Identify and work to understand the situation. 2. Describe the situation objectively and accurately. 3. Express concerns. 4. Ask the other person for… - Martin E P Seligman

Ten years ago Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson, then graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, did an experiment in which people were given differing degrees of control over the lighting of a light. Some were able to control the light perfectly: It went on every time they pressed a button, and it never went on if they didn’t press. The other people, however, had no control at all: The light went on regardless of whether they pressed the button.

TRANSCENDING Escher got it right. Men step down and yet rise up, the hand is drawn by the hand it draws, and a woman is poised on her very own shoulders. Without you and me this universe is simple, run with the regularity of a prison. Galaxies spin along stipulated arcs, stars collapse at the specified hour, crows u-turn south and monkeys rut on schedule. But we, whom the cosmos shaped for a billion years to fit this place, we know it failed. For we can reshape, reach an arm through the bars and, Escher-like, pull ourselves out. And while whales feeding on mackerel are confined forever in the sea, we climb the waves, look down from clouds. — From Look Down from Clouds (Marvin Levine, 1997)

But clinical psychologists also began to find something disconcerting emerging from therapy: even on that rare occasion when therapy goes superbly and unusually well, and you help the client rid herself of depression, anxiety, and anger, happiness is not guaranteed. Emptiness is not an uncommon result.