Resilience & Happiness

RESILIENCE

Resilience is facing a bleak winter, yet knowing that you can make it to spring just fine. Happiness springs from this knowledge.

As a therapist, it is my biggest wish for my clients to enjoy healthy and strong resilience because this will enable them to face life’s challenges more calmly, and yet allow them to rest with the knowledge that they have choices how to deal with their challenges.   

HAPPINESS

Which kind of happiness is your favorite kind of happiness?

Spiking, flowing, calm, or meaningful?

Research into happiness shows that the happiest people are the ones with many social interactions.  Introverts, relax!  There is more to this.  Positive Psychology research has also been able to point out that the nature of this kind happiness is experienced as spiking in its intensity and less lasting overall.  This happiness can be enhanced by mindfulness but still it peaks and ebbs.  Long term happiness has different parameters than buying a new car, a bigger diamond or smelling a rose.  I am not knocking these pleasures nor the resulting happiness.  It has its proper part in our lives and many of us do get happiness from it. 

In addition, though, there is happiness that comes from performing competently with almost anything – reading a book, working, or playing.  This state of happiness has nothing to do with consumption and everything with engagement.  It’s called “flow”.

Calm happiness stems from your knowledge that whatever life will throw at you, you can manage it.  You know yourself: the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Like any training, having failed a few times in this process has rendered you with this calm knowledge.  You know that you have the ability to sustain scars and still experience happiness.

Another state of happiness is connected with our meaning finding in life.  Research shows that people with a clear understanding of their purpose or purposes in life, also have a clearer understanding of what is meaningful in their lives, which in turn holds happiness for them.  This too is experienced as a long-term happiness.  

I believe that lasting success in the search for happiness only ensues after considerable personal work.

At the same time,  I would like to see all my clients experiencing all four kinds of happiness!