Brief Positive Psychotherapy: Implication of Reducing Negative Thoughts in College Student’s Interpersonal Relationships

DOI

10.2991/iciap-18.2019.23How to use a DOI?

Keywords

positive psychotherapy, well-being

Abstract

Academic performance is often considered as a benchmark of student success in adjusting to college life. Nevertheless, students also face various problems in their life that will indirectly affect their academic performance. One of the problems that could be an obstacle to achieving optimum academic performance is interpersonal relationships. The inability of students to overcome the various demands and problems in their interaction with the environment will affect their relationships with friends and the people around them, which will ultimately also result in declining academic performance. Positive psychotherapy intervention is used to help clients with problems that affected their life functioning, including interpersonal relationship. Nowadays, the wide use of positive psychotherapy is growing because it focuses more on the positive things in a human’s life and explores an individual’s strengths, rather than focusing on problems; also, to encounter negative thoughts and replace it with positive ones. It will build positive emotions that will help the participant through the problems encountered. Positive psychotherapy has been widely used to help people with negative emotional symptoms (depression, mental disorders) and problems with interpersonal relationships. This study conducted positive psychotherapy to treat a 20-year-old female college student with interpersonal problems and negative thoughts in her relationships with others. Brief positive psychotherapy was conducted to interfere with the negative thoughts regarding interpersonal relationships. The client focused on negative perceptions of her problems in her past and present and felt overwhelmed by her negative emotions. She could not find positive aspects related to her situation. With brief positive psychotherapy, evidence is presented through positive and negative aspects of experience rather than being opposite ends of a single dimension of negativity. The client presented with the importance of positive cognition in mental health. This therapy allowed the client to directly apply in her daily life, and the effects of the therapy were monitored directly by a therapist. Six sessions were conducted by applying several techniques of positive psychotherapy. The first session was a pre-session to gather information from the client and create a good rapport. The second to fifth session were intervention sessions to recall the client’s positive experiences, explore the client’s signature strength, use the forgiveness technique, and manage the action plan based on the client’s signature strength. The sixth session was the termination session. The duration of each session was approximately 90 to 120 minutes. The effectiveness of the therapy was measured by comparing the pretest and posttest results of the subjective well-being questionnaires, observed behavioral changes, and information gathered from the client through the interview technique. At the end of the intervention, the client’s negative thoughts had been reduced, and the subjective well-being score increased 8 points. The dimensions of self-acceptance and autonomy were the two dimensions with the highest score increases. After completing the intervention, the client reported a change in regulating her negative emotions, and her communication and relationships with her mother and boyfriend improved. The client also reported that she could be more focused on her studying and the relationships with her classmates are improving. At the beginning of the session, the client looked stressed and had difficult discussing experiences and her problems; after each session, the client seemed more relieved and had better communication in discussing her experiences and her problems.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Didon Permadi
AU  - Lifina Dewi Pohan
PY  - 2019/08
DA  - 2019/08
TI  - Brief Positive Psychotherapy: Implication of Reducing Negative Thoughts in College Student’s Interpersonal Relationships
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Intervention and Applied Psychology (ICIAP 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 271
EP  - 282
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/iciap-18.2019.23
DO  - 10.2991/iciap-18.2019.23
ID  - Permadi2019/08
ER  -