My interest in Carl Rogers grew when I realised that both Marshall Rosenberg and Eugene Gendlin were students of his. Since [[Nonviolent Communication]] and Focusing are two practices that have become important to me, I wanted to explore what inspired these powerful disciplines. I started reading some of Carl Rogers' personal essays in a book called [[Reference Notes/A Way of Being|A Way of Being]]. In particular, I found an essay called "My Philosophy of Interpersonal Relationships and How It Grew", and reading it made me feel an affinity towards Rogers. I enjoy reading accounts of a person's journey and how their thinking developed. I often get different insights than those gleaned from their more didactic writings (this happened recently with Joanna Macy when I read [[Reference Notes/A Wild Love for the World]].) With Rogers, I discovered how he went from being a loner to someone who was deeply interested in what was happening inside other human beings. I had the feeling of finding the source of both Rosenberg's and Genlin's insights regarding the cultivation of an open-hearted curiosity about our subjective experiences. This is how he describes the beliefs he had moved away from: > I have moved a long way from some of the beliefs with which I started: that man was essentially evil; that professionally he was best treated as an object; that help was based on expertise; that the expert could advise, manipulate, and mold the individual to produce the desired result. > .... > I have come to prize each emeerging facet of my experience, of myself. I would like to treasure the feelings of anger and tenderness and shame and hurt and love and anxiety and giving and fear – all the positive and negative reactions that crop up. I would like to treasure the ideas that emerge – foolish, creative, bizarre, sound, trivial – all part of me. I like the behavioral impulses – appropriate, crazy, achievement-oriented, sexual, murderous. I want to accept all of these feelings, ideas, and impulses as an enriching part of me. I don't expect to act on all of them, but when I accept them all, I can be more real; my behavior, therefore, will be much more appropriate to the immediate situation. The above could easily have been written by Rosenberg. We can see here the root of Rosenberg's [[key differentiations]], the move from jackal to giraffe language, and the embracing of every feeling and strategy as the expression of a beautiful need. Rogers writes: > On the basis of my experience I have found that if I can help bring about a climate marked by genuineness, prizing, and understanding, then exciting things happen. Persons and groups in such a climate move away from rigidity and towards flexibility, away from static living toward process living, away from dependence toward autonomy, away from defensiveness toward self-acceptance, away from being predictable toward an unpredictable creativity. In a 1957 article entitled The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change, he wrote: > For constructive personality change to occur, it is necessary that these conditions exist and continue over a period of time: > 1. Two persons are in psychological contact. > 2. The first, whom we shall term the client, is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable or anxious. > 3. The second person, whom we shall term the therapist, is congruent or integrated in the relationship. > 4. The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard for the client. > 5. The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client's internal frame of reference and endeavors to communicate this experience to the client. > 6. The communication to the client of the therapist's empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard is to a minimal degree achieved. And here is how Rogers practised the art of listening to people: > Before every session I take a moment to remember my Humanity, that there is no experience that this man has that I cannot share with him, no fear that I cannot understand, no suffering that I cannot care about because I too am human. No matter how deep his wounds, he does not need to be ashamed in front of me. I too am vulnerable. And because of this, I am enough. Whatever his story, he no longer needs to be alone with it. This is what will allow his healing to begin. All paths seem to lead back to Lao-tse and the Taoists, for Rogers refers to the following quote as something he deeply resonates with: > It is as though he listened > and such listening as his enfolds us in a silence > in which at last we begin to hear > what we are meant to be. That seems to be the distillation of what I have learned about empathic listening from NVC. His favourite quote of Lao-tse's is the following: > If I keep from meddling with people, they take care of themselves, > If I keep from commanding people, they behave themselves, > If I keep from preaching at people, they improve themselves, > If I keep from imposing on people, they become themselves.