Positive Psychology & Why It Is So Important In My Practice

Positive Psychology is a field that studies “What makes Life worth living?”

“Positive” is highly nuanced in this context. Happiness is definitely part of the picture, and an important part, but by no means the whole enchilada. There are also:

Resilience
Interpersonal Connection and Resonance
Why Our Pets Make Us Feel Good
Flow
Optimism
Mindset
Gratitude
Well-Being
Flourishing
Creating Our Future
And much more…

“Mental Well Being” is not simply the absence of “Mental Illness.”

I believe it was 1997 when somebody (probably Dr. Martin Seligman, but not sure) did a search and found like 46,000 published studies on Depression, and 400 on Happiness. It was a bit of a WTF moment for the field. The exploding field of Positive Psychology was born from a collective realization that my field had been deeply involved in “What’s Wrong with the World?“, but hardly aware at all of “What’s Right with the World?”

My own practice is much, much less about what went wrong way back when, and much more about “How do we create a meaningful and satisfying future, while making our signature contribution to the world?”

There are plenty of Psychologists and Therapists who spend a lot of time in your past, but I am not one of them. We certainly honor the past and metabolize it into more positive possibilities in the future, but we do not build a shrine and pitch a tent there for ten years. Oh, hell no.

I am just starting to write more about Positive Psychology. I hope you find it interesting…