Professor Lea Waters brings decades in positive psychology to WA: ‘hardship and happiness can coexist’

Standing on the windswept Yallingup coastline, both beautiful and harsh, renowned psychologist Lea Waters is considering her third act. The first was a dark childhood, marred by violence and trauma. The second was an intense period of raising children while building a distinguished career. But a new chapter is dawning. It will draw on everything she’s learned, from personal experience and years of study, about how adversity and gratitude can overlap — and the person she’s become as a result. “I want the third act to be joyful,” Professor Waters says. “I’ve done the work of moving away from the negative. Now I’m moving towards the positive.” Last weekend, the globally recognised expert crossed the country to Smiths Beach, to lead the first weekend retreat run by Wellx, the venture she has co-founded with two Perth-based wellbeing specialists. It was a rare chance for the 30-odd attendees to hear from one of Australia’s most influential psychologists, who describes herself the way she might also report on a piece of research: “living proof that hardship and happiness can coexist”. For three decades, Waters has considered, through a scientific lens, the kind of question normally asked of the ceiling at 3am: what enables a person to not only survive the worst, but to be positively redefined by it? It’s a question that began to form in Waters’ childhood home in country Victoria. Her mother lived with significant mental illness, cycling in and out of various hospitals. “When my mum wasn’t doing well, she would become quite violent,” Waters states candidly. As the eldest of three, she says she felt a keen responsibility to protect her younger siblings, which mostly worked. But one day, when she was only about 13, a flash point occurred in the bedroom she shared with her sister, Colleen. Waters recalls, in sharp relief, her mother’s “white-hot rage” and her own futile attempts to intervene. Afterwards, while soothing Colleen’s cries, Waters wrestled with an unbearable reality — that she hadn’t been able to protect her little sister. The harm done to her directly, she explains, was rarely the worst of it. “Part of the damage of family violence is the witnessing,” she says. “It was awful when it happened to me, but it was way worse when it happened to my siblings.” In bed that night, Waters promised herself that she would spend her life protecting other children from rooms like that one. “I felt a calling, an absolute sense of moral responsibility, which came from extreme pain,” she says. Her anguish turned to fuel. Waters transformed into a fiercely committed student, because university was the road to psychology, and psychology was the promise fulfilled. Colleen would find her own version of that calling and become a social worker. “We both,” Waters contemplates quietly, “found purpose in the pain.” Waters has built a truly impressive CV. She’s a past president of the International Positive Psychology Association and a global pioneer of positive education. She founded the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Positive Psychology (now the Centre for Wellbeing Science) and was its inaugural Gerry Higgins chair in wellbeing science. She has held positions at Cambridge in the UK, Michigan and Berkeley, and authored well over 100 academic works and a bestselling book, The Strength Switch. In 2020, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for her contribution to youth mental health and education. For decades, she told almost no one about her childhood. The few who were trusted enough to glimpse Waters’ backstory wondered, kindly, how she had turned out the way she had. She deflected and changed the subject. Then, when Waters was in her mid-40s, Colleen took her own life. In the rawness of it, Waters said one thing to her sister’s son, and then to everyone, again and again: “The way Colleen died does not define her and it does not define the way she lived.” She wanted her sister remembered as she was: courageous, quick-witted, with an amazing sense of humour. “She had a fantastic laugh,” Waters smiles. “She hated it. She’d say, ‘I sound like a chicken.’ I loved her laugh.” Not long after his mother’s death, Waters’ 20-year-old nephew sat beside her as they worked through the cruel paperwork a coroner’s court requires. He remembered aloud a quirky quote from his mum and, suddenly, the pair were sharing a proper, unguarded belly laugh. She watched the grieving young man stop himself abruptly, as though levity had been ruled out of order. “I reached across and said, ‘Thank you, that’s the first time I’ve laughed in six weeks, and she would have wanted us to laugh’,” Waters remembers. It’s a moment the psychologist returns to often; proof that “grief and gratitude, frustration and forgiveness“ can exist together, even if society tells us they cannot. It was the period when Waters’ professional and private lives ultimately intersected. Seeking therapy for personal trauma recovery, she found reams of material on post-traumatic stress disorder, but little that addressed the question she’d so often been asked and never wanted to answer: how did you turn out the way you did? The concept has a clinical name — post-traumatic growth — but there was almost no literature to consult. Psychology had been focused on trauma’s wreckage; only a handful of researchers were asking whether struggle might also build resilience, empathy and compassion. “I didn’t even know growth was a possibility,” Waters tells STM. “Simply knowing it’s possible is self-fulfilling.” Waters’ field of expertise is positive psychology, which she defines as “the scientific study of the best of human nature”. It was long dismissed as subjective self-help. Choosing the discipline 25 years ago, she says, felt like defecting to the light side of the Force, to widespread alarm. Today, by the discipline’s own metrics, it’s among the most rigorous of scientific branches, offering evidence-based approaches that can be measured and taught. One of its techniques, known as cognitive reappraisal, became a personal turning point. With a single, swapped word, Waters stopped asking, “How do I recover from this?” and began wondering, “How do I learn from this?” Instead of “Why me?”, a phrase that assumes everyone else has been spared from trauma, she considered, “Why not me?” Struggle, says Waters, is part of the human condition, but “when you change the questions you ask yourself, you change the answers that come back”. The philosophy now lies at the core of everything she teaches. Resilience, in Waters’ hands, is not a return ticket to who you were before the worst arrived, but an outbound journey towards a more intentional existence. “Sometimes the things that break us are the things that make us,” she explains. Those things didn’t politely cease with professional recognition and therapy, though. At 51, Waters was diagnosed with ADHD. It was a revelation braided with grief “about how much unnecessary struggle I’d had, for decades”, she says, citing the shame and self-blame that arrived alongside the diagnosis. Characteristically, she chose to say so out loud: “(ADHD) doesn’t define all of who I am and if I can talk about it publicly, it reduces the stigma and it helps other women.” Not long afterwards, following the death of her mother, Waters’ 28-year marriage ended. By then, she had taught herself one of the hardest skills of all: how to ask for help. Unlocking it also lay in the reframe. “If you can’t ask for help for yourself,” she says, “do it on behalf of someone else.” After Colleen died, Waters says she had no choice but to rely on friends — her “chosen family” — to hold her up, sometimes literally. She told herself it was only so she had something left to give her own children and nephew as they grieved, which made the burden feel more bearable. Sharing her hard-earned wisdom, both in a personal context and as a specialist, is at the heart of the Wellx philosophy. Last weekend’s retreat was created by Waters alongside long-time colleagues Claire Fortune and Natasha Taylor, who both hold masters degrees in applied positive psychology from the University of Melbourne. It was intentionally designed as an empirical experience within an industry Waters regards with a scientist’s customary scepticism. Wellness, she warns, has its share of the self-interested; her advice is to be “a wise consumer”. The Wellx defence against quackery is evidence: a two-day program grounded in years of data-driven research. Every item on the schedule, from group workshops to sound baths and shinrin-yoku — the Japanese practice of forest bathing — comes paired with published findings. “It’s not chicken soup for the soul,” asserts Waters. “This is what the science tells us from repeated global studies over decades; factors known to help us heal, help us recover, help us thrive.” WA’s South West, within this context, was not backdrop but apparatus. There is foundational theory on how nature soothes a frayed nervous system and Wellx leans into it. “It’s known across the world as a place of natural awe and wonder,” says Waters of the Yallingup coastline. “And now there’s all the science showing the importance of nature. In Western Australia, you have that in abundance, which makes the retreat so much more effective.” There’s a practical logic, too: lessons learned in a remote overseas destination can feel impossible to bring home, while Smiths Beach sits at what Waters calls the Goldilocks distance. It’s far enough from ordinary life that thinking becomes more elastic but close enough that change survives the drive back. Another proven theory, known in psychology as transfer of training. The next Wellx retreat is set for October in Victoria, with two international destinations in the works for 2027. Planning for accessible community and youth programs is also under way. And Waters is deep into writing her next book — this one about positive change. At the heart of all of it is the professor’s lived experience. Within the first 15 minutes of last weekend’s line-up, Waters asked the group, mostly women and men from WA, huddled behind the sand dunes under a watercolour dawn sky, to set down the question our “fix it” society presses on all of us: what’s wrong with me? Instead, she suggested selecting a better one: what is already right? That simple paradigm shift, she says, “is the platform to create change moving forward”. No quantum leap, more a gentle nudge in a new direction, a manageable strategy anchored in personal strengths that compounds over time. It’s the path Waters herself has walked. “We are so much more resilient than we believe,” she concludes. “When we get cracked open, an inner light shines out.” She would know; she’s living proof. If this story raised concerns for you, support is available at Lifeline on 13 11 14.