Positive Psychology

I have a conflicted relationship with the work of Martin Seligman.  On the one had, Learned Optimism was one of the most useful books I ever read.  Learning to reframe things was and remains a very useful skill.  I use it with myself and my kids all the time.   If they say “I can’t do X”, I add “yet”.

Where I differ a bit, though, is that I think sometimes you need to tell the kid: you suck at that, and always will, but I still love you.

No, that’s not quite it either, because that, too, is a sort of framing. 

Here is the thing: in his so far very interesting and useful book “This is How” (I’m about a quarter through it), Augustan Burroughs points out that positive self talk only works for people who are already pretty positive.  Positive psychology describes what makes people happy, but it does not really seem to teach you how to become the sort of person who pursues those things organically, or who can pursue them consciously.

In my own evolving view of the therapeutic process–and I know my ideas have likely seemed a bit crazy, since they seem that way to me too, although I am fully 100% committed to seeing them through, since that’s the only way it works–virtually all emotional growth depends on developing the capacity for emotional motion, and for anyone with even a moderate degree of trauma, that is not a given.  It cannot be used as a starting point.  The trauma, or lack of emotional skill, has to be the starting point.

Being rational, in important respects, is an extremely advanced skill that only follows the ability to fully feel, understand, and process emotion.  Suppressed emotion, to borrow a great line from Edward de Bono, speaking of arrogance, is a “Mistake in the future.”

I had more to say, but find I have no more to say.