Drs. Steven Sandage and Sarah Crabtree participated in an APA Psychotherapy Video Series project on strengths and flourishing in Psychotherapy. It is available for purchase on the APA website.

Strengths and Flourishing in Psychotherapy highlights how therapists can engage character strengths and virtues in psychotherapy regardless of their specific approach to therapy. Character strengths are qualities of personhood that tend to contribute to flourishing over time, such as gratitude, compassion, agency, forgiveness, humility, and many others. Traditionally, psychotherapy focuses on the alleviation of symptoms of distress which represents an important commitment to reducing client suffering. Yet emerging dual factor approaches to mental health involve attending to both suffering and flourishing to help clients cultivate meaningful and connected lives.

This video offers differing ways therapists can weave engagement of strengths and flourishing into a variety of well-established, evidence-based therapeutic approaches. The psychotherapy approaches demonstrated in this video include feminist-multicultural humanistic, contemporary relational psychodynamic, strengths-centered therapy using gratitude interventions, and the unified protocol cognitive-behavioral therapy. The demonstrations are followed by a group discussion with the host, Steve J. Sandage and the guest experts, Sarah Crabtree, Todd Farchione, Heidi Levitt, and Joel Wong.