Reprinted from The Boston Globe

By Christina Robb

Barry Neil Kaufman has impeccable credentials.

When his first son, Raun, was 18 months old, the boy was measured as having an IQ of less than 30 and diagnosed as incurably autistic. Kaufman, who was then a successful New York City graphic designer, quit his job and, with his wife Suzi, worked with Raun for 12 hours a day, seven days a week. At the end of three years Raun was measured as having a near-genius IQ and had become an imaginative, engaging, healthy pre-schooler. Raun graduated cum laude from high school last June and is now a freshman in college.

So when Kaufman comes to town saying he has a one-step program that can take you directly from wherever you are to permanent happiness, you know it's not just a snake-oil salesman talking. The man has worked miracles.

But happiness? Somehow it seems easier to believe that a man and his wife could cure autism in an infant whom science deemed incurable than that they and the staff of 48 they work with at their Option Institute in Sheffield could make a happy experience out of, say, a flat tire or a messy divorce or a financial bust.

And Kaufman doesn't even say you need a weekend or week-long workshop at his institute to become happy (for $395 or $995). Sitting relaxed in the Arlington living room of one of his staff members, he says all you have to do is pick up the latest of his eight books, "Happiness Is a Choice," for $16. In fact, all you really have to do, he says, is decide to be happy. That is the one step in his program: Decide to be happy right now.

Now Kaufman himself will be the first to tell you that it took him about 2 million steps to decide to be happy. He experienced misery, anger and agonizing migraine headaches for years while he tried every major religion, psychoanalysis, existentialism, esoteric traditions and many varieties of psychological training before he found his last teacher. "I was so attached to the contemporary myth of the helping profession, as most other people are today. And the myth is about the unconscious and the unknowable subconscious" that tell us our wounded depths or our past control us, he says.

But his final teacher, who Kaufman says insists on remaining anonymous, taught him a process of gentle but relentless questioning that Kaufman has been teaching, first in New York and now on 95 pastoral acres in Sheffield, for the past 20 years as The Option Process®.

All of the Option questions are variations on the theme of "Why do you believe that?" Kaufman believes that we choose our beliefs. When we question them, he says, we find that they are there only because we have chosen them. He says we can, if we want, choose other beliefs that will make us happy.

When he asks people from anywhere in the world what they want, they rarely say they want to be happy, he says. In the last month, people from Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, Russia, the Middle East, the Netherlands, Germany, England, Chile and South Africa have come to the Option Institute, saying that they want something other than happiness - political stability, religious harmony, safe investments or good marriages, he says. But when Kaufman asks why they want that, they always say they want it because it will make them happy. "The bottom line is always the same," he says.

Kaufman teaches that people can have the bottom line without worrying about any other line items that aren't in their control. "We teach people that happiness is a choice, and you can make that choice on a sustained basis," he says. "Happiness is not a good relationship. Happiness is not a successful career," he says. "Happiness is a frame of reference."

There are six Shortcuts to Happiness, he promises in "Happiness Is a Choice": Make happiness your first priority. Be authentic. Don't be judgmental. Be present. Be grateful. And then, decide to be happy.

Is this denial? Resistance? Is The Option Process® just a way to block misery and unhappiness? Kaufman says no. "I'm not saying it's not OK to grieve. I'm not saying it's not OK to be angry. I'm just suggesting maybe to question why we respond with grief in the first place, why we respond with anger, and maybe change it."

Examples. He has hundreds. There is the 76-year-old woman was afraid to fly and now sends him postcards from all over the world. There is the man who was called away from a workshop at The Option Institute because his mother had died. He was driving home in tears when he remembered that in his workshop he'd decided to choose happiness and so he decided to try gratitude instead of grief. When he got home, he started telling grateful stories and turned his mother's wake into a celebration of her life. There is his own life with his wife and six children, three of them adopted from horrific lives in war-torn places.

Though he is persuasive and engaging, Kaufman is not particularly charismatic. His Option Process is not a snow job. He is also not manic. His happiness is the kind that allowed him last month to go to his 24 year-old daughter, Bryn, when she was having an episode of cardiac arrhythmia in the middle of the night so severe that she could hardly breathe and the pain in her chest was like the pain of a coronary. This is a condition that cannot be treated with drugs. Surgeons at the Massachusetts General Hospital closed up her chest after three hours because they decided they could do nothing for her. On that night he went to her last month, Kaufman says, Bryn told him that she had been thinking she must be about to die because the pain had never been so bad, and that she felt that if she died it wouldn't be fair.

"Why do you believe it wouldn't he fair?" he asked her. He put The Option Process® to work with his daughter on what she thought might be her deathbed. And as she answered his gentle but relentless questions, she ended up concluding that a good life, not a long life, was what was important, and that she was having a good life and that this conversation with her father was especially good. And then she told him to go, and he did.

The Option Institute still spends about 30 percent of its time working with "families with special children," as Kaufman puts it - families whose children are disabled or have special needs and who may be miserable. His daughter Bryn is one of the teachers. And many of Kaufman's most visible successes come here - the miracles, the children who've been told they'll never walk, the 8 year-old boy with a terminal neuromuscular disease who is given six months to live and no hope of ever moving again, and lives 2 1/2 years, brushing his teeth and getting dressed every day and saying, on the day he finally dies, "Daddy, call the Happy People at The Option Institute and thank them for helping me find my courage."