I'm trying to broaden the scope of positive psychology well beyond the smiley face. Happiness is just one-fifth of what human beings choose to do.
Martin SeligmanRead
Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves.
Interpretation
We should focus on providing people with genuine affirmations instead of unrealistic compliments.
In this quote, Martin Seligman emphasizes the importance of providing individuals with realistic and concrete feedback that fosters self-esteem. Instead of inflating someone's ego with empty praise, true support should come from highlighting specific achievements and strengths, helping them develop a more authentic sense of self-worth.
In practice
This quote could be shared in a workshop focused on mental health and self-improvement.
I'm trying to broaden the scope of positive psychology well beyond the smiley face. Happiness is just one-fifth of what human beings choose to do.
One of my worries about America is the epidemic of depression we've been in. One of the possibilities about that is that the 'I' gets bigger and bigger, and the 'we' gets smaller and smaller.
The dirty little secret of both clinical psychology and biological psychiatry is that they have completely given up on the notion of cure.
The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who, in the middle of great wealth, are starving spiritually.
I believe psychology has done very well in working out how to understand and treat disease. But I think that is literally half-baked. If all you do is work to fix problems, to alleviate suffering, then by definition you are working to get people to zero, to neutral.
The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.
The abused child goes on living within those who have survived such torture, a torture that ended with total repression. They live with the darkness of fear, oppression, and threats. When all its attempts to move the adult to heed its story have failed, it resorts to the language of symptoms to make itself heard. Enter addiction, psychosis, criminality.
Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.
Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.
Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you. You interact with them.
Many psychopaths describe the traditional treatment programmes as finishing schools where they hone their skills. Where they find out that there are lots of techniques they had not thought about before.
Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.
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