I have come to feel that the more fully the individual is understood and accepted, the more he tends to drop the false fronts with which he has been meeting life, and the more he tends to move in a direction which is forward.” Psychological research has shown that if the evidence of our senses runs contrary to our picture of self, then that evidence is distorted. In other words, we cannot see all that our senses report, but only the things which fit the picture we have.” One aspect of this transformation is that they begin to 'own' all aspects of their selves, to allow totally contradictory feelings (one client admitted she both loved and hated her parents on occasion) and yet be OK about it. Rogers' dictum was 'the facts are always friendly' when it comes to sorting one's emotions and feelings; the real danger is in denying what we feel. As each feeling we are ashamed of comes to the surface, we realize it will not kill us to allow it to exist. Someone who fully owns all their thoughts and emotions will not always be conventional or conforming, but we can rely on them to be a real person - paradoxically, a socialized person. It is the people not in touch with all aspects of themselves that are the potential destroyers of the social fabric. Even without trying really hard, we guess that you can easily recall a situation in which a long talk with a friend made you feel better, or, to use the wrong word for the sake of simplicity, normal.

Carl Rogers - On Becoming A Person - Tom Butler-Bowdon Carl Rogers - On Becoming A Person - Tom Butler-Bowdon

A growing openness to experience – they move away from defensiveness and have no need for subception (a perceptual defense that involves unconsciously applying strategies to prevent a troubling stimulus from entering consciousness). Contemporary psychology derives largely from the experimental laboratory, or from Freudian theory. It is preoccupied with minute aspects of animal and human behaviour, or with the mentally ill. 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 interest of such a psychology is in the production of harmoniously mature individuals, given that we all have qualities and possibilities infinitely capable of development. Successful development makes us more flexible in relationships, more creative, and less open to suggestion and control. Optimal development, referred to below in proposition 14, results in a certain process rather than static state. Rogers describes this as the good life, where the organism continually aims to fulfill its full potential. He listed the characteristics of a fully functioning person (Rogers 1961):He is more able to live fully in and with each and all of his feelings and reactions. He makes increasing use of all his organic equipment to sense, as accurately as possible, the existential situation within and without. He makes use of all of the information his nervous system can thus supply, using it in awareness, but recognizing that his total organism may be, and often is, wiser than his awareness.He is more able to permit his total organism to function freely in all its complexity in selecting, from the multitude of possibilities, that behavior which in this moment of time will be most generally and genuinely satisfying. He is able to put more trust in his organism in this functioning, not because it is infallible, but because he can be fully open to the consequences of each of his actions and correct them if they prove to be less than satisfying. Additionally, Rogers is known for practicing "unconditional positive regard," which is defined as accepting a person "without negative judgment of .... [a person's] basic worth." Learner-centred education

Carl R. Rogers Quotes (Author of On Becoming a Person) Carl R. Rogers Quotes (Author of On Becoming a Person)

And, according to the fathers of psychology, there’s something disturbing deep within each and every one of us; and it is a psychotherapist’s job to help an individual either to do away with these dark impulses (Freud) or to embrace them and incorporate them in a healthier way in his being (Jung). Carl Rogers applied his experiences with adult therapy to the education process and developed the concept of learner-centered teaching. He had the following five hypotheses regarding learner-centered education: In his training as a psychologist, Rogers naturally absorbed the idea that he controlled the relationship with the client, and that it was his job to analyze and treat the patient as if he or she was an object. But he came to the conclusion that it was more effective to actually let the patient, or client, guide the direction of the process. This was the beginning of his famous client-centered (or person-centered) form of therapy. If you remember well, Sartre’s main idea was rather simply formulated: in humans, “existence precedes essence,” i.e., there is no blueprint on how a human should look like (essence), so we are in charge of the meaning of our own lives (existence).Carl Rogers is widely credited as one of the founders of the humanist (client-centered approach) to psychology. So as to help a patient (or a lover or a child or a friend), it is the job of a psychotherapist (or a partner or a parent or a colleague) to create a safe environment. P]ut in another way … I have not found it to be helpful or effective in my relationships with other people to try to maintain a facade; to act in one way on the surface when I am experiencing something quite different underneath. … [M]ost of the mistakes I make in personal relationships, most of the times in which I fail to be of help to other individuals, can be accounted for in terms of the fact that I have, for some defensive reason, behaved in one way at the surface level, while in reality my feelings run in a contrary direction.