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Can psychotherapy patients expect happiness as a consequence of therapy?

Releasing unrealistic expectations about life increases happiness and reduces suffering.

Mindfully embracing the present moment, instead of resisting reality, fosters contentment.

Is happiness something patients can expect as a realistic consequence of therapy? What does the quintessential clinical wisdom of psychotherapy say about happiness and how to attain it? This is a complex question we initially addressed in Part 1 of this series and continue to consider here.

Existentialism, Meaning, and Meaninglessness

The emphasis in existential therapy on the innate human need for a sense of significance, meaning, and purpose speaks volumes to what truly supports happiness. Suffering without meaning, notes existential psychiatrist and psychotherapist Viktor Frankl (1985), tends to lead to despair. But if life's suffering can be imbued with meaning, despair can potentially be transformed to joy, or perhaps contentment or fulfillment, something akin to so-called happiness. This is why existentialist author Albert Camus (1955) concludes that the tragic Greek figure Sisyphus, sentenced by the gods to eternally roll an enormous stone up a steep hill only to have it roll right back down at the end of each day for the crime of attempting to evade death, must be imagined as being happy. Despite his incessant daily suffering and unendingly tedious task, he has his raison d'etre, his reason for being, his assigned purpose in life, which he accepts rather than resists.

This act of consciously choosing even that fate which, by definition, we cannot control in life is an attitude referred to by another existentially oriented psychotherapist, Otto Rank (1936), as "the willing affirmation of the must." In this sense, we are all a little like Sisyphus: It is only when we are ready........

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