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Return of the Prodigal, Rembrandt |
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Return of the Prodigal, Rembrandt |
ALAN Carr comments in Positive Psychology: “Many comparative studies and meta-analyses have shown that most psychotherapeutic techniques are equally effective. This has been referred to as the dodo bird verdict (Luborsky et al., 1975). The allusion is to the pronouncement of the dodo bird in Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland that ‘Everybody has won and so all must have prizes.’”
Luborsky, L., Singer, B. and Luborsky, L. (1975). “Comparative studies of psychotherapies: is it true that ‘Everybody has won and so all must have prizes’”.
Archives of General Psychiatry 32:995–1008.[...]
The results of scientific research point to three reliable ways to find happiness:• Cultivate relationships which involve deep attachment and commitment;
• Involve yourself in absorbing work and leisure activities in which you exercise your strengths, talents and interests;
• Cultivate an optimistic, future-oriented perspective on life in which you expect the best and value the future more than the present.
PETERSON and Seligman, offer suggestions as to why psychotherapy, the “Talking Cure,” is often helpful (Aspinwell, 2003, pp. 312-313).
“Why is there so little specificity of psychotherapy techniques or specific drugs? Why is there such a huge placebo effect? Let us speculate on this pattern. Many of the relevant ideas have been put forward under the derogatory misnomer “nonspecifics.” We are going to rename two classes of nonspecifics as tactics and deep strategies.
1.
TACTICS:
Among the tactics of good therapy are [:]
paying attention,
being an authority figure,
building rapport,
deploying a grab bag of tricks of the trade (e.g., saying “Let’s pause here” rather than “Let’s stop here”),
requiring that the patient pay for services,
building trust,
encouraging the patient to open up,
naming the problem,
and much more.
2.
DEEP
STRATEGIES
The deep strategies are not mysteries. Good therapists almost always use them (cf. Frank, 1974), but they are seldom named and infrequently studied. So locked into the disease model are we that we do not train our students to learn them. However, we believe that these deep strategies are for the most part techniques suggested by positive psychology.
ENCOURAGE HOPE
For example, one of the important deep strategies is the instilling of hope (Seligman, 1991; Snyder, Ilardi, Michael, & Cheavens, 2000). We believe that these deep strategies can be the subject of large-scale science, and we believe that new techniques will be invented that will maximize the strengths. But we are not going to discuss this issue now, as it is often discussed elsewhere in the literature on placebo, on explanatory style and hopelessness, and on demoralization (Seligman, 1994).
DEVELOP EXISTING STRENGTHS
Another strategy is the building of buffering strengths. We believe that it is a common strategy among almost all competent psychotherapists first to identify and then to help their patients build a variety of strengths, rather than just to deliver specific damage-healing techniques. Among the strengths built in psychotherapy are
courage,
interpersonal skill,
rationality,
insight,
optimism,
authenticity,
perseverance,
realism,
capacity for pleasure,
future-mindedness,
personal responsibility,
and purpose.
Assume for a moment that the building of such strengths has a larger therapeutic effect than the specific healing ingredients that have been discovered. If this is true, the relatively small specificity found when different active therapies and different drugs are compared and the massive placebo effects both follow.
TELL THE STORY
Another illustrative deep strategy is narration. We believe that
telling the stories of one’s life,
making sense of what otherwise seems chaotic,
distilling and discovering a trajectory in one’s life,
and viewing one’s life with a sense of agency rather than victimhood
are all powerfully positive (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993; Pennebaker, 1990). We believe that all competent psychotherapy forces such narration, which buffers against mental disorder in just the same way hope does. Notice, however, that narration is not a primary subject of research on the therapy process, that we do not have categories of narration, that we do not train our students to facilitate narration, and that we do not reimburse practitioners for it.”
(Peterson and Seligman, “Positive Clinical Psychology”, ch 21 in Aspinwell, A Psychology of Human Strengths, Washington, DC, American Psychological Association, 2003, pp. 312-313)
This Webpage was created for a workshop held at Saint Andrew's Abbey, Valyermo, California in 2017
