Pain Into Gain: Positive Psychology, Virtue, and the Flourishing Person

For a hundred years, psychology asked one question above all others: what went wrong? It traced today’s suffering back to yesterday’s wounds, and it helped a great many people — but it also, quietly, taught a kind of passivity. In this focused, one-lesson course, Dr. Paul Vitz walks through the deeper meaning of Martin Seligman’s positive psychology and shows that it did something more radical than add optimism to the field. It changed the model of the person itself — from a being pushed by the past to a being drawn forward by a chosen future. In recovering that forward orientation, positive psychology rediscovered the virtues and character strengths, and with them a claim as old as it is practical: that difficulty, met with virtue, can be turned into growth. Grounded in Divine Mercy University’s Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person and enriched with both the psychological scholarship (Titus, Vitz, Nordling) and the spiritual tradition (Aquinas, Augustine, John of the Cross), the course equips counselors and pastoral professionals to help clients move from “what was done to me?” to “who am I becoming?”