Positive Psychology: America’s Happiness Obsession
Cara Blouin, LPC, Council for Relationships’ Director of Clinical Operations and Staff Therapist, explores how cultural expectations around happiness and control shape our emotions. Using insights from positive psychology, she examines America’s pursuit of a positive attitude and positive thoughts—inviting a more compassionate view of emotional well-being.
Understanding Positive Psychology and its Flaws
A dear client, a kind and funny person whom I love spending time with sits in my office, looking determined. She has a goal for therapy. She needs to cut out her negative thinking, and her wallowing, she says. She is in her own way. She could be so happy if she could just control her thoughts and feelings and replace them with more positive ones.
Can I help her do that?
I have had this exact conversation many times, and it always breaks my heart. I can’t. And honestly? If I could, I wouldn’t want to.
Buddha vs Positive Psychology: The Second Arrow
In the Sallatha sutra, a Buddhist text, the Buddha uses the analogy of a man, who is shot by an arrow and in terrible pain. The man then shoots himself again with a second arrow. In Buddhist philosophy, the first arrow represents that pain that is just part of life, inevitable. The second arrow represents our response to that pain. That response is often the sense that the pain should not be there.
Buddhists observe that life inherently includes both joy and suffering. The Buddha taught that our desire for only pleasant experiences increases our suffering—by wanting what is not possible, we shoot ourselves with the second arrow.
How Culture Shapes Positive Psychology in America
The desire to feel pleasure and avoid pain is human. In Western culture, especially in the United States, happiness is expected and unhappiness seen as failure.
The founding parents of American culture were Calvinist Puritans, people who believed that illness, poverty or bad fortune were signs of God’s disfavor. This belief endures. Americans still equate wealth with virtue and struggle with weakness. Similarly, Americans have a low tolerance for depression, illness, or grief that can’t be quickly “solved.”
While the Puritans taught that there was nothing that they could do to change God’s predestined judgements of them, the religious and cultural movements that followed taught the opposite. Americans believe that we make our own luck. That’s the foundation of the American dream: the right effort leads to prosperity.
Just a few years after the American Revolution, New Thought philosophers in our young country began to teach that this principle doesn’t just apply to our economic fortunes—it determines our experience of life, too, promoting the idea that attitude shapes destiny.
From Puritans to the Power of Positive Thinking
New Thought texts, the roots of American self-help, taught that we control our destiny by controlling our thoughts and feelings—a belief later echoed in positive psychology and modern wellness culture. Those who aren’t happy or prosperous simply aren’t trying hard enough—or, as later thinkers would say, haven’t cultivated positive thoughts that attract success.
The belief that happiness can be gained through willpower has endured—from the Gold Rush to the Power of Positive Thinking to the startup culture of the 2000s.
When a Positive Attitude Becomes Pressure
Positive psychology and behavioral psychology also embrace these ideas. In a culture that believes you can end your troubles by changing your mind, countless movements promise to show you how.
As the name “self-help” implies, it’s on you to change your attitude—to maintain a positive attitude—and not on communities to support you or societies to repair systemic failure. Conveniently, the belief that individuals control their own destiny absolves the rest of us of any responsibility to face the causes of suffering, or to help. It isolates us from each other, each with our own internal world to manage alone.
The Cost of Emotional Self-Policing
The Puritans saw misfortune as divine judgment. The unlucky learned to mask pain with a positive affect, avoiding complaint to escape condemnation.
Then, as now, “I’m fine” signaled that a person is doing well. Cheerfulness in hardship marked someone as commendable, not a burden.
Only in times when the stark reality of suffering was impossible for most people to ignore, like the Great Depression, have we seen Americans acknowledge a lack of individual control over outcomes. And throughout our history, groups that are systemically marginalized have built more community-based subcultures that allow for the expression of pain.
However, on the whole we tend to believe that a positive attitude is far more important than a positive experience. New Thought, and the ideas that followed it teach that it’s not just enough to fool others into thinking we’re always sunny, we also must convince ourselves.
The self-policing of emotions takes place in our own minds, where we judge our thoughts and feelings for their “negativity” and chastise ourselves for having them, rather than allowing space for genuine thoughts and feelings grounded in authenticity.
The Limits of Positive Thoughts and Forced Optimism
Rhonda Byrne, author of New Thought descendant The Secret admonishes her followers that if they find their attempts to mentally attract wealth or attractive partners aren’t working, it’s because their positive thoughts are not pure enough. On the other side of the coin, the author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about family and friends who told her she was responsible for her own breast cancer, saying that her poor attitude was literally killing her.
Many people take this project to therapy, hoping the process can help them not only stop experiencing unwanted thoughts and emotions, but truly control them.
But what is the cost of attempting to suppress and mask our authentic emotional responses to life’s realities? The social consequences experienced by the Puritans is still part of American life- we have little tolerance for those who speak openly about poverty, illness or systemic injustice, and we tend to expect sufferers to pull themselves up by their bootstraps (an impossible task, by the way).
When we’re taught that our feelings are our responsibility—and that if we are in pain, it is because we are choosing to be—we’re always experiencing the Buddha’s second arrow. There is the hurt that comes from the inevitable events of life- like loss, grief, and illness- but there is also the suffering that comes with believing that our response to these events is wrong and must be controlled or hidden.
What Positive Psychology Teaches About Acceptance
The science backs up the Buddha. A meta-analysis published in Clinical Psychology Review shows that “What we resist, persists.” The willful suppression of thoughts and feelings doesn’t make them disappear—it often amplifies them. Research shows that suppression of emotion is linked to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, autoimmune diseases, and earlier mortality.
But if we’re thoughtful about it, we can probably also tap our intuitive and experiential knowledge—and what Buddhist philosophy teaches about acceptance—to show that trying to push away our unwanted responses to the realities in life rarely leads to real happiness.
Finding Meaning in Suffering
In the therapist’s chair, I see this belief daily. Positive Psychology does not explore how people find meaning in suffering. It encourages people to ignore suffering. Many clients apologize for “complaining too much,” their pain compounded by believing that suffering makes them unlovable.
It’s especially sad that hiding our true emotions breeds loneliness.
When norms prevent sharing, we lose the ability to connect authentically. Meanwhile, the two-hundred-year-old message that sadness is dangerously contagious is still being reinforced as when pop-psychology influencers encourage followers to “cut out negative people.” Fearing ostracization, we avoid our path to true connection and pressure ourselves to maintain a positive attitude, even when honesty or vulnerability would serve us better.
A Grounded Approach Doesn’t Necessary Include a Positive Attitude
Clients like so many of mine respond by wanting to do better. They seek help in therapy to do what their cultural ancestors did- try to build the will and self-control to stop feeling sad, lonely, and scared. But that isn’t what therapy is for.
Our feelings provide crucial information about our internal state and about our environment. If we ignore these messages, they will come up in other ways: particularly as anxiety, depression, and illness.
More to the point, it’s not possible. We cannot remove the first arrow. We will all suffer in life, which includes loss, sickness, suffering, and death. It’s inescapable. Mental and emotional responses to this reality will inevitably arise. It’s not possible to stop them or make those responses into what we wish they were.
However, we can work with the second arrow. While approaches like mindfulness remind us to notice how historical and cultural forces have caused us to increase our suffering through our patterns and adaptations to our very real pain.
We can make choices about how to deal with what we feel authentically and in connection with another person—developing a more grounded approach that allows for both joy and sorrow. We can learn to discern what is actually in our control and what is not.
Sharing Our Real Experiences
I’m not interested in helping my client smooth her edges until they are pleasant and easy to bear because I don’t want to lose her in the process. One gift of being a therapist is knowing I’m not alone in suffering. If more people shared what’s truly going on, we’d all feel less isolated.
Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Council for Relationships.
Contact Cara to learn more about therapy and psychiatry at CFR.
About Philadelphia Therapist Cara Blouin, LPC
Cara Blouin, LPC, is Council for Relationships’ Director of Clinical Operations and a Staff Therapist. Her warm, collaborative style—grounded in positive psychology—supports adults navigating perfectionism, burnout, and compassion fatigue. She sees clients in person at CFR’s University City office and online across Pennsylvania.
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