There are a bunch of different schools of psychotherapy but the research is pretty clear that no school is statistically better than another. It appears that the trick is that patients benefit from talking to someone:
- uninvolved in their life
- who is paid to listen to them
- who spends and has spent a lot of time doing therapy and thinking about therapy
As far as I can figure (using my skill of overzealous, hasty generalization), all schools of therapy fix problems in two stages:
- the patient figures out how to stop doing that thing that hurts
- the patient improves their explanatory style
Therapy is overwhelmingly about solving problems, but positive psychotherapy skips straight to step 2. As Alex alludes, the point of improving your explanatory style is not to make you more successful in life, it’s to make you more resilient, particularly to failure (so you don’t go shoot people). After stitching you up, the doctor increases your pain tolerance.
The problem I have with this is that one of the chief ways to improve your explanatory style is to strengthen your sense of self. That might lead to happiness and better integration into society, but I am skeptical (what a modernist phrase! sigh). I’m convinced there must be a better way to cease suffering…