For over a century the focus of psychotherapy has been on what ails us, with the therapeutic process resting upon the assumption that unearthing past traumas, correcting faulty thinking, and restoring dysfunctional relationships is curative. And indeed, they are - but in the rush to identify and reduce symptoms of mental disorder, something important has been overlooked: the positives. Should enhancing well-being, and building upon character strengths and virtues, be explicit goals of therapy?

Positive Psychotherapy provides therapists with a session-by-session therapeutic approach based on the principles of positive psychology, a burgeoning area of study examining the conditions and processes that enable individuals, communities, and institutions to flourish. This clinician's manual begins with an overview of the theoretical framework for positive psychotherapy, exploring character strengths and positive psychology practices, processes, and mechanisms of change. The second half of the book contains 15 positive psychotherapy sessions, each complete with core concepts, guidelines, skills, and worksheets for practicing skills learned in session. Each session also includes at least one vignette as well as discussion of cross-cultural implications. Mental health professionals of all orientations will find in Positive Psychotherapy a refreshing alternative to symptom-based approaches that will endow clients with a sense of purpose and meaning that many have found lacking in more traditional therapies.

Tayyab Rashid's profile page

Martin P. Seligman's profile page

Dr. Tayyab Rashid is a licensed clinical psychologist and an associate faculty at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada, and has expertise in Positive Psychology interventions, resilience and post-traumatic growth. He is the recipient of the Outstanding Practitioner Award from the International Positive Psychology Association.

Dr. Martin Seligman is Director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center, Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology in the Penn Department of Psychology, and Director of the Penn Master of Applied Positive Psychology program. Seligman is a leading authority in the fields of Positive Psychology, resilience, learned helplessness, depression, optimism and pessimism. He has written more than 300 scholarly publications and 29 books, and coauthored Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification.

"Tayyab Rashid and Martin Seligman have done a masterful job of highlighting the critical idea that instead of simply focusing on what's wrong, clinicians can help guide their clients to focus on what's right using the approaches described in this book. This pioneering manual will serve as the theoretical, empirical, and practical grounding for the rapidly growing field of positive psychotherapy." -- Judith T. Moskowitz, Ph.D., MPH, Professor, Medical Social Sciences, Northwestern University

"This authoritative and much-anticipated volume offers a measured and clear-eyed synthesis of the theories and research that undergird positive psychotherapy. It shares the why and the how of good practice alongside valuable and hope-inspiring case examples. I'm heartened to imagine all the many lives these important new ideas will touch in the decades to come." --Barbara L. Fredrickson, Ph.D., Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of Positivity and Love 2.0

"Positive Psychotherapy is arguably the best book on positive psychology ever written. It is a must read not only for clinical psychologists but also for social workers, life coaches and psychiatrists. Until now there have been so few positive therapy interventions compared to the overwhelming number of deficit-oriented treatments. Psychotherapists have learned a lot about damage, deficits and dysfunction and very little about the ingredients for a good life and how these are nurtured. This book, step-by-step, provides positive interventions and the ways in which they achieve positive results. The these myriad suggested interventions are all provided with evidence based --George E. Vaillant M.D., psychoanalyst, Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, and author of Triumphs of Experience