On Becoming a Person

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By this I mean that he does not simply accept the client when he is behaving in certain ways, and disapprove of him when he behaves in other ways. Rogers gives the example of a teacher who is introverted but decides to become extroverted in her instructions.

For personal growth, I believe a better question you should ask yourself is: “Which potentialities within me do I most wish to spend my limited time cultivating, developing, and actualizing in this world? In conclusion, Carl Rogers was a psychologist who believed that everyone had the potential to heal themselves. The result was a revolutionary way of dealing with a person's issues that overturned the traditional psychologist-patient model, and which had broader implications for successful human interaction. Carl Rogers believed that humans in their daily lives are creative and active people who stay in the present and are concerned with situations, interpersonal relationships and perceptions, only in the present. Registered address: Unit 5, Vulcan House Business Centre, Vulcan Road, Leicester, LE5 3EF, United kingdom.But there are rebels, of whom the author counts himself as one, along with Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow and Rollo May, who feel that psychology and psychiatry should be aiming higher, and be more concerned with growth and potentiality in man. The same employee with sufficient conditions in life would also feel more psychological distress at the time of losing his employment or breaking up with a friend as compared to a person who has never experienced a rich, full life.

Through their advice, they were trying to get me to act in a way that would affirm the life choices that they've made.

If all this post achieves is for you to consider picking up this book and getting inspired, my mission is accomplished. And then Rogers realized something else: whenever he had come across a problem in his life, what helped and healed him wasn’t a talk with someone acting from an above-position, but a conversation with one who is a peer in every sense of the word. I have found that when I have trusted some inner non-intellectual sensing, I have discovered wisdom in the move. Consequently, it’s the job of a psychotherapist to listen to his/her patient, rather than trying to fix him/her. By doing the latter, regular psychotherapists don’t understand the main of people’s problems: their inauthentic lives.

Wanted or unwanted, it doesn't matter, they'll keep littering your kitchen, so you may as well learn to live with them, and maybe, just maybe, you'll learn to form a constructive relationship with them. This stance allowed that person to be accepting of all their thoughts, and after a number of sessions they would heal themselves. Many people live in a frightening world of their own making; they desperately try to hold everything in place. Carl Rogers took these features of a good relationship and applied them to his work as a psychologist and counselor.

Rogers observes that below the level of the complaint, each person is really asking, “Who am I really? Thus to an increasing degree he becomes himself - not a facade of conformity to others, not a cynical denial of all feeling, nor a front of intellectual rationality, but a living, breathing, feeling, fluctuating process - in short, he becomes a person. And today's catch cry to 'live your passion' can also in part be traced back to Rogers' focus on living a life that expresses who we truly are.