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Oct 03, 2004 01:53

Wow. I was feeling like shit earlier and then I worked on my pyschology project and like it really changed my whole perspective on things. I dunno. I still want a gf and all and I still can't shake the other awful feeling I have in the pit of my stomach but it like really changed my world view. Tonight was fucking tight as shit. I'm not gonna go into details but I had a really good time. I'm actually gonna post some of my 5 page report here so you can read it if you want otherwise just quit here. It really does have some like strong views, but I just wanted to get the essay down on paper so its worded really like...adolescencently so deal with it. The ideas are there.

Carl Rogers.

On a cold snowy January 8th in the year 1902 Carl Ransom Rogers was born into his family fourth out of his six child family. His father was a civil engineer and his mother a loving Christian housewife. His childhood was a pleasant one playing with his brothers and sisters in their yard in Oak Park, Illinois. Carl was always very smart and could read before Kindergarten. It was in 2nd grade that he really started to learn. Twelve years later the Rogerses moved 30 miles outside of Chicago to a farm where Carl had many tedious and hard chores in which he would do during the day making him a very independent and lonely person. Carl had always dreamed of being a religious leader because of his parent’s great influence about religion. After graduating high school he went to the University of Wisconsin to major in Agriculture. He soon changed his major to religion and joined the ministry. After going to the World Student Christian Federation Conference in Beijing for 6 months he had many new ideas and thoughts about the world around him and the people living in it. After he graduated from UW he married a Helen Elliot against his parent’s wishes and moved to New York where he joined the Union Theological Seminary a religious institution. While there he took a class called “Why am I entering the Ministry?” as you might have guessed it changed his views about religion and soon changed his mind about becoming a pastor. He soon switched to Columbia University where he took clinical psychology and learned of Otto Rank’s theory and his ways of treating this. While doing it he came up with his own ideas.
His theory came from working with clients for many years not from experimentations so much. Rogers sees people as normally good healthy people, with mental health as a normal progression in life which means that he sees becoming a criminal and mental illness a distortion of natural tendency. Compared to many other psychological theories Rogers’s is quite simple. It is based around the Actualizing Tendency, which is the built in motivation present in every life-form to develop its potentials of the fullest extent possible. This means that every creature tries to make the most out of its life and not just survive but strive. He believes that we seek safety, love a sense of worth, why we seek air, water, food, invent power sources, develop medicines, and create technology because we want to be the best that we can. We strive to do all of these things because of our natural tendency. Like it was stated earlier this applies to ALL living things not just humans you can see it everywhere you look. Trees hanging out of mountain sides, plants in the deserts, even grass growing through the cracks in the sidewalks. All of them trying to be the best that they can and make the best of their time here much like they should. This theory is even applied to ecosystems, consider this: in a forest as well as every other ecosystem like it is in an intricate balance. If one type of animal is eaten more than others than there is an increase of another to balance it out, eventually there will not be enough of the eaten animal to feed all of the increased so they will start to die off and vise versa will happen so and so fourth. Not only one animal is affected but all of the others in many different ways just as humans are much affected by the actions of others and react to it accordingly. Using the actualizing tendency much has been born from humans including things such as religion, culture, beliefs and technology none of which are a negative thing. Evolution plays a big part into this theory as it greatly affects all aspects of life. And when a culture or religion is in contrast with our actualizing tendency it is often lost and dies off much like those who continue to follow it even when it brings them down in many different ways. However it is thought that culture and religion are not evil, they just manage to affect in unhelpful ways.
He also believes in organismic valuing which is, when an organism is hungry or thirsty they not only find food but food that to them tastes good. He also came up with positive-regard and positive self-regard. Positive regard is the search we have for such things as love, affection, nurturance and the like, while positive self-regard is how you view yourself, like self-esteem, self-worth and a positive self regard. Both of these are given to us by others complimenting and showing us this with their words and actions. Conditions of worth are another thing he believed. Which is we only get recognition and praise when we are worthy. As most children see their parents do not come up and tell their kid how much they love them and how much they mean to them and what they are doing right unless they get good news from a teacher or the like. It is that we must earn what we should be told everyday. Conditional positive regard, another concept by Rogers is a confusing. Conditional positive regard is, society tells us what is correct and beautiful and ethical and whatnot, and in the urge of getting our positive regard we may form to what society thinks rather than how we feel. If we only get positive regard when we wash the dishes everyday then we will do that more than if we have homework in order to get fulfill what our instinct tells us we need. With conditional positive regard goes Conditional positive self-regard. That is that we are not happy with ourselves or see ourselves as good or beautiful or the like if we do not conform with what society tells us, and we often change how we really feel, talk or act to fit into that criteria rather than being ourselves that has been proved to be imperfect.
Rogers also has many thoughts on development such as your real self and your ideal self. Your real self is the one that because of the actualizing tendency you will become. However with the actualizing tendency and organismic valuing we develop an ideal self. By ideal, means something that is always out of our reach, the place we can’t get to. Inconginuity is the difference between our real self and our ideal self, the greater the gap the more the inconginuity. The more inconginuity the more suffering and pain we cause ourselves. This is also a thought of Karen Horney. When a hostile situation is expected you begin to feel anxiety. Denial is a big part of anxiety. Denial is when you tell yourself otherwise or denying it ever happened which happens to work for the time being but only later will you have prolonged your “suffering”. Another type of denial is Perpetual Distortion. Perpetual distortion is making is creating excuses to make it a hostile situation. For example a student that is threatened by tests and grades may, for example, blame the professor for poor teaching, trick questions, bad attitude, or whatever. The fact that sometimes professors are poor teachers, write trick questions, and have bad attitudes only makes the distortion work better: If it could be true, then maybe it really was true.
Carl Rogers is best known for his contributions to therapy rather than psychology. Clients look to therapists for guidance, and will find it even when the therapist is trying not to guide. So he called it client-centered therapy. He felt that it was up to the patient to work through it and figure out what is wrong and how to fix it by themselves with only the guidance of the therapist. However during his time no other therapists thought like this and he was ridiculed for his ideas. Today most people just call it Rogerian therapy after guess who. Carl Rogers. One of the phrases that Rogers used to describe his therapy is "supportive, not reconstructive,". This means that a therapist can only help you to do it not do it for yourself. This may seem rather obvious but many people think that if they tell their therapist that someone will just magically fix their problems, and while it may help and the therapist can do some things to help it is up to the individual to take the initiative and create happiness and health for themselves. The therapist cannot let them get attached to therapy or the therapist for that matter. The client needs to try their ideas by themselves. “Babying” is okay at first but it is the therapists job not to let their patient become attached and dependant. There is only one technique that Rogers is known for which is reflection. Reflection is more or less repeating what the patient says back to them in a statement such as when a patient says something like “I am tired” the therapist would say “So, you don’t sleep well.” This tells the patient that the doctor is paying attention to his/her problems and is sympathetic to them.
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