Tag: Carl Rogers

On Becoming a Person, Chapter 3 – Thriving in a Healthy Helping Relationship

by hkatz, posted in Psychology, Readings

In the third chapter of his book, On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers talks about some of the qualities of a healthy helping relationship. Although his focus is on therapists and patients, he also notes how these qualities could apply to other relationships, such as parent-child or teacher-student. Here are some:

1) A sincere desire to understand the other person. This doesn’t mean saying “I understand what’s wrong with you and now I’ll fix you” or “I understand what’s wrong with you because I had a similar experience and this is how I felt about it” or “I understand all right, but your concerns aren’t serious.” It’s important to try to see an issue as the other person sees it, not how you see it. Even if you don’t always succeed in understanding, people at least pick up on the sincere effort.

2) Genuineness. This isn’t license to be rude and insulting (for instance, there are ways of expressing anger that don’t involve humiliating another person; and I’m making this point from the start because I know people who are brutally hurtful, then claim it’s ok because they’re just being themselves).

With genuineness, you aren’t constantly giving off conflicting messages – ‘nicey nice’ words with anger in your eyes, a compliment spoken in indifference, contempt or resentment – as these generate mistrust. You’re aware of your thoughts and feelings, and aren’t always compelled to put on a show in front of everyone. To be more genuine requires self-acceptance; you’re willing to take the risk of being more exposed. You do not need to appear ‘perfect’ and express the ‘perfect’ sentiment at all times. Self-acceptance also means that you have less fear of others and what kinds of reactions they might provoke in you; you’re more accepting of their presence as well, and less defensive about what they say or do.

3) Allowing yourself to feel warmth and caring. You can care about the other person, while knowing full well that there’s always the possibility that they’ll flake out on you, try to take advantage of your good will, make terrible mistakes, stab you in the back, or disappoint you. The alternative is to remain cold or completely impersonal, which usually closes off communication in these kinds of relationships (though it does give you the sense that you’re protecting yourself).

4) Reminding yourself that you’re distinct from the other person. Do you fear losing yourself in their emotions? On the flip side, are you trying to control them, needing them to slavishly follow what you say or be dependent on you? You really have to respect that the other person is distinct and separate from you, and you from them.

5) Unconditional acceptance. Acceptance doesn’t mean you’re automatically condoning everything the other person does. It means that you keep regarding them as they are, instead of completely spurning them or twisting their words and behaviors to be more palatable to you. Or can you really only see the other person when they show you the kinds of things that are easiest and least disturbing for you to see?

6) The ability to create an unthreatening environment. Are you subjecting the other person to the threat of constant evaluation and judgment? Do they always feel as if they’re trying to prove themselves and are falling short? Or are you helping them establish their own standards of behavior, their own sense of what’s acceptable or not, and helping them take responsibility for themselves without the constant need of a punishment or harsh judgment hanging over their heads?

7) Perceiving the other person as constantly developing. Instead of seeing them purely bound to their past and what they’ve always been to you (often in unforgiving terms: an ignorant student, an immature child, a neurotic mess, etc.) you see them in the process of becoming, of daily changes and development.

Most of the time what blocks us from developing these qualities to any extent is fear – of being hurt and exposed, of being wrong. Another pitfall is all-or-nothing thinking: “I fail to be genuine all of the time, so I won’t bother.” Then there’s mental laziness, which can lead us to taking shortcuts in understanding and helping another person. The take home point is that to be in a position to consistently help others, you need to work on your own psychological maturity – so as not to use other people and their problems for your own purposes, and obscure them in a dense cloud of your own thoughts and feelings.

On Becoming a Person, Chapter 2 – How do therapists foster personal growth?

by hkatz, posted in Psychology, Readings

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What’s the best way to help someone develop intellectually and emotionally?

In Chapter 2 of On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers writes that it’s a mistake for a psychotherapist to relate to a client as a “case” or a set of problems to fix. Instead therapists should see each client as a whole person, and beyond that form a relationship with them in which they can free themselves of lies and psychological defense mechanisms and grow as people.

What kind of relationship is this?

Rogers characterizes it as one in which: 1) he’s genuine about his own thoughts and feelings; 2) develops an “acceptance and liking” towards the other person; 3) tries to understand the other person.

But he also writes:

I am by no means always able to achieve this kind of relationship with another, and sometimes, even when I feel I have achieved it in myself, he may be too frightened to perceive what is being offered to him.

What happens if a therapist genuinely dislikes a client? Cultivating an attitude of acceptance (discussed more in this earlier post and comment thread) can help override your initial impulse to try to fix the other person or shut him/her out for not being exactly like you. But beyond that? Under what circumstances – even with an attitude of openness, understanding, and genuineness – does a relationship just not work out between therapist and client?

And what about those clients who are “too frightened to perceive what is being offered”? Is the fear something they can work past in time with the therapist, or something that’s a precondition for therapy that they need to work through on their own? Also, fear isn’t the only obstacle standing in the way of a good therapeutic relationship; for instance I’m picturing someone malicious and manipulative, ordered to undergo therapy by a court. (Maybe fear of some kind can also lie at the root of malice and conscious dishonesty.)

Rogers also compares the kind of ‘helping relationship’ between a therapist and client to similar relationships that facilitate growth in people: parent-child, teacher-student, etc. Any relationship in which there’s growth needs to have genuineness, acceptance, and understanding. I’m inclined to agree with him, though each kind of relationship also has qualities that set it apart from others. Returning to the therapist-client relationship more specifically, how does a therapist become a “companion” to the client (as Rogers puts it) without over-stepping certain bounds? The therapist isn’t exactly a friend, or a parent, or a teacher really – or is the therapist something of each of these?

On Becoming a Person, Chapter 1 – What does acceptance mean?

by hkatz, posted in Psychology, Readings

When hearing people argue for ‘acceptance’ and ‘accepting others’ I’ve usually gotten the sense that they’re supporting a lazy relativism – all viewpoints are equally valid, all opinions have merit, all practices and beliefs are beyond reproach. I’ve rejected this idea of acceptance because it falls flat in the face of reality. In some situations you can disagree with people while seeing the merits in their argument, or accept that they have their own tastes and way of life. Other times this kind of ‘acceptance’ stems from laziness, dishonesty and indifference, and can lead to terrible problems if people use it to excuse or ignore destructive practices.

I’ve started reading On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers, an influential psychotherapist who broke away from both Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviorist approaches to psychotherapy. In Chapter 1 of this book, which was published in the early 1960s, he brings up acceptance:

I believe that it is an increasingly common pattern in our culture for each one of us to believe, “Every other person must feel and think and believe the same as I do.”

And a few sentences later he writes…

Each person is an island unto himself, in a very real sense; and he can only build bridges to other islands if he is first of all willing to be himself and permitted to be himself. So I find that when I can accept another person, which means specifically accepting the feelings and attitudes and beliefs that he has as a real and vital part of him, then I am assisting him to become a person: and there seems to me great value in this.

Shifting away from the lazy relativism discussed earlier, the acceptance described here seems to focus on acknowledging that people’s beliefs/feelings/etc. are a real and valid part of them. It matters to them in some way. Maybe we completely disagree with what it is they’re expressing or we find it abhorrent, but we accept that it’s real to them.

We have a strong tendency to invalidate other people by pretending that what they think or feel isn’t real (“You can’t be serious,” we say, or “no one thinks that way” or “you’re lying”); we can even make up explanations to override them (“you don’t really feel like that, you’re just tired” or “you’re hysterical/emotional/unstable…”). Rogers writes that when he’s more “open to the realities in me and in the other person” he’s much more likely to listen and try to understand, instead of immediately leaping in to “fix things” or bend people to his own way of viewing the world.

I think this kind of acceptance is generally a good approach; it reduces the chances that we’ll steamroll someone with our own thoughts, manipulate them and tell them exactly what it is they’re thinking/feeling. It also resonates with some of my readings on mindfulness training and accepting the present moment as it is, with all of its positive and negative qualities (instead of avoiding reality or warping it with our own thoughts of what it should be like).

Then again, what do we do when we want to change ourselves or when other people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors are destructive to themselves and to others? We can accept that what they’re doing is real and serves some important psychological need… but if they want to change and ask for help, how can we help them? Does the kind of acceptance described by Rogers in this chapter easily slide into the lazy relativism mentioned earlier in the post? I’ll keep reading more of this book (and more about mindfulness) to better understand (hopefully) how these ideas of acceptance interact with personal development and change. At least for now, Rogers writes that it’s a paradox:

Yet the paradoxical aspect of my experience is that the more I am simply willing to be myself, in all this complexity of life and the more I am willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person, the more change seems to be stirred up.