FoundationWhere This Comes From
Dr. Kassel's approach is built on Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology, as extended by Rudolf Dreikurs — a framework that treats behavior as goal-oriented, social, and best understood in the context of a person's relationships and history, not in isolation. He trained in this method under nearly 1,000 hours of clinical supervision with a leading figure in Adlerian psychology and co-author of standard texts in the field, during his doctoral training. His own research appears in The Journal of Individual Psychology, the field's flagship journal.
That training took place at the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago — the institution Rudolf Dreikurs himself co-founded — under faculty with direct ties to the field's founding generation, including the late Harold Mosak, a co-founder of the school and one of the most influential Adlerian theorists of the past half-century, and Eva Dreikurs Ferguson, Rudolf Dreikurs' daughter and a longtime leader of the International Committee of Adlerian Summer Schools and Institutes (ICASSI). His master's degree concluded with an oral examination centered on Adlerian theory, administered by senior Adlerian faculty and the program's dean.
In coaching, this shows up as a structured way of understanding why people — and the relationships and families they're part of — keep running the same patterns, and what actually shifts them.
Core ConceptsWhat the Method Looks At
- Style of life — the organizing pattern behind how a person moves through the world: a personal operating system of core convictions about self, others, and expectations, largely set in early childhood and stable afterward unless deliberately examined. This is what a Lifestyle Assessment is actually built to surface — not symptoms, the pattern underneath them.
- Family constellation — birth order and sibling dynamics, and how they shape a person's early sense of belonging and the role they learned to play in relationships.
- Relational atmosphere — the prevailing tone, mood, and unspoken rules set by parents or partners, which define the emotional climate a family or relationship operates in.
- Goal-oriented behavior (teleology) — the idea that conflict and "misbehavior" are purposeful, not random. In co-parenting and high-conflict work, this shows up as Adler's four goals of misbehavior — attention, power, revenge, and avoidance — a lens for decoding what a person (a child, an ex-partner, or oneself) is actually after with a given behavior.
- Social interest — the capacity for genuine empathy, connectedness, and contribution to others, which Adler considered the foundation of psychological health and healthy relationships.
ProcessHow the Work Proceeds
- Building a respectful working relationship — coaching starts from a non-authoritarian stance: client and coach as equals working the same problem, not an expert delivering verdicts.
- Lifestyle assessment — looking at history, early recollections (specific childhood memories, gathered not as a factual record but as a window into the conviction a person is still organizing around today), and relational patterns to surface the "basic mistakes" — the hidden assumptions — driving current behavior.
- Reorientation — shifting away from reactive punishment or permissiveness (in parenting, partnership, or self-management) toward logical consequences and genuine encouragement.
- Reframing — helping a client see the goal behind a behavior — theirs or someone else's — rather than reacting only to the behavior on the surface.
In PracticeCommon Strategies
- Encouragement over praise — reinforcing effort and self-improvement rather than conditional validation tied only to results.
- Logical consequences — letting natural, predictable outcomes teach responsibility, instead of relying on arbitrary anger or punishment.
- The "typical day" review — mapping a household's or client's actual daily routine to pinpoint exactly where the friction and power struggles happen, rather than working from a general impression.
- Group formats, where appropriate — sharing challenges with others navigating similar dynamics, to normalize the difficulty and surface solutions collaboratively.
- Acting "as if" — for a defined stretch, deliberately behaving as though you already had the confidence or capacity in question, testing belief against real evidence rather than waiting for confidence to arrive first.
- Naming what a problem is doing for you — asking how things would be different if a stated problem simply vanished, to separate what's genuinely at stake from anything that may be keeping it in place.
Why These AreasThe Five Life Tasks
Adler named three central arenas every person has to work out — work, love, and friendship; later Adlerian writers added a fourth, a person's relationship with themselves. The five coaching areas below aren't an arbitrary list of topics — they map onto these same arenas.
- Work & occupation — contribution through meaningful, sustaining activity. See Executive & Leadership Performance.
- Love & intimacy — the capacity for closeness, partnership, and sexuality. See Relationship Compatibility Coaching and Sexual Compatibility Coaching.
- Friendship & society — cooperation and belonging outside the family and the couple. See High-Conflict Relationships & Co-Parenting and Addiction & Recovery Coaching.
- Self — a person's relationship with their own self-image and self-evaluation, closely tied to both Addiction & Recovery and Executive & Leadership work.
Functioning well across these tasks is, in Adlerian terms, largely what social interest looks like in practice.
Further ReadingModern, Accessible Introductions
For anyone who wants a more approachable entry point into these ideas outside a session, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga's dialogue-format books are widely credited with bringing Adlerian psychology to a broad modern audience: The Courage to Be Disliked (2013) and its sequel The Courage to Be Happy (2016). Both are general-audience introductions, not coaching or therapy in themselves — a good next step for anyone curious to read further between sessions.