. Authentic connection (especially felt by the patient)

When a person is set on the idea that they have been abandoned or rejected, these parts of the style of life must be removed. Instead, therapists work to encourage social engagement by showing the client that they can do it with the therapist in sessions. Increased self-confidence changes the fundamental goal to a healthy striving.

Create Expectations

Creating expectations is a technique employed in Adlerian therapy in which the client is asked to consider how they would act if they were already the person that they strive to be. By spending time with this thought exercise, the client can visualize themselves being successful and potentially disempower barriers standing in the way of positive change. This shifts the client’s expectations toward present and future success.

Study Older Memories

This purpose for using memories means that even if the memories are imagined, made up, or told to the person by others, they are still useful because they all point to the same core interests and goals. The therapist must come to understand what it was like to be the person in that memory to see how it contributed to the prototype and lifestyle, and thus how to unwind its influence.

Observe Behavior & Attitudes

A person’s attitudes in everyday situations show their general attitude to life, and the way they move through the world is deeply informed by their attitudes. Things like posture, gait, and gestures are a helpful way to see how a person views life. While any one movement is rarely enough to tell us about an overall attitude, people who try too hard to look a certain way are revealing something, and when we come across exaggerated hostility, passivity, or shyness, we are also seeing how we fundamentally see our path to Adler’s conception of “superiority.”¹

The Four Stages of Adlerian Therapy

The four stages of Adlerian therapy are:

1. Create a Relationship: The patient and therapist get to know each other, ideally genuinely liking each other, and agree to work together.
2. Assessment: The therapist gives their full, non-judgmental attention to the patient, learning about what it was like for them in their formative years, and how they are coping (or not) in the present with life’s challenges based on those formative experiences.
3. Insight: The therapist and patient share and discuss insight into the person’s lifestyle, their beliefs around inferiority, their plan for superiority, and begin the work of considering how these can be improved.
4. Reorientation: The strength of the relationship, along with the insights into the fundamental working of the person”s style of life and self understanding, are used to choose healthier, more accurate ideas and plans, that can lead to real fulfillment and social connectedness.

Benefits of Adlerian Therapy

Adlerian therapy can help clients to gain better self-awareness in the context of the society in which they live.

In Adlerian Therapy, clients can gain:

• Social skills
• Coping skills
• Communication skills
• Problem-solving abilities
• Self-insight
• Encouragement

Is Adlerian Psychology Effective?

Adlerian therapy is an effective form of therapy, which has seen increased respect and popularity in the time since Adler’s death.⁷ In addition to standing up on its own, the fingerprints of Adlerian therapy are visible in all manner of contemporary therapeutic approaches, such that evidence for them can be seen as further evidence for Adlerian therapy itself.^8,9,10

Limitations of Adlerian Therapy

Though Brief Adlerian Psychotherapy is utilized with success by some clinicians, traditional Adlerian Therapy is not time-limited and may be lengthy and thereby costly.¹¹ This intervention may also not be the best suited for people with certain diagnoses, such as autism, schizophrenia, or a personality disorder.¹² It relies on the introspective abilities of the client rather than clinical diagnostic tools and labels, which may be beneficial for some but is not the best fit for everyone.

Adlerian Therapy Examples

Individual particulars are essential to a proper treatment, but here are the core ideas Adler identified to guide treatment in these types of cases.

Adlerian Therapy for Depression

If you are experiencing depressive symptoms, it is highly likely that you have experienced a major failure or loss, whether real or imagined. It is also very likely that you have in a way turned your anger on yourself as punishment for the failure.¹³ Adler argued that depressed people tend to report low self-evaluations. Their thinking is more in line with the belief that they had the opportunity to do something or get something they believed was truly valuable. He calls this a “disguised idea of greatness.”

The driving factor of the state of depression is the unconscious mind telling someone that being depressed is inevitable. Treatment involves increasing the depressed person’s sense of self-confidence, even helping them engage in reality-testing that will allow them to enjoy some sense of healthy superiority. This could be by successful re-engagement with favorite activities, or a re-defining of what is meaningful or valuable in a way that is attainable.

Adlerian Therapy for Anxiety

Adler thought that anxious people want to protect themselves from “a single or repeated failure.” The reason anxiety “works” is twofold: All the energy spent in ruminating and pointless stress activities gives the feeling of actually doing something. At the same time, those activities create a legitimate reason for not taking the risk or engaging in a particular activity.

Treatment would involve encouraging the person to forgive themselves and move on from their “failure,” or better still, reconsider it as not as bad as they thought. From there the anxious person can be gently helped toward taking healthy risks and seeing themselves succeed despite having no guarantee of security.

How to Find an Adlerian Therapist

There are numerous institutes dedicated to Adlerian therapy, but the straightforwardness of his theories and interventions, along with the many years the theory and its techniques have had to seep into the fabric of psychotherapy mean that any licensed clinician who takes the time to read his work should be able to get a good handle on how practice it.^14,15

While you may feel more comfortable with some sort of accreditation specific to Adlerian therapy, it is not necessary. Your therapist should be a licensed therapist or counselor, though.

How Much Does Adlerian Therapy Cost?

You can expect the cost of therapy with an Adlerian therapist to be the same as with any other therapist in your locale. In the New York City area, that means you can generally expect to pay in the range of $150-$350 per session.

What to Expect at Your First Appointment

Your first session should be a fairly straight-forward process of setting the terms regarding the client-therapist relationship and things like confidentiality and payment, and then moving into creating a pleasant, friendly working relationship. You may find that, compared to other types of therapists, there is more interest in your formative years and old memories and less immediate interest in your recent concerns.

How Is Adlerian Therapy Different Than Other Therapies?

Given just how influential Adlerian therapy has become over the years, with its DNA in the structure of so many types of therapy, it is difficult to state with any finality what is different about it. Adlerian therapists are less interested in presenting problems, viewing them as manifestations of deeper issues to be resolved.⁶

It is different from Rogerian/person centered therapy in that unlike the Rogerian, the Adlerian therapist is quite involved, often even leading the discussion. Unlike cognitive behavioral therapy approaches, Adlerian therapy has a good bit of interest in the past.⁶

History of Adlerian Therapy

Alfred Adler began a working relationship with Sigmund Freud in 1902, and while they shared interest in the unconscious, they had serious disagreements about the nature of personality and the source(s) of mental health issues, and ultimately had a total falling out. Adler went on to develop his theories based on his own extensive observations as a physician and therapist, and became internationally famous, including in the United States, by the time of his death in 1937.

Adler’s legacy has only improved in recent years as many of his insights and methods have been taken into numerous current psychological theories and therapeutic methods.⁸ For example, his influence on cognitive behavioral therapy and rational emotive behavioral therapy is widely acknowledged, and he was a clear precursor to existential therapy.¹⁰