Positive Mental Health: Thriving and Flourishing

1. Positive Mental Health:Thriving and Flourishing CiciliaEviGradDiplSc., M. Psi

2. Across the life span • Adult development is a continuous process of anticipating the future, appraising and reappraising goals, adjusting to current realities, and regulating expectations so as to maintain a sense of well-being in the face of challenging circumstances • Not merely reactions to events • Include active participations in shaping one’s own development

3. Resilience: Healthy adjustment to difficult childhood • Poor family environment  problematic adults? • Chronic poverty, parental neglect, parental psychopathology, abuse and living in a midst of war • Resilience is a pattern of positive adaptation in the face of significant adversity or risk (Masten & Reed, 2002)

4. How do they cope: • Find a nurturing surrogate parent/teacher  to fill the role of disturbed parent  detachment • Good social and communication skills, at least one close friend  desire to help others and provide some nurturance for others • Creative outlets, activities or hobbies  give them sense of pride and mastery  when hard times hit • Believe that somehow life will work out well  fairly optimistic, internal locus of control, positive self-concept • Religious belief

5. Protective buffers • For boys  a household with good structures and rules, a male role model and encouragement of emotional expressiveness • Girls  homes that emphasized risk taking and independence, reliable support from an older female  particularly a steadily employed mother • Resilient children  do not react passively to the loss and neglect, but participate in creating/finding environments and people who will be supportive and reinforce their competency

6. Generativity: Nurturing and Guiding Others • Erik Erikson  stage 7 • “The responsibility for each generation of adults to bear, nurture and guide those people who will succeed them as adults, as well as to develop and maintain those societal institutions and natural resources without which successive generations will not be able to survive”

7. High generativity is associated with greater well-being • Related to many traits that are central to the concept of the good life in positive psychology  moral reasoning, more education, emphatic concern, less egocentric behaviors in midlife • Commitment script  life narrative on how people interpret or perceive their life events as meaningful  does not mean they have less life stresses!

8. Flourishing and Thriving as We Age • Selective optimization with compensation  optimal adjustment to aging is accomplished by accepting that certain capacities decline with age and by finding ways to compensate for those necessary losses  choose activities that give a sense of satisfaction

9. Socio-emotional selectivity  the development of a positive self-concept or the regulation of emotional remain throughout the life span • Positive self-concept  important in adolescence, less important with age • Emotional regulation  less important in adolescence, more important with age, because they will make social choices based on emotional rewards • Social selection is not the same with social withdrawal

10. Age was not related to the frequency of positive experiences • Extended periods of positive emotionality were more likely to be found in older people • Older people also experience more complex and moving emotion than young people  they have learned how to recognize more nuances of emotional experience and how to regulate their emotions in more adaptive ways

11. Wisdom • Erikson (1950) defines wisdom as the result of a successful resolution of the last stage of psychosocial development – involving acceptance of life as it had been lived and accepting the reality of approaching death • “Involved disinvolvement”  commitment to the process of life with a calm detachment from any requirement that life turn a specific way

12. Wisdom is not a storehouse of information/opinion • Wisdom implies knowledge that is social, interpersonal and psychological – also knowledge that average people will find it hard to understand • Wisdom is “exceptional breadth and depth of knowledge about the conditions of life and human affairs” (Kramer, 2000) • Wise person is the one to go to when we wrestling with the most difficult questions in life, able to transform negative life experiences as life-affirming experiences

13. Two forms of wisdom (Helson & Wink, 1987): • Practical wisdom  includes exceptional abilities such as: interpersonal skills, clarity of thinking, greater tolerance, and generativity • Transcendental wisdom  has a spiritual or philosophical quality, includes the limits of knowledge, the rich complexity of the human experience and a sense of transcending the personal and individual aspects of human experience

14. Predictors of Wisdom • 35% personality intelligence  creativity, cognitive, style, social intelligence • 26% Life experience  general life experience, specific professional experience • 21% Personality traits  openness to experience, personal growth, psychological-mindedness • 15% Intelligence • No relation to Age!

15. Positive Mental Health • Grouped as: • Innate Potentials  innate drive to search for positive mental health • Assume positive mental health as a product of developing specific personality traits or character

16. As innate potentials • Alfred Adler  social interest, a feeling of an intimate relationship with humanity, empathy with the human condition and a sense of altruism • If a client is showing more social interest, the therapy works! • Jung  optimal mental health was characterized by a balance between elements of the personality, an openness to messages from a deeper level of the unconscious, and a growing sense of spirituality

17. Carl Rogers: • Self-actualizing tendency  innate need to develop our potentials, that will also be both socially responsible and personally fulfilling  supported by unconditional love, empathic understanding and genuineness • Fully functioning person  someone who achieves the ideal, the fullest potentials  characterized by: (1) openness to experience, (2) existential living and (3) trust in organismic experiences  (4) a sense of freedom and (5) enhanced creativity

18. Abraham Maslow • Self-actualization  refers to the process of living up to one’s potentials  not a state, but an ongoing process of development – not possible in young and developing people because people need some life experiences first! • Hierarchy of needs • Deficiency needs (D-needs)  physiological; safety; belongingness and love; self-esteem • Being needs (B-needs)  self-actualization

19. Security VS growth  a willingness of a self-actualized person to risk the security of the known and comfortable for the potential growth that can come from embracing a new challenge  they acknowledge, accept and may embrace the tensions created by B-needs • Jonah Complex  when people reject personal growth changes because they fear that other people in their lives will not accept those changes

20. As Character Development • Authenticity: Finding one’s true self • The combination of behaviors  ability to recognize and take responsibility for one’s own psychological experiences; and the ability to act in ways that are consistent with those experiences • Know Thyself  real motives, true emotions, actual beliefs • “True self” is actualized through activities that promote and foster 3 basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness and competence  higher WB

21. Healthy and Adaptive Defense Mechanism • Good mental health is “a way of reacting to problems and not an absence of them” (Barron, 1963) • Unhealthy/neurotic defense mechanism  often used by adolescents and people with severe depressions  delusional projection or psychotic denial, passive-aggression, acting out • Normal style  repression, intellectualization, reaction-formation, displacement, dissociation • Mature defense mechanism  sublimation, altruism, anticipation, humor

22. Strengths and Virtues • Virtues  acquired excellences in character traits, the possessions that contribute to one’s completeness; ideal states that facilitate adaptation to life • Both are important to help a person grows psychologically toward optimal character development

23. Recognizing strengths and virtues • Contribute to fulfillment  create better people • Valued in their own right • Celebrated when present and mourned if lost • Taught by parents and social institutions • There are parables and morality tales in the society that teach them • People hold and express them in different degrees • Malleable or learnable • Prompt joyful responses from others when expressed

24. Good character • Character is higher-order concept that reflects the possession of several virtues • Act consistently over time, consider the welfare of others and greater good for society • Character is not personality traits, but must be learned and developed over time through experience, training or socialization  includes self-regulation, strong self-identity, empathy, good judgments, high ethical standards, self-transcendence

25. Authentic Happiness • Signature strengths  positive personality characteristics that are representative of each person and add to his or her uniqueness  as their ‘real self’ • Authentic happiness  found by identifying and cultivating your most fundamental strengths and using them every day in work, love, play and parenting • Gratifications  our emotional responses to activities that allow us to enact our signature strengths and virtues

26. Six Principles of Authentic Happiness • Everyone benefits • Savoring success  to deal with present problems • Social intelligence  knows which strengths to use and avoid particular person or situation • Opening doors  “When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade” • Strengths in couples • Finding meaning