On Becoming a Person – Dr. Carl R. Rogers
“The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.”
As I approached this text in an earlier point of my life, I had thought of it as being like a “self-help” book. This initially led to some feelings of disappointment as I had desired answers not homework. What didn’t help was I had already been processing a heavy relapse with depression and agoraphobia. I was in a mental space where I couldn’t possibly at that time understand what Rogers was attempting to extrapolate. However, this is where I must state that this book remains a profound alteration to my perception of what it means to live a fulfilling life. It was through reading it a second time that the interpretations of Rogers’s concepts of self-actualization and self-awareness allowed for the deepest and most insightful introspection within my own internal monologues. This book for me was the baby-steps to acknowledging myself as being valuable and giving myself the allowance to wonderfully be myself despite how heavily it breaks away from social conformity.
The text may seem like a self-help book as Rogers’s writing repeats itself and such it may give the reader the idea that they’re in need of a change. This book is notably repetitive; I would suggest that the reader allow themselves to skip around as within the text Rogers is continuously repeating himself through-out multiple reports that argue the same conditions. It is with this reminder that the book is written almost entirely through a collection of unpublished reports, presentations, clinical interviews, and empirical clinical studies that Rogers is utilizing to capture and give light to his subjective experiences and findings. This is why Rogers purposely conveys that his book could not be a self-help book as he is enunciating that these experiences and ideas that are true to him will not necessarily apply to every single individual. It is with his style of writing that the reader gets to experience the warmth and regards of Rogers as he conveys his ideas of what it means to be human.
“Could I open myself to the phenomena of therapy freshly, naively? Could I let the totality of my experience be as effective a tool as it might potentially be, or would my biases prevent me from seeing what was there? I could only go ahead and make the attempt.” Through this clinical lens the reader is led through Rogers’s journey through his life as he gives his perspective of his developmental approaches to both psychotherapy and the acquisition of personality.
The text divides itself into both sections and chapters. Following this pattern where each section focuses on specific moments in Rogers’s clinical history. Within these segments we get the personal history of Rogers, psychotherapy as he views it, the process of becoming a person, and the philosophy of how a human becomes oneself in a nation thrashed by social conformity. This is not about fixing oneself but instead acknowledging oneself. In a client-centered therapeutic environment the purpose is for there to be no authority coming from the clinician. The clinician is simply there, as himself, accepting anything that comes his way.
Dr. Carl Rogers is the first psychologist to restructure psychotherapy into a new and foundational approach. Humanistic psychology is the approach where at its core the clinician is most attentive to the client’s perspectives and experience. A more commonly known example of humanistic psychology is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid. Rogers plays a role in the creation of humanistic theories as he expresses that his client-centered theory revolves around three core conditions of congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathy.
The idea of congruence focuses on how genuine and transparent the clinician can be in the moment; “his words are in line with his feelings rather than the two being discrepant.” Rogers’ concept of congruence focusing directly on the clinician having an authentic respect for their client.
It is through the notion of unconditional positive regard that the reader is given Rogers’ attitudes towards what a client is deserving of, expressing that clinicians need to provide this warmth, caring, liking, and genuine interests in the client. Rogers enunciates this condition heavily by describe that “It involves the therapist’s genuine willingness for the client to be whatever feeling that is going on in him (the client) at that moment, –fear, confusion, pain, pride, anger, hatred, love, courage, or awe. It means that the therapist cares for the client, in a non-possessive way. It means that he (the clinician) prizes the client in a total rather than a conditional way.” The therapeutic relationship that Rogers is expressing is without possession; there are zero requirements for the client to be given a validating sense of worth. It is a clinician accepting their patient as they are, for all their flaws, no matter how negative.
The concept is about extending empathy to truly explore the client’s world as seen from their perspective on the inside. This theory requires that the clinician has a sense of understanding for the client and has reflections that fit the client’s mood and expressions. The purpose of this being to remove the stigmatized idea that people need to be cured from their troubles.
Rogers’s therapeutic work is well pieced together when he extends his clinical interviews with a woman given the pseudonym of Mrs. Oak. She was looking for counseling due to having difficult marital and familial relationships. That is where over the course of 60-odd sessions her own story of coming to know herself is documented. These interviews show Mrs. Oak breaking herself away from the shackles of the belief that she was inherently bad as she believed that the world had cheated on her life. Mrs. Oak recognizes and rejects the societal stigma that one must hide their emotions; instead, she finds the beauty of a child being allowed to cry. “Our society pushes us around and we’ve lost it… and I keep going back to my feelings about children. Well, maybe they’re richer than we are. Maybe we—it’s something we’ve lost in the process of growing up.” Mrs. Oak, while sobbing, comes to the self-actualization that her bitterness was originally covering up deep-seated emotions. It is with this self-actualization that she begins to truly talk about herself in a light where she isn’t selfish about caring for herself. “I’ve covered it up with so much bitterness, which in turn I had to cover up… it’s as though I were looking within myself at all kinds of—nerve endings and bits of things that have been sort of mashed” This is an absolute eureka moment for Rogers as he recognizes this as being the true therapeutic work occurring in the relationship between clinician and client.
To become oneself in the Rogerian fashion is to “take off the mask and lose the façade.” The clients are acknowledging themselves instead of moving away hesitantly to a self that they’re not. It is a means of breaking from societal conformity and allowing themselves to be free in any way as they wished. Rogers puts this idea of autonomy as “He is free—to become himself or hide behind a façade: to move forward or to retrogress; to behave in ways which are destructive of self and others, or in ways which are enhancing; quite literally free to live or die.” It allows the client to move away from people-pleasing behaviors and moving towards self-direction. The hope being that the client approaches the realization that they can move in any direction that they so desire. To put it simply it is having an openness to experiencing life, being more open to their feelings both positive and negative. It is through the investigation of changes in self-concept that one also begins to act in the nature that they’re wanting. These clinical interviews then break off into Rogers’s further developments and added research that are expressed as a means of continuing to solidify the effectiveness of client-centered theory in psychotherapy.
In my appreciation for this book, I recognize that I found this text deeply formative for person who I am today. I still would heavily recommend the reader give the text a chance despite how dry the text may appear. Additionally, it is deeply important to me as Dr. Rogers is among the clinicians who truly pioneered the humanistic psychological field, transforming psychotherapy into what it is today. Therapy as we know it would be entirely different. Rogers walks the readers through his theories in action with multiple clinical interviews, all of which have fairly positive results like Mrs. Oaks. Rogers gives the reader the concept of living without the shackles that come from having the fear of judgment from others. This text is full of rich empirical resources that Rogers expresses as “the facts are friendly” when it comes to the validity of his theory of psychotherapy and personality. It is through these texts that we can enrich ourselves with the idea that “when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
