Positive Psychology, Mental Health, and Addiction

By P. Casey Arrillaga, LCSW, LCDC

Most people enter recovery because they are experiencing some of the worst times of their adult lives, Understandably, they may easily focus on the worst aspects of themselves and have trouble seeing what is good inside them. Discovering and accentuating the positive is a vital part of the recovery process, however. This is where positive psychology can make a big difference. This article will look at why this is so important and how it can be accomplished.

What We Know So Far

The modern field of positive psychology is relatively new, having been born in 1999. Dr. Martin Seligman, who was the head of the American Psychological Association at the time, gave a call to action for psychologists to place more emphasis on the scientific study of happiness. As he pointed out, the bulk of research had focused on what went wrong with people’s thinking and behavior, with much less attention paid to what went right.

This was based in the medical model of “remove disease and you will have health.” We know this is a vast oversimplification, however. Just as removing junk food from your diet is a positive move but won’t create muscle mass, removing negativity is very important to our psychology, but it won’t create optimal happiness. Thus, studying and deliberately increasing happiness is important for anyone.

This study and its application can be especially important for people who suffer from mental health issues, including addiction of any kind. This is because what appear from the outside to be distressing mental health symptoms may feel like important coping skills to the person who has them. This is especially true for the behaviors seen in addiction. In such cases, even if the person who has the addiction knows they need to stop their compulsive, destructive behavior, they may still feel on a deep level that doing so will be giving up a trusty way to deal with life. In fact, giving up an addiction can feel life-threatening, even if we know intellectually that the opposite is true.

In the early stages of moving out of mental health issues, especially addiction, it often feels as though there will never be a time when they are going to feel good again. Some people actually resign themselves to what they believe will be a life of drudgery and toil, thinking that this is their only choice. It’s true that there will be many difficult days, which may provide strong temptation to return to old patterns.

This makes it vital to offer positive psychology as part of treatment. Positive psychology findings and techniques offer a way to balance our outlook when we are going through difficult times, as is usually the case in early recovery. It gives not only light at the end of the tunnel, but offers light in the tunnel itself, a way to see forward and know that things don’t have to be so dark.

Unfortunately, this has often been overlooked in treatment facilities. Instead, the focus has often gone almost exclusively to reducing uncomfortable and debilitating symptoms. This is important, but it misses half the picture. Still, some people in recovery see this as the only way to go, with much emphasis put on “removing character defects” without talking anywhere near as much about increasing character assets. This may be understandable, but it is misguided. People need hope that goes beyond, “This will feel better someday.” They need tools they can use from their earliest days in recovery to start feeling better now.

How Can We Use This Knowledge to Help People?

At Windmill, we take a proactive approach to infusing positive psychology into treatment. We work hard to help clients remove the negative (trauma responses, negative self-talk and self-image, destructive behaviors), but we don’t sit back and hope that positivity takes its place without any effort on our part. Instead, our clients have regular classes in positive psychology and how to incorporate it into their recovery, including both underlying concepts and practical techniques. This includes learning about core character strengths and how to recognize them in themselves and others, taking the VIA assessment to get a personalized rating of each strength, learning about the PERMA model of human happiness and how they can grow in each category, learning how to create personalized affirmations that target the areas in greatest need, learning how to recognize and facilitate post-traumatic growth, understanding and building their resilience, and moving from negativity bias to positivity bias in their conscious and subconscious thinking, to name a few of the topics we teach. Positive psychology techniques are woven into other classes as well, and they are incorporated into the individual therapy that our clients receive. We recognize what research confirms: a person doesn’t have to wait until the negative is all resolved; they can actively build the positive from day one.

The Bottom Line

Positive psychology is a growing and important field of psychology. Its findings and techniques are very relevant to treatment for mental health issues including addiction. At Windmill, we incorporate positive psychology for all of our clients so they can get the best outcomes and become their best selves.

About The Author

P. Casey Arrillaga is the Team Leader for Education at Windmill Wellness Ranch, and he is the author of books including “Realistic Hope: The Family Survival Guide for Facing Alcoholism and Other Addictions”.