To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question. ~Eric Hoffer
My very first client showed up on a Tuesday. I handed him the client questionnaire I had crafted, on a tasteful Lucite clip board. After the demographic info, I hit him with the big question: What do you hope to gain from counseling? I left three lines for the reply, but he only needed one.
He wrote: Peace of mind, and introduced me to the answer I would see far more than any other in the next 20-plus years of my practice. It wasn’t happiness, or get my spouse off my back, or make my depression go away. It was a much bigger order, peace of mind.
At the same time, at the University of Pennsylvania, a rising star named Martin Seligman, Ph.D., who would become the guru of Positive Psychology later on, was setting up shop too. A research psychologist, he began seeing what he could learn from rats. He tells it all in his new book Flourish (2011).
You don’t get to be guru of anything without an outsized ego, and Seligman doesn’t try to hide his. He details his turning points from rat researcher to human researcher, and later from pathology-seeker to happiness-promoter.
In a rare burst of humility, he acknowledges that his earlier concentration on happiness research (reported in Authentic Happiness, 2004) was lightweight and misguided. In this new book, he sees the light – he has decided to move far beyond mere happiness.
In describing how he came to this recent turning point, he criticizes two common approaches used by his colleagues in the real world of therapy and life change: psychotropic medication and talk therapy. Why? Because, he says, they only target symptom relief, and then the effect wears off. If that was the case, I wasted my time with that questionnaire and the considerable work that followed. But I have a question. What became of the research (not his) that shows that both approaches are effective for many people, giving the long-term edge to talk therapy?
While he made friends with his rats, I dug in at my office, pursuing one of those useless pursuits, trying to help my real clients find their peace of mind. We explored all the areas of life that I asked about in my questionnaire: their health, upbringing, daily stressors, family issues, spirituality, and others. We tried to bring all that together, locate their obstacles and strengths, and weave it together into a new life story. Quite often we succeeded.
Seligman tested me with this book. For instance, he and his editors might reconsider the section on his stint as a residence hall-based professor who found his students’ needs – over such matters as date rapes and suicide attempts – to be intolerable “hassles” for him. Don’t we want our gurus to be a bit more compassionate than that?
I also stuck with him through his reports of his grouchy, snarky, resistant, sometimes brittle and resentful behavior, even though we might hope for more positivity from our positivity gurus.
I was not an early adopter of Positive Psychology. I was exposed to an earlier generation of it when I worked in a project to provide job readiness training and support to “displaced homemakers.” I was committed to help these abandoned women step outside the narrow “housewife” role into career paths that would build their independence. It became clear early on that the director of the program and I differed on how to accomplish that.
She had run the first round of the six-week program before I came on board, and I was to follow her protocol. At the first session, each participant was to choose an adjective to serve as her nickname in class. It seemed lame but I led the group through the exercise. The first client chose “Hard-working.” The next, “Feisty.” “Hopeful,” the next.
Wait a minute, I thought. I’d already worked in community mental health for several years and had known numerous women in this circumstance. Where was “Pissed off,” or “Depressed” or “Scared to death,” or “Exhausted”?
The answer was right before me. The clients had heard the line in the directions that I had missed even as I read it to them.
“Be sure you pick a positive word.” Oh. They were so compliant that they were willing to pretend positiveness.
Finally though, one of them came through.
“Hostile,” she said. The other members looked at me in alarm. She’d broken a rule.
“Okay,” I said, “Hostile it is. By the end of the class, let’s see if we can move that to – what would you like?”
“Able to sleep,” she said.
“Good then,” I said, “That’s a deal.”
I was called on the carpet as soon as the women were out the door.
“You allowed one of them to describe herself in a negative way,” said the director.
“But it reflects where she is,” I countered.
“We have to model positivity,” she said.
“But that would be false,” I said. I caught the this-is-only-going-to-get-worse look in her eye.
“You’ll have to help her choose a new word tomorrow,” she declared.
“Are you sure we don’t want to meet them where they really are?” I asked, pushing beyond the intelligent stopping point.
She was sure. The next day we settled on something like “Determined.” By the end of it, she was sleeping better, but she and I both knew it would have been better to get there the honest way.
I was similarly unimpressed with the next waves of positiveness that washed through the therapy world: affirmations, self-esteem-building, and Seligman’s pursuit of happiness. I figured from the start of my career that the only realistic goal would include a balance between happiness and sorrow, and the resources to survive both. I just kept pursuing that peace of mind I’d been hearing about from my clients. I felt sure that concentrating only on happiness would deny the part of life that has the most to teach us.
As is often the case, science eventually catches up and proves what we already know. Now in Seligman’s new frontier he’s decided to shoot for well-being instead of happiness. He says that it rests on positive emotions (including happiness), as long as other factors are present, things like engagement, relationship, meaning, and accomplishment. Sounds a little familiar to me – an ambitious goal beyond symptom relief, created by weaving together a variety of elements. Well, duh, Doc, if only we’d been able to have this conversation years ago, maybe I could have been your guru.
In the end, I have to hand it to him. He’s gone far beyond the scope of what I accomplished at my little office. He’s now helping institute his principles in schools here and in Australia, and more recently in the Army to address the needs of returning war vets. And he has maneuvered his new passion for building resilience over treating pathology to the center of his profession.
When I got to the end of the book, my doubts evaporated. This touchy, self-aggrandizing researcher talks not about the pathology of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but about the strength and wisdom that comes from Post-Traumatic Growth.
So we agree. For the best life, go ahead and assemble those positive emotions all you want, but add engagement, throw in some relationships and accomplishments, and wrap it up with meaning. When things really go wrong and life gets as bad as it can, look for strengths to emerge. Yes. After all our problems, Dr. Seligman and I have ended up on the same team.
CBH 07/15
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