hi welcome back to humanistic psychology here at the university of west georgia this video will be the second one in a series on carl rogers book on becoming a person in the first video what we basically did was we went over what i think of as carl rogers greatest hits the things that he was most known for most famous for especially internationally and number one on that list has to do with client-centered therapy also known as person-centered therapy number two on that list probably has to do with unconditional positive regard and its relation to therapeutic theory and praxis uh at any rate uh in this video our goal is to start tracking in parallel with your reading assignment from the book on becoming a person and as you might recall from the first video the very first chapter in your reading assignment is oddly enough chapter one so uh what we're going to do in this video is go through not the entirety of chapter one because i want to move fairly slowly at first and then pick up speed as we go on once you start to get the hang of it probably we can speed up but in the beginning i want to go pretty slowly and methodically and perhaps even plottingly slightly but before we actually dig into that here's the hat of the day so to keep my hair under control i'm having a hard time getting haircuts in the midst of the coronavirus apocalypse so it's a uh atlanta braves hat uh we here at west georgia are about uh 50 miles west of atlanta not too far from the alabama border at any rate there's your hat of the day to keep my hair under control mostly all right so chapter one is entitled somewhat agromatically this is me so uh basically they're going to be two things going on in chapter one so the first half of chapter one has a whole bunch of autobiographical details uh of carl rogers life and his trying to get this settled here uh his uh youth which he uh grew up in wisconsin probably ate a lot of cheese and he's telling us a whole lot of details about his childhood and high school years and college years and uh what happened and at first it's probably a little bit of a puzzlement because when you first pick up on becoming a person you think well here's like a famous book about psychotherapy from the point of view of humanistic psychology by a famous probably the most famous humanistic psychologist carl rogers so you're expecting to read about psychotherapy and instead in the first half of chapter one you're hearing about all of these details about his personal life his personal history and the question the obvious question is why like why would he go on at some length about all of that now if you've understood so far the theme of holism within humanistic psychology the answer is probably obvious but in case it's not obvious here it is it's the uh the idea that you never come to insights about life or about what psychology is about or what psychotherapy is about that are somehow separable from your personal perspective from what you've experienced from the long historical path that has brought you to this point in time wherein you think that insights a b and c are the most relevant one so uh the question is not whether that's going to be true that's pretty much inevitable that we give voice to truths and insights and thinking and so on from the point of view of where life has carried us thus far that's not up for debate so the only real question is whether we're going to own that okay so one way of viewing the first half of chapter one is that it's carl rogers attempt to own his perspective and to let the reader know a little bit about where these theories are coming from not only with respect to his uh capacity to have insights in the present time but also with respect to the historical trajectory that carried him to the present time so that's basically what it's about his it's his attempt to uh be true to the holistic animating spirit of humanistic psychology in that regard and consequently to let us know where his life path has taken him and the various twists and turns and so on but that's not what i want to focus on with respect to chapter one because our treatment of on becoming a person is going to be much more focused on what psychotherapy from this humanistic psychological point of view looks like so the parts that i really want to dig into are the ones that do more of that so i'm going to skip ahead a little bit now the second half of chapter one consists basically of two lists so the hopefully in this video we'll get down the first list of what he calls significant learnings that occurred to him throughout his personal historical process okay and i'm going to go through these kind of slowly and unpack them that's going to be the task for today because here's the thing about carl rogers carl rogers is very easy to read like the the pages of the book almost turn themselves as you're reading it but the trick is to realize how deep what hit what he's saying actually is because he has a very simple and straightforward of our way of articulating himself so the trick is not in getting through the sentences the trick is in glimpsing the hidden depth because he can be deceptively deceptively profound at points so quote okay first of his significant learnings on page 16 of the book he says in my relationships with persons so he's speaking in a real general way not specifically about clients in my relationships with persons i have found that it does not help in the long run to act as though i were something that i am not okay so let's reread that in my relationships with persons i have found that it does not help in the long run to act as if i i were something that i'm really not okay so really uh what he's talking about is basically the theme of being phony or fake at some level or uh not being true to ourselves in the way that we relate to other people perhaps also to ourselves too so the thing is like to be a little bit fake as we move throughout our day has a kind of utility if you think about it why because it can get us through what would otherwise be sort of difficult moments in our day you know when someone asks you how you're doing they don't necessarily want a long and involved truthful heartfelt answer to that question right maybe every now and then they do but most the time not like what they want is it's basically you know just a kind of um a linguistic device that we use uh as a kind of social lubricant like hey how you doing fine you're doing all right yeah yeah and sort of move on that sort of thing so um in a way you can see that is a little bit fake or a little bit phony but it has its use right so uh in the short term it can get us through a lot of moments in our lives you know in a relatively easy way and as a utility as i'm arguing so uh the trick is in the phrase in the long run okay so he says in the long run it does not help to act as though i were something that i am not in the short run it can work and it can be something desirable to do that but in the long run his view of therapy is about the long run okay it's not about saying the facile thing that'll get you through the moment it's about the long run of transformation why the long run because human transformation of the type he's looking for which is basically holistic transformation it's not like flipping a light switch on or off all right it like tends to take time to enter into the deep latencies of process and transformation okay so uh this tendency to be a little bit fake a little bit phony uh he says it's mostly about uh being defensive you know like um we're trying to protect ourselves from other people so we say sort of the nice easy thing that'll get us through rather than being honest rather than saying what we really think or really feel it's a way of defending ourselves a lot of the time uh from other people but also from ourselves from our own uh judgments of ourselves because if we have to really be honest and speak the truth we also have to be honest and speak the truth with respect to ourselves so it's a defensive function with respect to others also with respect to ourselves but the big point is with respect to psychotherapy this is not going to be the paradigm this is not going to be sufficient because he's after change in the long run not the easy facile thing to say in the short term okay so let's go to the next one number two i find i am more effective when i can listen acceptantly to myself and can be myself okay so basically he's talking a bit about self-honesty okay being true to ourselves you know which is if you study psychology for any length of time you probably get an appreciation for how difficult that actually is it seems like really simple and straightforward at first actually it's a lot trickier and a lot more challenging than it seems to be at first to be actually honest with ourselves now here's a kind of paradox is sort of creeping up in this when he's talking about when i can listen acceptantly to ourselves no notice by the way uh the very conditional way he has of saying this like when he can what does that mean that means that maybe sometimes he does this and sometimes he does not but he's saying when he is able to do this he's more effective as a psychotherapist probably as a human being more generally okay but he's talking about listening acceptantly to himself it's about accepting who we are both with respect to strengths and weaknesses okay so both with respect to the light upbeat constructive parts of who we are but also the dark destructive parts of who we are like the challenge is more to accept the latter right most for most people i guess unless you're a serial killer then it might be the other way around but uh he's talking about uh self-acceptance uh but the paradox that's creeping up is this well you know like if you're more effective when you're able to listen acceptantly to yourself well what about like aspirations and wanting to change and wanting to grow beyond yourself and all of that because if the whole action is about accepting yourself that seems to sort of uh foreclose the possibility of aspiring to be better and deeper and so on like if you've thoroughly accepted yourself where's the motivation to change all right and here he notes a paradox and i would say that this paradox that he makes note of to me is uh probably on my list of top five definitely the top ten uh insights that i've gleaned from psychology throughout my life uh possibly in the top five but here's the paradox and i'm gonna quote him because it's he says it so beautifully when i accept myself as i am then i change we cannot move away from what we are until we thoroughly accept what we are okay i'm going to read that again because once again rogers can be like deceptively simple so he says when i accept myself as i am then i change we cannot move away from what we are until we thoroughly accept what we are okay so um real change isn't about trying to delude yourself into thinking that you're better than you actually are in other words uh sometimes that's known as spiritual bypassing when you know we sort of instantaneously try to promote ourselves to some sort of elevated spiritual level or a high state of evolution or a high state of morality or something like that without being willing to do all the hard work it actually takes to arrive there in any genuine sense that's part of why acceptance of what we are is necessary to changing what we are because otherwise we fall prey to this tendency towards spiritual bypassing and just sort of deluding ourselves into thinking we've changed that we've evolved when in reality we have not so the paradox is that we change as a function of what we accept not as a function of what we resist and pull so hard against like we don't want to realize stuff about ourselves and we're in denial and we got to maintain our heavy bastions of denial like all the damn time that just reinforces and strengthens our problems okay that keeps us stuck so what we resist persists okay what we resist about ourself persists when we accept ourselves as we are on the other hand then all of a sudden we're loosened up enough and free enough to move past whatever it is and that's the paradox of it so we change think about this also socially you know because a lot across the social terrain people often have the idea that you know we need to sort of uh forcefully ramrod change down the throat of our world because you know our world isn't good enough well you know maybe our world changes more as a function of how we accept it and maybe ultimately how we love it you know we don't for the most part we don't change as a fun when someone tries to ramrod their idea down our gullet you know or their ideology down our throat for the most part that doesn't change us what that does is it makes uh it pisses us off and then makes us even even more resistant to change you know so the idea is that the world changes and we are cells change more much more as a function of acceptance than as a function of some kind of forceful attitude or something like that and then to put the icing on the cake in this one he goes that's also when relationships become real whoa that's something interesting so you know like when are your human relationships real as opposed to sort of fakie or phony or something like that well his from his point of view real relationships are about change they're about helping each other change and grow and accepting each other and understanding each other well enough so that it can invite this process this paradoxical process of changing as a function of what we accept and maybe as a function of what we love ultimately about each other so our hatred and our animosity for the most part doesn't change the world and it doesn't change other people our judgmentalism doesn't change the world and it doesn't change other people things change when we're seen when we're understood when we're accepted and that's a really different paradigm this is why like i said like i number this in in maybe the top five um insights that i've gleaned throughout my years and as a student of psychology and philosophy and all that kind of stuff okay so that's when relationships become real real relationships tend to change rather than to remain static and stuck okay so you know if you ask yourself as young people probably are sort of investigating the whole realm of relationships love relationships probably most obviously but friend relationships too like is the relationship real or not like if you need a litmus test well is it mostly about helping each other grow and transform and enter into life's deeper possibilities or is it mostly about remaining complacent and stuck and rigid you know and if it's the latter maybe the relationship isn't quite as real or as deep as you think it might be just a thought you can sort of experiment with this okay so number three i found it of enormous value when i can permit myself to understand another person sorry i sort of stumbled there so let me re-read it i found it of enormous value when i can permit myself to understand another person once again notice the conditional way he's putting it when i can permit myself sometimes he can permit himself to understand notice also that the language of permission it's about a kind of allowing not a trying to force an understanding but allowing an understanding and sometimes he can do this and sometimes he can't the reason why the conditional statements are important and there's going to be more of them as we go on is that he's problematizing what we might otherwise just take for granted that we naturally understand each other well it's going to turn out that understanding is actually very rare you know usually we think we're understanding each other but in reality what we're doing is judging each other and then mistaking our judgments for actual understanding but we'll talk about that in greater detail later maybe that's just a teaser so uh when i can permit myself he's underscoring the difficulty of it so he's problematizing what we probably take for granted that we're going around our damn day always understanding other people and he's saying uh no you're not you think you are but you're not really so we don't usually understand each other usually what we're doing is judging each other we judge each other by the way since we're starting to talk about this in all kinds of ways some of them are reasonable and accurate and a lot of them are unreasonable and inaccurate a lot of them are automatic you know it's a very natural human thing to go around judging each other so we judge each other in all kinds of ways like you know what another person looks like physically uh how old another person is what race another person is how the other person dresses whether they uh look sort of a well-off or not you know what kind of car they other people drive what kind of house they live in uh the kind of parties they go to the kind of people a lot of it boils down to sort of high school dynamics really but it's a very human thing throughout all of our lives so the question is not whether we're going to be judging each other because that's very human the question is whether we're going to make a space for doing something other than judging each other okay and the thing that he's going to he's going to contrast judgment with is understanding okay so usually uh we're judging each other and not understanding each other so like if it feels like in your life that hardly anyone understands you hardly anyone gets you hardly anyone ever really sees you there's a reason for that and the reason is because we're almost never understanding each other it's not just you you're not necessarily an anomaly in the world because of that you know because the fact is that understanding is very rare in our world and the reason why is because judgment is very common in our world and usually we're mistaking the two okay so genuine judgment is rare it's rare partly because you see when when you really understand someone you're also open enough and vulnerable enough to be understood by the other person so there's a kind of risk in genuine understanding because it's a two-way street sort of like you know if you look someone in the eyes they can look at in and you see into them they can also look and see into you at the same time understanding works much the same way and you know most of us have a kind of uh you know kind of defense mechanism about being really seen you know on one hand we hope that the world sees us for who we are but on the other hand we're scared as hell of it you know it's a kind of tension or a kind of paradox with respect to that so in genuine understanding as a consequence of that both parties are open to change all right so the idea here is that genuine understanding is powerful enough and deep enough to actually change us okay you know like when you're genuinely seen and genuinely heard and you genuinely see and genuinely hear another person too that experience is powerful enough to actually alter us psychologically so both in this case both therapist and client all right so number four i found it enriching to open channels whereby others can communicate their feelings their private perceptual worlds to me okay so opening channels to what we normally keep private this is part of what psychotherapy is about psychotherapy for the most part is not just talking about stuff that you would talk about any with other people anyhow all right it's about talking about stuff that you probably normally don't want to talk about with other people okay so it's about opening up a kind of dangerous conversation or by dangerous what i mean is it feels dangerous to the client and also to the therapist too because you're going where social customs uh more or less prohibit you from going you know like taboos and you know it's it's sort of like to be a uh to be a therapist is in a way a little bit like to be a little kid that points out the obvious you know like a little kid like if a little kid sees someone uh in the supermarket with let's say a big wart on his face a little kid will go up and point and say how come you got a big wart on your face and at that point usually the parents are mortified it's like no junior you you don't go saying things like that well being a psychotherapist is in a way about recovering that capacity to name the obvious all right which most of most of us have deeply buried you know so it's a it's a really strange kind of conversation a therapeutic conversation partly because we're opening ourselves up to this kind of dangerous private somewhat forbidden communication and that's part of why working on an atmosphere of safety is so damn important especially in the early stages of psychotherapy like you have to establish an atmosphere of safety because without an atmosphere of safety probably your clients not going to trust you if your client does not trust you the client is probably not going to go where the client needs to go because odds are where the client needs to go is going to feel dangerous and scary and weird okay it's going to be intimidating so cultivating an atmosphere of safety is uh cinequa known as the ancient romans would say so what that means is required pretty much without which not literally okay so uh opening channels to this kind of conversation and this requires a sensitivity of understanding okay so here's the thing about sensitivity all right not everyone has it in equal measure surprise maybe you've noticed this in life okay you know some people are much more tuned in and much more sensitive to what other people are going through and other people are not okay so if you're not particularly sensitive to what other people are going through becoming i would say becoming a psychotherapist generally and definitely becoming a psychotherapist of this persuasion is going to be rough can you cultivate sensitivity as you work to become a better psychotherapist yes you can you can become better at it that's true of most things in life you're kind of gifted in a certain way but it's also a matter of improving whatever gift it is you have but if you're sort of gifted with uh this weird blessing slash curse of being very sensitive to what other people are going through um then and you work at developing it even more well now you're really sort of running on all cylinders as it were with respect to psychotherapy okay so uh an atmosphere of safety again okay we've said this before but this is part of what makes an accepting climate so important because if the client starts to sense that he or she is being judged guess what that's not going to be conducive to an atmosphere of safety because they're probably going to be worried about like whether they're being judged negatively especially you know so when we think we're being judged by someone else that does not make us feel safe that makes us feel threatened in some way all right so that's not going to be very conducive to a therapeutic relationship and accepting climate a genuinely accepting climate now here's the thing about acceptance for most of us it's easy to accept other people when they're doing what we like anyhow okay so when they're being whatever let's say friendly and honest and forthright and expressive that's easy for us to accept the challenge isn't there the challenge is when they're doing and saying things that we don't particularly approve of all right so when they're being lying let's say or they're being immature or they're being sort of egoistic and boastful or being just sort of argumentative and abrasive like when they're when they're doing all those kinds of things that's where acceptance becomes challenging so acceptance it turns out is a also a kind of skill a little bit like sensitivity all right so the ability to accept other people and receive them as they are without them first needing to say you know only things that you find appropriate all the time or that you you know what i'm saying or uh that you sort of like you know you know like if they're good enough people please or then you'll accept them well guess what most your clients are not going to be that way most your clients are going to be suffering and suffering very deeply in some really nasty ways okay so you're not going to be dealing for the most part with the nicer brighter sides of human nature you're going to be dealing with the suffering difficult sides of human nature 95 of the time as a therapist all right so number five i found it highly rewarding when once again notice the conditional language when something happens i found it highly rewarding when i can accept another person once again god that sounds so damn simple doesn't it turns out to be a lot harder in practice partly for the reasons we just got done talking about you know because if you're really sensitive to other people you're gonna notice how they're bearers of darkness all right you know even people that put on like a nice happy face all the time like oh my happy face you know they're bearers of darkness and i'm trying to make a face where you can almost begin to feel that and a creepy face i'm trying to make a creepy professorial face for you so that you can sort of maybe almost feel like in your gut like at a visceral level how like you know some sometimes probably a lot of times you know the mass we put on that everything's also wonderful and happy can very quickly disguise our inner darkness and difficulty anyhow um when i can accept another person when i can so this is actually accepting other people is harder than it sounds like at first it's a little bit like understanding so in the previous item he was problematizing understanding now he's problematizing acceptance it's much more difficult than it seems to be at first especially in a psychotherapeutic context where you're dealing with pain and nastiness a lot however acceptance of course is i'm trying to make it sound even at this early juncture in the second video i'm trying to make it sound uh pretty crucial to psychotherapy because it definitely is especially according to this school of psychotherapy there are many different schools of psychotherapy so this is just one okay the other thing in number five he's talking about uh finding it highly rewarding so he's getting at sort of the payoff of being a psychotherapist because if you follow what i've said like a few minutes ago that psychotherapy for the most part is about dealing with pain and difficulty and like tragic history and suffering history and injustice of various kinds and nastiness and so on uh you can start to wonder like well why would i ever want to do that for a job and you may you may think it may occur to you that well you know i guess i could handle that yeah you can handle it for an hour but it's a different story when you're doing it full time every week you know it requires a certain kind of endurance for sure and not everyone has that kind of endurance so what's the reward okay so big vocabulary word it's in big block letters in your notes an instant going to be an intrinsic reward intrinsic means it's internal or inherent to the activity itself okay so for some people there's a reward that is inherent to the activity of assisting another human being as they try to find their way down life's road okay they try to find their way in life like being of assistance to a person who's struggling with that some people find that inherently rewarding and what he's part of what he's saying is that that's the real reward of being a psychotherapist and yeah you know like the the more extrinsic or external type rewards are there too yes you can have a professional uh career doing it you can be pretty reasonably well paid at any rate but if you really want to make money there are easier ways of making money like well you know i used to write software professionally so i can tell you that if you have a knack for writing software and for mathematics um it's way easier if your goal is to make money to be a software engineer okay i mean it's not even close in terms of you know the scale of pay and all that so uh well if maybe now you're turning off the video but uh so let's uh let's speak to the people that are remaining the others have decided they're gonna learn java or something like that okay so the real point of being a psychotherapist is the intrinsic activity of it because unless you feel that intrinsic reward you're probably not going to last and the reason why is because there's just too much heavy weight in the activity of assisting other people with their psychological suffering it's just going to wear on you too much and you're not going to be able to endure doing it unless you find it intrinsically rewarding at some point so even though i realize at this point in your process your undergraduates mostly so um but even at this early point you may wonder about yourself and your own personal makeup and you know sort of like what you really like in life and what you don't really like in life because all that's going to figure in to the formation of your career eventually and you know if it doesn't figure in probably you're going to end up in a midlife crisis in about 20 years and discover that you went down the wrong path in life not to terrorize you too much at this early juncture in your career but i think it is salutary for you to think at least a little bit and understand yourself a little bit so that you end up not having a misfire and wasting a whole bunch of time and money that's my opinion i don't know if wasting time and money is your thing then go for it but anyhow let's get on to the last item of this list because uh the video is already getting long enough so number six the more i am open to the realities in me and in the other person the less do i find myself wishing to rush in and quote fix things okay so the desire like if part of your sort of desire to be a therapist is to be a kind of mechanic of people's souls to rush in and fix things you know it's like well i think you got like a compression problem in your number three psychic cylinder and you know that's why your engine is misfiring and i think you might need a new head gasket kind of a metaphor like um from roger's point of view that is actually uh that's not a good sign if your primary desire is to go around fixing people okay partly it's not a good sign because when you're seeing your clients as broken and in need of being fixed there's kind of a judgment already there and we've already sort of said that well judgment is going to be problematic like really what you're up to is acceptance you can accept another human being and encounter another human being that is much better that's a much better posture than automatically judging your clients as broken and consequently in need of being fixed somehow like you might need to get your dog fixed so the other thing is you know seeing psychotherapy that way and seeing ourselves as fixers of broken people can easily be for our benefit more than for the client's benefit okay so seeing the whole project that way why can that be for the therapist benefit because most of us have a desire to feel like uh we're in control we know what we're doing we have like a definite agenda we know what's going on and all of that kind of stuff well you know if if you're sort of consumed by those sorts of desires um then seeing yourself as a fixer of other human beings can very quickly become more about trying to allay your own neurosis rather than helping the client move through theirs okay so a little reversal in the dynamic okay now i wanted to uh read a quote about this one a a longer quote so maybe we'll end the video with this longer quote it's going to be on page 21 and 22 about this point about like getting past the whole desire to fix people that'll go fix people yeah maybe you should fix yourself first all right so here's what he says starting on 21 near the bottom of the page last paragraph indentation he goes the more i am open to the realities in me and in the other person the less do i find myself wishing to rush in to quote fix things ding as i try to listen to myself and the experiencing going on in me and the more i try to extend that same listening attitude to another person the more respect i feel for the complex processes of life so i become less and less inclined to hurry in to fix things to set goals to mold people to manipulate and push them in the way that i would like them to go i'm much more content simply to be myself and to let the other person be himself i know very well that this must seem like a strange almost an oriental point of view what is life for if we are not going to do things to people what is life for if we're not going to mold them to our purpose what is life for if we're not going to teach them the things that we think they should learn what is life for if we're not going to make them think and feel as we do how can anyone hold such an inactive point of view as the one i'm expressing i'm sure that attitudes such as these must be a part of the reaction of many of you 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'm willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person the more change seems to be stirred up it is a very paradoxical thing that to the degree that each one of us is willing to be himself then he finds not only himself changing but he finds that other people to whom he relates are also changing at least this is a very vivid part of my experience and one of the deepest things i think i've learned in my personal and professional life okay so once again that paradox i described earlier that we change mostly as a function of what we accept about ourselves how we change when we allow ourselves to be what we are then what we are tends to change okay and that is a tricky and uh you know paradox i think in our age especially part of the reason why uh it's it's tricky is because for the most part i think most of us have the idea that things only change when we force them to change okay otherwise they don't change that force we've got a force and ramrod got a ramrod change down the throat of the world you know and roger's insight is that's a complete illusion sorry thank you for playing you'll have to settle for miss congeniality because that's a complete illusion like change for the most part occurs when we are what we are when we allow ourselves to be what we are when we allow the world to be what it is when we're able to accept it and who knows perhaps even love it okay so that's the first half of chapter one next video second half of chapter one have a good one take care bye bye