Positive Psychology in Therapy: What Else Is True About You?, an article by Carl Argent

You may be able to describe your difficulties in considerable detail. But when did someone last help you see the qualities you could draw on to find a way through them?

The short answer

Positive psychology brings strengths, meaning, relationships and the possibilities for a fulfilling life into the conversation about mental health. In therapy, it can help us understand your difficulties while also recognising the person who is experiencing them.

That matters because a problem can gradually become an identity. “I feel anxious” becomes “I am an anxious person.” A period of feeling lost becomes a conviction that you have nothing to offer.

Your difficulties are real, but they are not all that you are. There may be qualities you use every day that you have stopped recognising, or strengths that could help you approach a familiar problem in a different way.

When the problem becomes the whole picture

Perhaps you have spent years trying to understand why you struggle.

You know the situations that unsettle you. You recognise some of the patterns. You can explain what you wish you did differently. Yet each new insight seems to add another item to the list of things you need to fix.

Even therapy can feel daunting when you imagine arriving with that list and asking someone to work through it.

Understanding distress is valuable. Sometimes a diagnosis also provides an explanation, access to support or relief from years of blaming yourself. But an account of your difficulties can only describe part of your life.

It may tell us little about your humour, your loyalty, the things that hold your interest or the care you bring to other people. It may miss how resourcefully you have adapted to circumstances that were never easy.

If we only look for where you are struggling, we can overlook what might help you move.

A fuller way of understanding yourself

Positive psychology developed as a research field concerned with wellbeing, strengths and the conditions that help people flourish. It widened the questions psychology was asking to include what makes life meaningful and what enables people to function well. Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi’s introduction to positive psychology.

This offers a refreshing starting point for therapy.

Alongside asking what hurts, we can ask what matters to you. Alongside noticing where you feel stuck, we can explore where you already have some freedom, confidence or connection.

Therapy has never had just one way of seeing people. Person-centred counselling, developed by Carl Rogers, has long recognised a person’s capacity for growth and their ability to discover their own resources within an accepting therapeutic relationship. Positive psychology adds a body of research and further ways of exploring those possibilities. BACP’s explanation of person-centred counselling.

For me, the interesting question is what happens when these perspectives become part of a real conversation about your life.

What else becomes visible when we stop expecting the difficulty to explain the whole person?

Strengths are often hiding in ordinary life

When I mention strengths, people may think of achievements, qualifications or being particularly good at something.

The qualities I am interested in are often quieter.

You might be the person who notices when someone has been left out. You may keep asking thoughtful questions when everyone else has accepted the obvious answer. Perhaps you find humour in a difficult moment, recognise an unfairness quickly or remain interested in people whose experiences are different from yours.

You may dismiss these qualities because they feel ordinary to you.

But something can come naturally and still be valuable.

Imagine someone who describes themselves as indecisive. Looking more closely, we might discover that they are thoughtful, sensitive to consequences and reluctant to dismiss another person’s needs. Those qualities do not remove the difficulty with making decisions. They give us a more useful picture of the person making them.

Now there is something to work with.

How could that thoughtfulness help them make a considered choice? What would allow their care for others to sit alongside their own needs? Where might they already have shown the courage to act without complete certainty?

The conversation becomes more specific, and potentially more hopeful.

How I bring this into therapy

My person-centred approach begins with understanding your experience. You do not have to arrive feeling hopeful, identify a strength or put a positive interpretation on what has happened.

There needs to be room for what hurts.

As we work together, I may also become curious about the parts of your life that the problem has pushed out of view. When do you feel most like yourself? What still catches your interest? How have you responded to difficult circumstances before? Who helps you feel understood?

Sometimes we might look closely at an ordinary moment when something went a little differently. You spoke honestly. You asked for help. You gave yourself time before answering. You noticed that you needed rest and acted on it.

What made that possible?

We can explore whether something from that moment could help elsewhere. A quality you use comfortably in one part of life may be available in another, even if you have never thought of bringing it there.

My ACT approach also brings attention to your values and the choices available to you while difficult thoughts and feelings are present. We might consider a small action that expresses something important to you, without waiting for every uncomfortable feeling to settle.

You decide what fits. I bring curiosity, reflection and possible ways of exploring it.

Creative solutions begin with a different question

When you see yourself as the problem, the answer often seems to be that you must become a different person.

Be less sensitive. Be more confident. Stop overthinking. Try harder.

Those instructions can leave you with considerable pressure and very little idea of what to do next.

A fuller understanding of your strengths opens other routes.

Someone who struggles to speak in a meeting might use their curiosity to ask a question, rather than feel they must deliver a confident performance.

Someone exhausted by always being available might draw on their sense of fairness to consider whether their own time deserves protection too.

Someone who finds it difficult to express a feeling might begin through writing, an image or a comparison that makes the experience easier to describe.

These are possibilities to explore, rather than solutions to apply to everyone. Their value depends on the person, the circumstances and what happens when they are tried.

The creative part comes from finding an approach that uses something recognisable in you. Change may become more workable when it builds on qualities you already have.

Your strengths need care as well

A strength does not help equally in every situation.

Kindness may leave you depleted if there is no room for a boundary. Perseverance can help you through a difficult period, but it can also keep you in something that needs to change. Being skilled at noticing other people’s moods may have helped you navigate uncertainty, while leaving you constantly alert.

These qualities deserve understanding, including how they developed and what they cost you.

In therapy, we can explore when a strength serves you, when it becomes overextended and what might help you use it with more choice.

Recognising resourcefulness must also leave room for the reality of your circumstances. Money, health, discrimination, caring responsibilities and the behaviour of other people can limit what is available to you. You should not have to turn every hardship into an opportunity for personal growth.

Sometimes the useful next step is more support, a practical change or a clearer boundary.

You do not have to feel positive to begin

The word “positive” can sound like another expectation.

If you are grieving, anxious or exhausted, being asked to look on the bright side may feel painfully distant from what you need.

The way I use positive psychology leaves room for those experiences. We can recognise a strength without asking it to cancel out sadness. We can explore a meaningful possibility while acknowledging that you feel uncertain about it.

Research suggests that positive psychology activities can support wellbeing, although the effects vary and some early claims were overstated. They deserve thoughtful use, with attention to the individual person and alongside appropriate care. White, Uttl and Holder’s review of the evidence.

For our work together, the useful question is whether an approach helps you understand yourself more fully and respond to your life with greater choice.

A small place to start

Think of a recent moment when you handled something with a little more care or judgement than you have given yourself credit for.

It does not need to be impressive. Perhaps you admitted that you were struggling, paused during an argument or followed through on something that mattered.

Ask yourself what quality was present in that moment.

Then consider where else that quality might be useful, with the right support.

You do not have to turn the answer into a plan. It may simply reveal that the story you have been telling about yourself has left something out.

Questions people often ask

Will you ask me to focus on strengths when I need to talk about something painful?

Your experience leads the work. If something painful needs attention, we make room for it. Exploring strengths should help you feel more fully understood, and its timing matters.

What if I cannot see any strengths in myself?

You do not need to identify them before coming to therapy. We can begin with ordinary experiences and notice together what they reveal. A difficult period can make your own qualities hard to recognise.

Can understanding my strengths help with a longstanding problem?

It may give us additional ways to approach it. We would still explore the problem, its context and its impact. The aim is to have more of your experience and resources available when considering what could change.

If you want to take this further

Perhaps you have become very good at explaining what is wrong and less sure how to describe who you are beyond it.

In therapy with me, we can make room for both your difficulties and the qualities that deserve a place in your understanding of yourself. We can explore what you have been carrying, what matters to you and whether there are ways forward that feel more like your own.

I work in Shoeburyness, Southend-on-Sea, and online across the UK. You can read about counselling with me or book a free initial conversation to see whether my approach feels right.

You do not need to arrive with a list of strengths. We can begin with the person you are, including the parts that have become difficult to see.