Tag: growth

“You only know what you know ’til you know…”

by hkatz, posted in Struggling Striving Healing

YouTube recommendations sometimes are wonderful. I go on YouTube mostly for music, and this song by Mozella (an artist I was unfamiliar with), hit me with its lyrics, which have some good insights about change and development.

“You only know what you know ‘til you know.”

People, myself included, sometimes wish so badly that they could know everything they need to know at the outset of some great venture or new stage in life – to have the knowledge, complete and whole, at their command, to keep them from missteps, embarrassing mistakes, and painfully wrongheaded decisions.

But there’s no such complete knowledge. At any given point, you know what you know, that’s it. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a mentor or another trusted person to guide you, you still have to live out the process of learning for yourself, and one way or another, you won’t always get things right. The key is to keep learning, to grow in wisdom.

“So many things mattered to you that really meant nothing but you needed them to find the truth.”

Yes, some of the things that once interested you may seem unimportant now, but they’re still a part of you. They helped you become who you are now. You’ve still learned something from them.

“You can’t sleep it off or drink it away, trick it with frivolities, fortune, or fame.”

There’s a temptation to ignore pain, which is a symptom of an underlying difficulty, something in you that needs to be addressed. The strategies for avoidance and denial are varied and often involve an addiction or compulsion of some kind; maybe you drink frequently or spend hours on mindless Internet browsing. But the problems don’t go away. The call for change and growth persists, even when it goes unanswered. How long can you avoid change or pretend that everything can stay the way it is?

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?