Essential Components

Three essential components of psychological health are 1. the ability to openly and honestly communicate thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with another, 2. the ability to honor agreements and disagreements, commonalities and distinctions, and 3. the ability to use personal resources to accomplish values-directed goals.  --Steven R. Hobbs

5 Behaviors Guaranteed to Increase Happiness: #3 of 5

“View yourself as actively capable of making changes in your life, rather than as a passive, helpless victim. Make use of your own agency. Take responsibility for being the architect of much of your own misery, and choose to build success instead.” —Dr. Stephen Marmer; December 9, 2022; The Dennis Prager Show

To Be a Therapist

“A therapist must find a way to follow the rules of his clinical profession and also be a therapist, and at times the two are incompatible. Similarly, to be both human and a professional expert is a difficult task for some therapists. Because the situations a therapist encounters are so various, he needs a wide range of behavior. Sometimes he must take charge; at other times he must be helpless so that others will take charge. He must be serious but at times introduce humor; he must be flirtatious at one moment and distant at another. One of the therapist’s tasks is to be intensely involved in a situation at one moment and to sit on the periphery of it in the next. Sometimes the therapist must be repetitive, insisting over and over on the same behavior; at other times he must be changeable and not offer the same directive twice.” --Jay Haley in Leaving Home: the Therapy of Disturbed Young People, pg. 281