On Becoming a Person

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This can be challenging, especially when the client's behavior or attitudes may be contrary to the therapist's personal values or beliefs.

As the therapy progresses, Rogers argues, the individual will more and more come to feel that he sets his own standards to live by, that he determines his own values, and that he has the ability to choose his own direction in life. To illustrate this point, let's say you're a teenager who feels inadequate because you've never been able to play sports well. And the job of a psychotherapist should be that: to listen attentively and pass no judgment over his patients, thus creating a safe environment wherein one can really get in touch with his true self. Hostile emotions are simply “the frustration of more basic impulses for love and security and belonging”. 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.

Once again – unnecessarily complicated; let us rephrase it in Rogers’ words: “If I accept the other person as something fixed, already diagnosed and classified, already shaped by his past, then I am doing my part to confirm this limited hypothesis.

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.In my clients and in myself I find that when life is richest and most rewarding it is a flowing process. Buber says in a paragraph quoted (and edited) by Carl Rogers: “Confirming means… accepting the whole potentiality of the other… I can recognize in him, know in him, the person he has been… created to become… I confirm him in myself, and then in him, in relation to this potentiality that … can now be developed, can evolve. We mainly use Royal Mail Tracked 48 Service for goods which weight less then 2kg, all other goods will be delivered by a Courier. We will process the refund due to you as soon as possible and, in any case within thirty (30) days of the day we confirm via e-mail that you are entitled to a refund for defective goods. I find I am at my best when I can let the flow of my experience carry me, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals of which I am but dimly aware.