“For more than a century, psychotherapy has been a place where clients discuss their troubles. The focus is based on the assumption that uncovering childhood trauma, untwisting faulty thinking, or restoring dysfunctional relationships is curative. This focus on negatives makes intuitive sense but doing only this loses sight of the importance of the positives. Positive psychotherapy is a therapeutic endeavor that aims to alleviate symptomatic stress by way of enhancing well-being.
What is Positive Psychotherapy?
Positive psychotherapy is an emerging therapeutic approach that is broadly based on the principles of positive psychology. Positive psychotherapy studies the conditions and processes that enable individuals, communities, and institutions to flourish. It explores what works, what is right, and what can be nurtured.
Positive psychotherapy integrates symptoms with strengths, risks with resources weaknesses with values, and regrets with hopes, in order to understand the inherent complexities of human experience in a balanced way.
Positive psychotherapy is more than positives. This is not suggesting that other psychotherapies are negative, and in fact, positive psychotherapy is not meant to replace existing psychotherapies. Rather, positive psychotherapy is an incremental change to balance therapeutic focus on weaknesses. Knowing our personal strengths, learning the skills necessary to cultivate positive emotions, strengthening positive relationships, and influencing our lives with meaning and purpose can be tremendously motivating, empowering, and therapeutic.
The goal of positive psychotherapy is to help you learn concrete, applicable personally relevant skills that best use your strengths to strive for an engaged, satisfying, and meaning life.”
Rashid, T., Seligman, M. (2018). positive psychotherapy clinicial manual. Oxford University Press.
Remember- the absence of symptoms is not the presence of mental well-being. Contact me today to start focusing on your strengths rather than just your weaknesses to live a more fulfilling life!
Love yourself, you deserve it!
