Learned Optimism

Yesterday at Unity Service Barbara Jones who has a Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology spoke on Martin Seligman's seminal work, "Learned Optimisim". He is the founder of Positive Psychology and has written several additional books, "Character Strengths and Virtues", and "Authentic Happiness". His central theory is that we can learn to be happier even if we have been pessismistic all our lives. He postulates that people who have had trauma in their childhoods are more likely to be pessismistic as they become adults. However, by cultivating certain character strengths and virtues we can retrain ourselves to be optimistic and happier. His research demonstrates that people who score higher on his character strength questionnaire are by far happier than people who don't. Let me see if I can remember the major strengths:
Creativity, Bravery, Temperance, Fairness, Kindness, and Open mindedness, Humor, Curiosity and Persistence. His website: www.authentichappiness.com provides free questionnaires that you can take if you want to find out how you score on happiness and individual character strengths and virtues.

Barbara gave us a homework assignment for the following week - she suggested that we choose one character strength that we score at a lower level than we would like and then think of one thing we could do to improve that score. I partnered with someone who said that forgiveness of herself and others was really difficult for her. She committed to communicating with someone that she has had been holding a resentment against and forgive them. I mentioned that temperance (self control and regulation of appetites/desires) was a biggie for me - especially in the area of consuming sweets (and well, coffee, too, truth be told). So I committed to not eating any sweets for a week. We had a followup chat about a time in her life when she felt she was addicted to sugar and how this caused her to develop severe candida and become quite ill. She posed this question to herself: What sweet things/activities(not food/beverages)have I not been allowing myself to have - ie: then consuming sugary foods as a substitute for that sweetness she was really craving... For her it was time alone, and giving herself the luxury of a walk, hot bath, reading, etc. rather than always caring for others... Get's me to pondering. Not that this a new or necessarily revoluntionary concept. I remember back to reading Susie Orbach's, "Fat is a Feminist Issue" or Denise Lamotte's, "Taming of the Chew". I could write a book on the subject myself. But that will have to wait until the book I'm working on is finished...