Understanding Positive Therapy

People often ask, “Do I need therapy?” Implicit in this question is the idea that a person must be broken or damaged to a large enough degree to justify going to therapy. Not so. Therapy can be a way to find yourself, to work out who you are, to decide how you want to live your life. These are profound issues for all of us. Maybe you don’t need therapy, but would you benefit from time spent engaging in these tasks of self-discovery and self-knowledge?

For many years now, it has been a mission of mine to make more people aware that counseling and psychotherapy are not only activities for alleviating psychological suffering, but also for helping people to become more fully functioning. I used the term positive therapy to describe this. It is not a new idea, as I described it in my book Positive Therapy, it was in fact the vision of Carl Rogers, one of the pioneering humanistic psychologists writing and practicing in the 1950’s.

It was an exciting and forward-looking time for psychology. Humanistic psychologists took a new approach to the field. Instead of only being concerned with misery and suffering, they wanted to understand people at their best. For this reason, humanistic psychology was known as "height" psychology, referring to the idea of understanding how to help people grow psychologically to their fullest potential.

"Fully functioning" was the term Rogers used to describe what it was that therapy freed people to move towards. It was not a description of the absence of negative qualities but a description of positive qualities. For example, characteristics of the fully functioning person include: that they can live in harmony with others, are more open to experience, are able to adapt creatively to new situations and learn from them, and live more existentially and in tune with their bodies and their inner wisdom. In turn, the fully functioning person is happier and has more meaning and purpose in their life.

The new form of therapy that Rogers introduced was called client-centered therapy. In essence, client-centered therapy involves the therapist listening attentively, with empathic understanding and unconditional acceptance. This is to such a profound degree that the client feels safe and valued for who they are, so much so that they feel able to drop their defenses and listen to their own inner wisdom. Too often, people are so busy pleasing others or doing what they think they should do that they fail to live life on their own terms. As such, they struggle to make choices for themselves and find their own direction in life.

Today, such insights are taken for granted, but at the time, client-centered therapy was a revolution, and offered a new way to do therapy that was not only about overcoming difficulties but also about helping people discover their potential.

Today client-centered therapy is still widely practiced, and although Rogers died in 1987, over a decade before the positive psychology movement started, he is recognized as one of the early pioneers of positive psychology, with his focus on helping people become more fully functioning.

While these ideas are now more common, not everyone is familiar with the idea that therapy is not only about looking back in life and examining what has gone wrong, and dealing with misery and anxiety. It can deal with such issues, but it can also be about looking forward hopefully, finding new directions, learning about oneself, and making positive psychological changes in one’s life.