In Bethesda, MD
Positive Therapy’s targets are personal growth and well-being, rather than remediation of psychopathology and dysfunction, per se. It is designed to optimize a person’s inner calm and resilience in spite of life’s challenges.
Positive therapy therapists help their clients build confidence in themselves and relationships that can be relied upon when, and if, personal strengths aren’t sufficient for dealing with adversity.
Clients who maintain a negative bias in their thinking about themselves, others, and circumstances, are encouraged to engage in increased self-awareness and re-assessment of their perceptions. Personal strengths and actual successes are explored, identified and emphasized as one of the ways to discourage a negative bias.
Importantly, clients learn strategies that allow them to switch from negative thought and emotion networks in the brain to networks that generate a sense of self-efficacy and
perception of personal control – the opposite of negative thinking, anxiety and self-doubt.
In fact, by being able to switch from negative to positive thoughts and feelings at will, individuals discover that they can cope with challenges and adversity more effectively.
I think, the more a psychologist knows different, psychotherapeutic methods, the more one
can apply “what works” into one’s own repertoire of valid strategies as needed. In fact, there is now a psychotherapeutic method called Positive Cognitive-Behavior Therapy!