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We are going to be talking about one of the central features in positive psychology.

What is positive psychology?

Positive psychology started probably with the work of Abraham Maslow,

the hierarchy of needs, who focused on self actualization.

It's basically founded on the belief that clinical psychology and counseling theory and counseling psychology have become overly focused on pathology, the disturbances in mental health, rather than studying what we would say are the

attributes that allow people to lead lives where they are resilient and flourishing and have meaning in their lives.

It's understandable.

Obviously, psychology was at first developed as a tradition to address pathologies rather than to study high functioning.

And given my work, offering individual support, people don't generally show up wanting to talk about their well-being and happiness. They most want to talk about the issues and challenges and disorders and that cause distress.

So it's very easy for psychologists and therapists and those of us that work in the field to become focused on what's going wrong rather than what is going right and how to develop

flourishing and resilience helping people isolate what are the traits mental practices that are associated with well-being.

So that's tonight's topic in general.

We're going to be focusing on positive emotions, how they're

cultivated and how they help us flourish and become resilient in life. We'll even do a practice where we try to develop some of those positive

emotions. I should note that to understand why positive emotions are so important.

We have to talk a little bit about the three settings

of the nervous system.

In the course of evolution, we developed three different states of being that helped us survive,

help all species survive. The oldest is immobilization, shutdown, freeze, dissociation,

...