I wanted happiness to be a by-product of a large effect size, but it wasn't.

Reading Engels, Garnefski & Diekstra (1993) was like yawning to even out the air pressure behind one’s eardrums during an assent: after previous readings frustrated and tore at our scientific souls, Engels came along and eased the empirical tension, in a way. They painstakingly ripped apart studies of rational-emotive therapy until their hands bled with the lines they drew between the “masking of [an] experimenter” and “masking with data collection” (p. 1084). And their conclusion? Yes, rational-emotive therapy seems to be more effective than sitting on one’s couch and crying, but this difference is not statistically significant (p. 1086). The climax of the story came when, despite seeming to want to have their article support RET as something worth researching, they were frank about the results of their meta-analysis: “The methodologically more rigorous studies tended to produce moderate-to-low treatment effects," and “Concerning age, social class, and seriousness of disturbance, generalizations from this meta-analysis to clinical practice do not seem to be permitted,” and “no superiority over alternative treatments was found. However…methodological rigor…indeed had a decreasing influence on magnitude of ES" (p. 1088). They have more or less come out to say that, by manipulating the studies to find the good data, they found that the data was significant when the results were not applicable to real life, and the data were not significant when the studies were well-executed.

I believe Engels, and at the same time believe that we have it all wrong. Why are we not studying individual, successful therapists? I won’t go as far as to say that I believe in the dodo effect, but all of these articles have me skeptical of whatever it is we are measuring through therapy research.

But then, after reading Butler, Chapman, Forman & Beck (2006), their meta-analytic support for cognitive-behavioral therapy seemed show most of its strength in the follow-up periods after therapy ceased. Rarely, however, did those follow-up assessments take place after one year post-treatment. But then again, what is the goal? Is the goal concrete, such as a reduction in recidivism (p. 27)? Is the goal happiness in the abstract? I thought about these questions when brainstorming of what to write in this blog entry, and penned down the phrase “Happiness is a by-product of ordered thinking.” Then I crossed out “of ordered thinking,” leaving just “Happiness is a by-product.” Then I realized—there’s no way I came up with this phrase…it seems too familiar. So I googled it—turns out, according to some random, unreliable source called thinkexist.com, two people have said this: Sam Levenson, who said, “Happiness is a by-product. You cannot pursue it by itself,” and William S. Burroughs, who said “Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.” This is humorous to me, as William S. Burroughs was completely off his rocker and accidentally shot his wife by having her put an apple on her head and trying to pull a William Tell stunt while high. My guess is that Sam Levenson was equally kooky. But still, the phrase makes total sense.

My point is that psychological stability seems too complicated to address in brief treatments and expect some sort of definitive change to take place in a measurable time period. Therapy is not a pill, and that’s why it works in the long term, for the long term. But works at what - flattening the personality, or accepting a bumpy one?