Psychology for Dummies (83 page)

Why would Carl Rogers think that making a genuine connection with his patient and really trying to understand what it’s like to be that particular individual has a helping or healing effect? The answer to that question may seem obvious: All of us like to feel understood. (See Chapter 13 for more on the importance of relationships.) Having people “get” what we’re about seems to give us a sense of well-being, a feeling of being more alive and present against the backdrop of a dark and uncaring world.

Although he’s not considered a client-centered therapist, Eric Fromm introduced a concept that attempts to explain why being understood is so important to all us. Fromm believed that we all make constant attempts to check our perceptions and experiences against the perceptions and experiences of others around us, particularly people whose opinion we value. You may have heard of the concept of a
reality check
— like asking someone if he or she just saw the UFO land in the field next to the highway. “Did you just see what I just saw?” If the other person saw it too, you experience something Fromm called
validation.
Validation is the experience of having someone concur or support your experience of reality. Validation gives us a sense of presence; it makes us feel like we
exist.
According to Fromm, we would feel as if we didn’t existence without validation.

So, being understood seems to be central to feeling like we actually exist — that we’re alive! Have you ever talked to someone when she wasn’t getting what you were trying to say, like she didn’t understand you? This type of experience can feel pretty bad. In situations like this and many others, we can feel disconnected and, in extreme cases, isolated.

Why is being understood or understanding others so difficult at times? Rogers believed that each and every one of us has a unique frame of reference from which we experience the world. Think about it. Someone else in this world may look just like you, have the same name, and be exactly like you in almost every other way. Biologically, identical twins even share the same genetic code! But according to Rogers and the client-centered therapists, even identical twins are not exactly alike. They are, in fact, two separate people. I like to look at it this way. No other person can occupy the same physical space that I occupy at the same time I occupy it. And they can’t occupy the same mental space either! People can abstractly “walk a mile in my shoes,” but only when I’m not wearing them.

You’re unique! Our individual experience is specifically separate from others, and as we differentiate our experience from the experiences of others, we begin to develop a sense of self, a sense of who we are. Our sense of self depends first, however, on how other people see us and relate to us. As children, our experience is intertwined and merged with the experiences of our parents, families, and caregivers. They serve as an experiential guide of sorts, providing us with our first models of understanding and experience in the world. Later, we begin to differentiate our experience from the experiences of others.

This
experience-differentiation process
is only possible, however, within an environment of positive regard and support from those around us. If I see a UFO and the other person doesn’t, he may still support me in my experience by saying that he doesn’t see the UFO, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t see it. If he wasn’t supportive, he might say, “You’re crazy! You don’t see a UFO!” More realistically, I’ve often witnessed a young child who gets hurt or upset and goes to a parent for comfort only to have the parent say, “You’re not hurt. You’re okay.” This situation is the opposite of validation; it’s an
invalidating
experience. The child may get confused, thinking, “I feel hurt, but Daddy says I’m not. Am I really hurt or not?” Pretty confusing stuff for a kid.

Rogers called our experience of ourselves, as it depends on the views of others, our
conditions of worth.
As long as we continue to meet the conditions of worth set up by others, we’ll do fine. But when we don’t receive unconditional acceptance, we can get into trouble. We may then start seeking the
conditional acceptance
of others because we’ve yet to experience their
unconditional acceptance.
When seeking conditional acceptance, we live a lie of sorts, adopting a confusing and undifferentiated experiential approach to living. If our experiences are different than the experiences of those around us, we may distort our own thinking, feelings, or behavior in order to be in line with theirs. We walk around with a belief that, if we think, feel, and behave in accordance with the people around us, we’ll get the positive regard we long for.

Even if we don’t receive unconditional acceptance, we still have this underlying sense of individuality and uniqueness. When there’s a disconnection or inconsistency between my experience of my self and my experience of my self as I distort it to be in line with other’s views, I’m
incongruent.
This involves having two views of yourself: how you actually are, and how you think others think you are. Rogers believed that what lies at the core of psychological maladjustment is the incongruity between my total experience and my distorted self-concept. This incongruity leads to feeling estranged, disconnected, and not whole. We’re then only living out part of our full being, and therefore, we’re not fulfilling our basic need to experience, enhance, and expand our being.

As we travel along this compromised path, we use different defense mechanisms to keep up the act. We selectively process information about ourselves, others, and world around us so as not to overturn the apple cart of reality. For example, a lot of families have a black-sheep member who stands out. At times, this person may deliberately do something that goes against the grain in order to stay in line with his family-derived self and the image that everyone has of him. Sometimes, we can stick to this plan in such a rigid manner that we may actually lose touch with reality. Have you ever been in a situation where something happened and everyone tried to pretend that it didn’t? I call this a “Twilight Zone experience.” Everyone seems to know what’s going on, but no one is willing to acknowledge reality.

One of the main goals of client-centered therapy is to help the patient reintegrate these different versions of the self. At the center of this process is perhaps Rogers’s most important contribution to psychotherapy —
unconditional positive regard.
This involves accepting the patient as a person without judging his or her experiences, feelings, thoughts, or behaviors in a moral sense. The therapist does not want to repeat the invalidating experience that the patient probably went through growing up or continues to go through.

Client-centered therapists engage in what Rogers called
reflection
— communicating to the patient that they hear what the patient is saying and that they’re trying to understand where the patient coming from. Rogers emphasized
accurate empathy.
Therapists who adopt this concept stay away from imposing their own understandings and structures on the patient’s experience. This helps patients begin to see how they’ve distorted their own experiences without introducing any new distortions in relation to the therapist’s expectations.

The therapist “reflects” you back to yourself by being attentive and describing to you the self that you’re presenting to him. During this process, your self-awareness increases, and you start to see yourself in a way that you’ve never been able to before. The client-centered therapist is kind of like a mirror or a “self-amplifier.” Anderson and Wexler viewed this process as therapists helping patients attend to and better organize their own experiences and thoughts.

Another huge contribution Rogers made to psychotherapy was the introduction of his six
necessary and sufficient conditions
that must be in place for therapy to be helpful: