being a fully functional person

Being a Fully Functional Person

Here is where the two books I am reading intersect in purpose. In Rituals of Healing: Using Imagery for Health and Wellness, the idea is to increase one's physical functionality. In On Becoming a Person, the idea is to increase one's mental and emotional functionality. So far, with the help of the first book, I have created a breathing routine, or ritual, which has helped me a lot with lower my stress and tension, as well as with my asthma problems (though it doesn't completely rid me of them). I still have yet to work on something for the chronic pain, which is a revelation in itself, since I had the underlying belief that taking care of the stress and lessening the fatigue would reduce the pain. So sometime this week, I will have to rethink my chronic pain.

Ever since my late twenties, I had often expressed the desire to be a fully function human being. But looking back, I'm not sure I really knew what I meant by that, outside of the wish to feel compentent and secure--and the ability to keep up on housework. And yet nothing I did seemed to be enough. Instead of feeling more human, I found myself feeling less and less human. Carl Rogers, based on his observation of his clients, defined being fully functional as "being the self one truly is". This means to accept that there are some things I am good at and some things that I am not good at. I have always understood to a point that I had to play with my strengths, and have even had some success with it.

However, looking over my past efforts, I approached them more as a problem in engineering, than a progression towards personhood. Instead of being more efficient, I might have been more successful if I questioned the "shoulds" more, fought the facades being placed on me in an effort to please and meeting the expectations of others. That might to make it easier to follow my own direction, with all the complexity that is me. That doesn't mean that I can ignore the expectation of others completely, but I can certainly be more picky as to which expectations I accept and those I don't.

Life is not a steady state. Years ago, I wrote the following mission statement for myself: "Everything deserves respect and an opportunity to develop itself to its fullest potential, including me. This can be achieved most effectively when the forces of our lives are in balance. Imbalance causes stress and a system in stress must compensate for that stress. This is the way of nature, whether it occurs in an ecosystem or a test tube or someone's life. My body and mind are ecosystems in themselves and need to be kept in balance. This balance is not a steady state, but a fluid, living thing that requires adjustments from time to time."

Becoming a Person

Becoming a Person

A summary by A. Doerr over Chapters 5, 6 & 7

 

[Yes, I am a few weeks late with this.  I have been reading the material, but not writing on it.  I will hopefully correct this oversight during the next few weeks.]

 

What does it mean to become a person?  Aren't we already a person because of our humanity?  While this makes sense logically, intuitively, most of us know that this isn't true.  For what every reason, many of us have experienced blocks to feeling that we are actually people and deserve to be considered as such.  The idea of taking "quiet pleasure in being" ourselves is a foreign and almost blasphemous concept, one often confused with pride and boastfulness.  Yet, there is a difference between the loudness of boasting and the quietness of acceptance--to accept that we have just as much right to exist as anything else in this universe.

 

According to Carl Rogers, the inner most core of a person is basically socialized, forward moving, rational and realistic.  But to get there, people must accept that they are human organisms, with the realistic ability to control themselves and socialize.  To quote Rogers, "There is no beast in man.  There is only man in man."  And when humans are less than fully human--when they deny various aspects of their experience--then there is reason to fear their behavior.  Such people cannot make adequate judgments because they have contorted their own data.

 

So, what are the traits of a fully emerged person, according to Carl Rogers?  First, an openness to experience.  This doesn't necessarily means to seek out new experiences, as it does to actually be open to what we are currently experiencing and seeing it without preconceived notions.  To take the situation as it is, without distorting it.  Second, trust in one's self.  To believe that we are capable to make correct choices and behave in a satisfying manner in a situation.  Third, to evaluate ourselves using an internal standard than to constantly compare ourselves to others.  This includes accepting responsibility for our actions.  Finally, to be willing to accept that we are always a work in progress and never a finished product.  We constantly flow with life and its events.  We don't jump from plateau to plateau.

 

To be able to achieve these traits, we have to move from being remote to our feelings to being able to accept them, even in ambiguity, as we feel them. We accept new experiences within their own existence, without imposing the structure of the past onto them.  We reconsider our mental constructs.  We are not threatened by other possibilities.

 

I personally believe that by lessening our frustrations created by incompatible self-perceptions, we lessen the stress that needs to be released and are more able to release it in a controlled manner that have it corrosively seep out our seams or blows up in our faces.

The Helping Environment

A Helping Relationship

 

For those who haven't heard of Carl Rogers, here's a summary of what research has found to be of the most help in counseling: That the client feels that his/her therapist is trustworthy, that the therapist tries to understand them, and that the therapist is being genuine with them.

Techniques and teaching methods alone do not bring about improvement. It's hard to trust the process, if you don't have faith in the person putting you through it. This is true for most relationships, even those that you may not consider personal. Take calling up customer service for help, for instance. If the representative doesn't seem to care about your problem or doesn't seem to understand, you're not likely to have much faith in what they tell you--especially, if like me, you normally find that this type of customer service representative is far more likely to tell you something that causes more harm than good. Not getting enough data will give diagnoses that may be very wrong and don't fit in with the other things the client is experiencing. It's hard to give sensitive information to someone whom you don't trust, even if you know intellectually you should. It's a matter of self-preservation.

But if one has the knowledge, they can tell you what's wrong. And knowing what's wrong is half the battle, right? To such a question, I answer, "Only if the diagnosis makes sense to the one it's being applied to." Though to be honest, I still believe that a diagnostician who doesn't have the client's trust is working under a handicap. Anyway, no diagnosis will help a client to make any significant change to their lifestyle if they don't comprehend it. I can't find my book right now, but I believe it is in John Bradshaw's Healing the Shame that Binds You where the author gives the example of a preschooler being reprimanded for riding their tricycle beyond the corner, after being told several times not to. While the parent was engage in rage, the terrified child looked up and asked, "What is a corner?" No one can follow instructions they can't understand.

Another situation that many people are probably more familiar with: someone is in a very abusive relationship, who really should leave, but doesn't--or if they do leave, they return to it after a while. Most people who have been on the outside looking in, often give up on the person, saying things like, "They want the abuse." "They're idiots." "They're just hopeless." However, what often happens is these people don't leave because they really cannot comprehend how to live differently. Sometimes financial or cultural issues keep them there. Sometimes they don't understand the help they can receive. However, some of them stay because of beliefs that the relationship will change if they just work hard enough at it, or love the person more, or that they are the ones at fault. These people can be pressured into leaving their abusive significant other, but they do it to please those pressuring them, not because they themselves believe the abuser is horrible. In fact, being insulting about the abuser is more than likely to bring out the protective response in them. As long as they see some hope in the relationship, they won't give it up easily. Only they can make that decision and make it stick. After all, if you are demanding them to get out of the relationship, you might appear just as bad as the abuser they are dealing with. That's not to say that you shouldn't tell them that there is something wrong, if they appear open to it. Nor am I saying that you shouldn't interfere if it becomes a matter of life and death. However, when all is said and done, only the person can finally cut those ties.

What has worked the best for me when in such a situation is to emotionally support the person in their decisions and let them know that I am there for them, even though I don't agree with them. Usually when they no longer feel pressured to defend the abuser or the relationship, they are able to make the decisions necessary for their own happiness and there are no "What if I had tried this or that?" regrets to contend with. When all is said and done, they need the support more than they need the problem labelled, though the label can help them to address the problem.

Grossly simplified: diagnosis is not the same as therapy. This is a particularly sore spot for me because as someone who intends to become certified as an art therapist, one of the greatest frustrations I have is getting people to understand that when I speak of doing art therapy, I am not talking about using the client's art to see what's wrong with them--I'm talking about the client using their art, especially the process of making it, as a means towards self-understanding and growth. Yes, it is possible to diagnose certain conditions through artwork. Studies have shown that schizophrenics often draw in a certain manner and that sexually abused children will often exaggerate certain body parts when drawing people. However, studies have also shown that it is what an individual personally attaches to an image that matters when it comes to a therapuetic art process. And non-directive therapuetic artmaking works better in most cases than telling the client what to draw, even though directive artmaking is not without some benefit.

The research on Carl Rogers' person-center therapy has been so convincing and thorough that almost all schools of therapy promote using it in addition to their methods and philosophies. But how does one foster this trusting and safe environment with a client? Not without a lot of soul searching on the part of therapist. To be able to provide a safe environment to allow the client to explore the dark and scary parts of their own psyche, the therapist has to be able to not only deal calmly with the client's fears and anger, but their own. We are never truly as good about hiding things as we often belief we are. Things slip out at times and if we do not handle those feelings with genuiness, then we give our clients very good reasons to feel at least a little unsafe around us. They will hold back telling us about certain feelings and thoughts to keep the therapist from reacting badly. However, if the therapist also has shown that they believe in the client's abilities to grow and be stronger, then the relationship has another mooring to keep it in place. Likewise, an understanding of the problem as the client experiences it creates yet another mooring.

In a way, the therapuetic relationship is like scaling a cliff with the therapist as a guide and safety line. Both therapist and client has some treacherous terrain and loose rocks to look out for, but a skilled therapist, like a mountain guide, makes sure the safety lines are in place and knows not only how to handle the situation when the client slips, but what to do in the hopefully uncommon situations when both do.

 

Carl Rogers

A brief background summary by A. Doerr


[Sources used: On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers (Preface, Introduction, and Chapter 1); Wikipedia Entry on Carl Rogers; and "WE OVERCAME THEIR TRADITIONS, WE OVERCAME THEIR FAITH" by Dr. William Coulson.]


Carl Rogers was the fourth of six children from a relatively well-to-do and affectionate family. His parents were very protective and created a very rigid religious environment to raise their children in to keep them uncorrupted by worldly things. To this extent, the family moved to a farm when he was twelve. There his father, a prosperous business man, farmed as a hobby and the children were encouraged to do the same. On the upside, this installed Rogers with a strong conscience and gave him a strong animal science background. On the downside, this upbringing convinced Rogers that people were inherently good and that strict religious systems were harmful to an individual's personal development.

This last belief was further strengthened after he changed from a degree in agriculture to history and joining the ministry. He felt that he was being indoctrinated more than taught. In 1922, Rogers went with a Christian student group to France and Germany after World War I. It was then that he was exposed to the concept that very honest and good people can believe very different things. After further religious study, he became convinced that it was "a horrible thing to have to profess a set of beliefs, in order to remain in one's profession." (Rogers, 1961, p 8) This eventually lead him to becoming a children's counselor and then a very successful psychologist when it came to dealing with neurotic patients.


If we to inject the generation cycle theory put forth in the book Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe, we can easily place Rogers in the G.I. Generation due to his birth. The quote from Wikipedia that states: "[a]ll of them entering midlife were aggressive advocates of technological progress, economic prosperity, social harmony, and public optimism" does fit Rogers a great deal. He was very optimist about human nature and social harmony. However, perhaps due to his very protective upbringing, Rogers also shares many traits of those in the Silent Generation, advocating "fairness and the politics of inclusion, irrepressible in the wake of failure."


I've included this sociological information to help explain Rogers' fame and infamy. Peter Kramer's posthumous introduction to Roger's book On Becoming a Person mentions that in some ways, Rogers was what Isaiah Berlin would call a "hedgehog"--he knew one thing, but he knew it so well that it became his world. Most of Rogers ideas were good and are still in use today, especially his push to get the field of psychology to rely more on scientific methods and studies, but his own work was mostly for neurotics. His success there was worthy of the fame he received. It was when he tried to apply his theories to people who weren't neurotic that things fell apart.

To quote Neils Bohr: "An expert is a person who avoids small error as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy." Rogers' grand fallacy was the IHM Nuns controversy. Dr. William Coulson, an assistant of Carl Rogers who was personally involved in this experiement, has spoken on the subject with much honesty and clarity. Though, like Rogers, the "all or nothing" thought distortion sometimes raises its head. Though I'm not really sure if it is them actually, or the people who are presenting their work to prove their own agenda. It is my impression that the cause of this disaster in the field of psychology was based on the following factors:


1) Rogers did not stop to consider how his own issues were being triggered. After all, the Catholic school acted much in the way his own mother did towards him and his siblings. Of course, the feedback from the progressive faction of the IHM only helped to feed his biases by suggesting that things did need to be changed. However, even though a lot of something can be bad, that doesn't mean that any bit of it of all is also bad. In fact, some of it may actually be necessary.


2) Rogers believed that all people were good. As Maslow said, there was great danger in his assumption that there weren't paranoids, psychopaths or other destructive people that would mess things up for him.


3) Rogers' own belief that people should ultimately be their own authority backfired on him. In his assumption that all people were inherently good, it had never occurred to him that not everyone had a conscience as well-defined as his, even though Abraham Maslow warned him of the evil that can exist and the failure of his methods when Maslow tried to use it with his own students. So, while the encounter groups ran by Rogers and those who were afraid of Rogers no one wandered into sexual misconduct, other facilitators were not as restrained. In fact, Rogers and Coulson were unaware that of "the reports of seductions in psychotherapy, which became virtually routine in California."

Coulson summarizes this backfiring better than I could: Rogers didn't get people involved in sex games, but he couldn't prevent his followers from doing it, because all he could say was, "Well, I don't do that." Then his followers would say, "Well, of course you don't do that, because you grew up in an earlier era; but we do, and it's marvelous: you have set us free to be ourselves and not carbon copies of you."

4) There was several older nuns and priests looking into feminism and other social reforms who neglected to provide any real guidance to their students, who were lead to believe that they would receive sound guidance. So instead of being liberated, the students were actually abandoned. Granted the studies about the human brain not being fully developed until age 26 probably weren't available at that time and the leaders didn't quite comprehend that their charges were still developing judgment skills.

5) The popularity of humanism was at its height and coupled with drug use in many cases. While Rogers had troubles with even putting soda pop in his body as a young adult, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of his followers considered drug use as a means to overcome obstacles to being one's self.

6) California is not really a place to find "normal people" in large numbers. (I was borned there and live only a few years there and even I can't claim to be a "normal" person.) Rogers probably should have been suspicious when he couldn't get the same study to work in Wisconsin because the participants kept dropping out when they realized what was going on. Instead, he found a group willing to invite him in to do this. That in itself should have been a red flag. However, I will not judge him on that matter, considering the fact that humans have a wonderful tendency to ignore red flags and I have done it a time or time myself.

Even though this became a total failure as an attempt to improve the lives of the nun, it did eventually improve and support the ethical guidelines for psychologists. Counselling students are now taught that it is unethical to try to change a client's religious beliefs, to have sexual interactions with the client, and to be aware of one's own issues enough to know when they should refer a client to a professional without the same issues. Rogers did realize his own folly. So, while he did fall into Bohr's definition as an "expert", he and the field of psychology did learn from his mistakes.

From now on, I will be focusing more on what Rogers got right. Having accepting his human fraility, I will start on his brilliance.