The fundamental guideline for not deploying optimism is to ask what the cost of failure is in the particular situation. If the cost of failure is hig… - Martin E P Seligman

The skills of becoming happy turn out to be almost entirely different from the skills of not being sad, not being anxious, or not being angry.

Here are the twin premises of the inner-child recovery movement:

• Bad events in childhood exert major influence on adulthood.
• Coming to grips with those events undoes their influence.

These premises are enshrined in film and theater. The biggest psychological hit of 1991 was the film version of Pat Conroy's lyrical novel The Prince of Tides, in which Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte), an alcoholic football coach, has been fired from his job, and is cold to his wife and little girls. He and his sister were raped twenty-five years before as kids.

He tearfully confesses this to Dr. Susan Lowenstein (Barbra Streisand), a New York psychoanalyst, and thereby recovers his ability to feel, to coach, and to control his drinking. His sister, presumably, would also recover from her suicidal schizophrenia if she could only relive the rape. The audience is in tears. The audience seems to have no doubt about the premises.

But I do.

Happy people remember more good events than actually happened, and they forget more of the bad events. Depressed people, in contrast, are accurate about both.