About Positive Affect Therapy (PAT)

Positive Affect Treatment (PAT) is a new therapy which focuses on increasing clients’ positivity and capacity for enjoyment that can lift them past their anxiety and depression by imparting a sense of joy and rewardingness that often is lacking.

Core Principles of Positive Affect Treatment

Happiness and positive affect – the ability to function in positive ways and find happiness – are precious, vital potentials of our human endowment, but many of us need to cultivate them in order to experience their pleasures and benefits.  During stressful times, strengthening our ability to function in positive ways can be especially useful and important.

Extensive psychological research shows that enhanced positive affect motivates and invigorates us. Positive Affect Treatment can enable us to function in happier, more adaptive, healthy ways and improve our ability to manage stress.

Please Note: Positive Affect Treatment is therapy for healing emotional disturbance. It does include addressing negative thoughts and feelings when needed or when they come up.

The Existential Gap Between Feeling Less Negative vs. More Positive

Many depressed and anxious individuals who complete Cognitive Behavioral Therapy still feel negative and unhappy. Weird, right? Psychologists had widely assumed that the natural result of CBT for anxiety and depression would be that positive emotions would rise on their own after enabling clients to reduce their negative emotions, like anger, fear, anxiety, and sadness – but unfortunately, they didn’t. Psychologists Michelle Craske and Alice Meuret originally developed PAT to help these clients bridge this “Mood Gap”.

To be fully effective, as it turns out, therapy needs to reduce negative emotionality and increase clients’ ability to feel positive feelings.

Research showed that anhedonia, a “positive affect deficiency” which many people with anxiety or depressive disorders have, was the culprit: The mental mechanisms that normally enable us to feel rewarded by experience do not activate for these individuals, so their capacity to feel positive emotions and experience reward in pleasant situations is diminished or eliminated.

To develop Positive Affect Treatment, Craske and other scientists brought in elements of CBT, emotion therapy, behavioral activation, and meditation-based therapy.  PAT counteracts the  deficiency of positive affect by training individuals to identify and enlarge their positive emotions, no matter how fleeting.

PAT enables individuals to activate their capacities for wanting, enjoying, and learning how to integrate positivity, rewardingness, and progress in valued directions into their lifestyles. Read on, and we’ll tell you how. Clients learned useful, smart ways to increase the positive affect they bring to everyday functioning that enhances what is rewarding and what they value the most.

PAT may be the treatment of choice for women and men who choose positive-focused therapy.

How Does PAT Do It?

Positive Affect Therapy gives clients the ability to expand and dive deep into their pleasing and uplifting emotions and to learn to enjoy their lives.  Michelle Craske and her colleagues turned traditional CBT for anxiety and depression on its head in developing PAT, the art and science of enlarging and integrating positive emotions into our lifestyles, instead of focusing on negatives like thinking errors and erroneous beliefs.

PAT activates individuals’ capacities to

• Want what’s rewarding
• Enjoy pleasant and positive experiences
• Learn to spread positivity inside and out and integrate it into their lifestyles.

THE PROGRAM

ACTIONS TOWARD FEELING BETTER

Clients begin by recalling every positive and pleasurable experience and memory they can. With their therapist, they fit the skills and activities they’ve enjoyed in the past into a Behavioral Activation (BA) program, scheduling, practicing positive skills daily and tracking the experiences, rating their moods, and reflecting on the positive emotions that occur.

ATTENDING TO THE POSITIVE – To cultivate Wanting and Enjoying, clients need to pay keen attention to the positive and learn to integrate, expand, and deepen the pleasure by

a. Savoring

Clients practice savoring their positive experiences by intentionally, vividly, richly marinating themselves in good feelings.

“Notice and consciously feel the good feelings, intensify, and prolong them. . . When you succeed in savoring, amp it up!  It’s juicing.  Celebrate.”

Savoring strengthens the positive connections between our behavioral accomplishments and our moods.

b. Practicing Positivity entails working with the thoughts about your practices with sustained attention and learning from what’s worked.

“Finding the Silver Lining” entails mentally seeking and re-experiencing positives along with negatives in all their sensory and emotional dimensions. In The Art of Happiness, the Dalai Lama describes achieving happiness as “exercising the capacity to change negativity into acting more positively”.

“Taking Ownership” involves identifying your role or contribution in past and current situations that are in the process of turning toward the positive. 

Practice “Imagining the (Future) Positive” as your personal, possible happier future.

Who Can Positive Affect Help?

Women and men who go into PAT learn useful, smart ways to increase the positive affect they can bring to everyday functioning that enhance what’s rewarding and what they value the most.

PAT may be the treatment of choice for women and men who choose positive-focused therapy.

PAT can be utilized in versatile ways. I adapt elements of PAT to provide many of my clients with what they want and need.  A depressed person who has worked on overcoming depression or anxiety in therapy and now who most wants to feel a sense of contentment and joy should probably go for PAT. Elements of PAT may be a useful, valuable part of therapy for

• A person who doesn’t take good care of themselves because they feel they don’t matter enough (perhaps because they lack compassion for themselves)
• People who want to be able to enthusiastically treat themselves better and enjoy more
• People who wish for and believe their lives would be better if they could live more in accord with their values
• Individuals who don’t feel present enough to really enjoy and experience pleasure

Call me if you think you would like to meet and discuss whether PAT might be for you.