Arthur Brooks (2026) argues in The Free Press that therapy is not supposed to make you happier. He says, “Therapy generally involves regular speaking sessions with a trained professional dedicated to addressing one’s emotional, behavioral, or mental-health challenges and teaching techniques to build coping skills and make positive changes. In lay terms, it aims to help a patient manage whatever is making her miserable, such as depression or anxiety.”
Brooks says therapy is about managing negative emotions, while happiness is about increasing positive emotions. For happiness, he says you should “get out of the house,” “mix with people,” and “try not to be a jerk.”
What Brooks doesn’t address is why people who want to be happy don’t socialize more often and more effectively. These reasons are the real focus of therapy.
As I describe in my 2018 book, What Every Therapist Needs to Know, it is well known that the primary variable that accounts for successful therapy is the working alliance. The idea is that the therapist and patient must have mutual goals; they must understand how the therapy will achieve those goals by sharing an understanding of what patterns or tendencies are getting in the way; and they must allow the natural collaborative bonds that develop between people working together to develop by understanding together what is getting in the way of their development.
In practice, very early in the therapy, often in the first session, the conversation switches from the pain and misery that Brooks seems to think is the only topic in therapy. The conversation addresses what the anxiety, depression, trauma, or condition keeps the patient from doing that they would like to do or ought to do. The moments when the patient’s psychology interferes with the pursuit of happiness become windows into the ways the patient needs to change. They also alert the dyad to the ways the patient’s psychology will interfere with the therapy.
The fact that the patient messes up the therapy the same way they mess up other relationships and activities is a good thing. It means that the dyad can resolve the patient’s life problems by fixing the therapy relationship.
How is it possible that a leading researcher on happiness doesn’t know what therapy is supposed to do? I think there are several relevant factors.
First, since the 1980s, therapy has largely been funded by health insurance companies. This has led to an emphasis on diagnoses rather than on unwanted behavior. Progress notes have become organized around pathology rather than change. Health insurers want therapists to focus on reducing pathology so they can stop paying for the therapy.
Second, many observers, and truth be told, many therapists, think therapy is not about change but about “support” and “validation.” This is because the idea of change implies that there is something wrong with the person. We seem to be living in an era in which everyone is perfect exactly as they are, and to say there is something wrong is some kind of insult. But compare psychotherapy to physical therapy. If there’s nothing wrong with you, you might hire a personal trainer, a coach, or a yoga instructor. You go to a physical therapist when there’s something wrong.
Third, we seem to be living in an era in which the world is divided, for many people, between oppressors and the oppressed, and being an oppressor is villainized. Many people are proud of having a diagnosis, because it identifies them as oppressed. A diagnosis is also seen as a built-in excuse for not living up to one’s potential. Consequently, many people say, as Brooks reports, that they have been in therapy for five years and are still not happy. But they don’t think there is something wrong with the therapy because they are not in therapy to get better. They are in therapy to consolidate their sense of blamelessness for their own unhappiness. Blamelessness feels good in the short run, but in the long run, it prevents you from taking proactive steps to make yourself happier. Going to therapy used to be such a step; now it’s more like an admission of resignation and helplessness for many patients and therapists (which Brooks points out, not as a critique but as a disadvantage of therapy).
Regardless of the reasons for thinking that therapy is not about resolving the barriers to happiness, that is exactly what therapy is about.