## Metadata - Author: [[Carl Rogers and Peter D. Kramer M.D.]] - Full Title: On Becoming a Person - Category: #books ## Highlights - empathy—a ([Location 43](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=43)) - “If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.” By growth, Rogers meant movement in the direction of self-esteem, flexibility, respect for self and others. To Rogers, man is “incorrigibly socialized in his desires.” Or, as Rogers puts the matter repeatedly, when man is most fully man, he is to be trusted. ([Location 44](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=44)) - Rogers’s understanding of acceptance as the ultimate liberating force implies that people who are not ill can benefit from therapy and that nonprofessionals can act as therapists; ([Location 49](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=49)) - That marriage, like therapy, depends on genuineness and empathy is basic Carl Rogers. ([Location 51](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=51)) - self psychology understands relationship, more than insight, to be central to change; ([Location 57](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=57)) - Rogers places his ideas in historical and social context, alluding to contemporary social psychology, animal ethology, and communications and general systems theory. He locates his heritage in existential philosophy, referring most often to Søren Kierkegaard (from whom he takes the phrase “to be that self which one truly is,” Rogers’s answer to the question “What is the goal of life?”) and Martin Buber. ([Location 69](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=69)) - ignored a reproductive strategy that coexists with hierarchy dominance and is also strongly encoded in genes and culture: reciprocity and altruism. ([Location 98](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=98)) - Animal ethologists and evolutionary biologists today would agree with Rogers’s thesis that when a human being is adequately accepted, it is these latter traits that are likely to predominate. ([Location 99](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=99)) - Harry Stack Sullivan ([Location 104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=104)) - Murray Bowen ([Location 105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=105)) - Milton Erickson ([Location 107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=107)) - Carl Whitaker ([Location 108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=108)) - Erich Fromm, Victor Frankl, Hellmuth Kaiser, Erik Erikson, Heinz Kohut—whose ([Location 110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=110)) - Rogers’s central premise is that people are inherently resourceful. ([Location 113](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=113)) - For Rogers, the cardinal sin in therapy, or in teaching or family life, is the imposition of authority. ([Location 114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=114)) - Despite its origins in the helping relationship, Rogers’s philosophy is grounded in Thoreau and Emerson, in the primacy of self-reliance. ([Location 116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=116)) - Does individualism imply fresh exploration of values by each person in each new generation, or must individualism be linked to fixed traditions and a view of man as selfish and competitive? ([Location 118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=118)) - Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May. ([Location 187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=187)) - There is one final reason for putting out this book, a motive which means a great deal to me. It has to do with the great, in fact the desperate, need of our times for more basic knowledge and more competent skills in dealing with the tensions in human relationships. Man’s awesome scientific advances into the infinitude of space as well as the infinitude of sub-atomic particles seems most likely to lead to the total destruction of our world unless we can make great advances in understanding and dealing with interpersonal and intergroup tensions. ([Location 189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=189)) - likable. I was forced to stretch my thinking, to realize that sincere and honest people could believe in very divergent religious doctrines. ([Location 279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=279)) - This independence of thought caused great pain and stress in our relationship, but looking back on it I believe that here, more than at any other one time, I became an independent person. ([Location 281](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=281)) - I cannot be very objective about this, but her steady and sustaining love and companionship during all the years since has been a most important and enriching factor in my life. ([Location 287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=287)) - A group of us felt that ideas were being fed to us, whereas we wished primarily to explore our own questions and doubts, and find out where they led. We petitioned the administration that we be allowed to set up a seminar for credit, a seminar with no instructor, where the curriculum would be composed of our own questions. ([Location 292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=292)) - I now knew from my experience that such an interview would not be of any lasting help to the parent or the child. It made me realize that I was moving away from any approach which was coercive or pushing in clinical relationships, not for philosophical reasons, but because such approaches were never more than superficially effective. ([Location 342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=342)) - that it is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried. It began to occur to me that unless I had a need to demonstrate my own cleverness and learning, I would do better to rely upon the client for the direction of movement in the process. ([Location 354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=354)) - I have learned to live in increasingly deep therapeutic relationships with an ever-widening range of clients. This can be and has been extremely rewarding. ([Location 395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=395)) - to act in one way on the surface when I am experiencing something quite different underneath. It does not, I believe, make me helpful in my attempts to build up constructive relationships with other individuals. ([Location 434](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=434)) - I feel I have become more adequate in letting myself be what I am. It becomes easier for me to accept myself as a decidedly imperfect person, who by no means functions at all times in the way in which I would like to function. ([Location 444](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=444)) - when I accept myself as I am, then I change. ([Location 447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=447)) - experience—that we cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. ([Location 448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=448)) - It is when I do accept all these attitudes as a fact, as a part of me, that my relationship with the other person then becomes what it is, and is able to grow ([Location 456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=456)) - To understand is enriching in a double way. I find when I am working with clients in distress, that to understand the bizarre world of a psychotic individual, or to understand and sense the attitudes of a person who feels that life is too tragic to bear, or to understand a man who feels that he is a worthless and inferior individual—each of these understandings somehow enriches me. I learn from these experiences in ways that change me, that make me a different and, I think, a more responsive person. Even more important perhaps, is the fact that my understanding of these individuals permits them to change. It permits them to accept their own fears and bizarre thoughts and tragic feelings and discouragements, as well as their moments of courage and kindness and love and sensitivity. And it is their experience as well as mine that when someone fully understands those feelings, this enables them to accept those feelings in themselves. Then they find both the feelings and themselves changing. ([Location 466](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=466)) - Because understanding is rewarding, I would like to reduce the barriers between others and me, so that they can, if they wish, reveal themselves more fully. ([Location 476](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=476)) - A sensitiveness of understanding which sees him as he is to himself, and accepts him as having those perceptions and feelings, helps too. ([Location 479](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=479)) - I wish to reduce the need for fear or defensiveness, so that people can communicate their feelings freely. ([Location 492](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=492)) - Yet it has come to seem to me that this separateness of individuals, the right of each individual to utilize his experience in his own way and to discover his own meanings in it,—this is one of the most priceless potentialities of life. Each person is an island unto himself, in a very real sense; and he can only build bridges to other islands if he is first of all willing to be himself and permitted to be himself. ([Location 502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=502)) - the more I am simply willing to be myself, in all this complexity of life and the more I am willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person, the more change seems to be stirred up. ([Location 516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=516)) - is that when an activity feels as though it is valuable or worth doing, it is worth doing. ([Location 522](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=522)) - evaluation by others is not a guide for me. The judgments of others, while they are to be listened to, and taken into account for what they are, can never be a guide for me. ([Location 534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=534)) - The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person’s ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me. ([Location 545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=545)) - My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction. ([Location 551](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=551)) - I have come to feel that the more fully the individual is understood and accepted, the more he tends to drop the false fronts with which he has been meeting life, and the more he tends to move in a direction which is forward. ([Location 594](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=594)) - I find I am at my best when I can let the flow of my experience carry me, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals of which I am but dimly aware. In thus floating with the complex stream of my experiencing, and in trying to understand its ever-changing complexity, it should be evident that there are no fixed points. ([Location 602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=602)) - Life is guided by a changing understanding of and interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming. ([Location 605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=605)) - One brief way of describing the change which has taken place in me is to say that in my early professional years I was asking the question, How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth? ([Location 631](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=631)) - It is only by providing the genuine reality which is in me, that the other person can successfully seek for the reality in him. ([Location 653](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=653)) - that the more acceptance and liking I feel toward this individual, the more I will be creating a relationship which he can use. ([Location 656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=656)) - the relationship which I have found helpful is characterized by a sort of transparency on my part, in which my real feelings are evident; by an acceptance of this other person as a separate person with value in his own right; and by a deep empathic understanding which enables me to see his private world through his eyes. ([Location 668](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=668)) - individual will discover within himself the capacity to use this relationship for growth. ([Location 677](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=677)) - growth tendency, a drive toward self-actualization, or a forward-moving directional tendency, ([Location 683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=683)) - We know now that individuals who live in such a relationship even for a relatively limited number of hours show profound and significant changes in personality, attitudes, and behavior, changes that do not occur in matched control groups. In such a relationship the individual becomes more integrated, more effective. He shows fewer of the characteristics which are usually termed neurotic or psychotic, and more of the characteristics of the healthy, well-functioning person. ([Location 694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=694)) - He changes his perception of himself, becoming more realistic in his views of self. He becomes more like the person he wishes to be. He values himself more highly. He is more self-confident and self-directing. He has a better understanding of himself, becomes more open to his experience, denies or represses less of his experience. He becomes more accepting in his attitudes toward others, seeing others as more similar to himself. ([Location 697](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=697)) - by a genuineness and transparency, in which I am my real feelings; by a warm acceptance of and prizing of the other person as a separate individual; by a sensitive ability to see his world and himself as he sees them; ([Location 721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=721)) - will experience and understand aspects of himself which previously he has repressed; will find himself becoming better integrated, more able to function effectively; will become more similar to the person he would like to be; will be more self-directing and self-confident; will become more of a person, more unique and more self-expressive; will be more understanding, more acceptant of others; will be able to cope with the problems of life more adequately and more comfortably. ([Location 725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=725)) - educational counseling, vocational counseling, or personal counseling. In this last-mentioned area it would include the wide range of relationships between the psychotherapist and the hospitalized psychotic, the therapist and the troubled or neurotic individual, and the relationship between the therapist and the increasing number of so-called “normal” individuals who enter therapy to improve their own functioning or accelerate their personal growth. ([Location 749](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=749)) - Baldwin and others (1) at the Fels Institute ([Location 771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=771)) - the “acceptant-democratic” seemed most growth-facilitating. Children of these parents with their warm and equalitarian attitudes showed an accelerated intellectual development (an increasing I.Q.), ([Location 772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=772)) - originality, more emotional security and control, less excitability than children from other types of homes. ([Location 773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=773)) - Whitehorn and Betz (2, ([Location 781](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=781)) - The therapist procedure which they had found most helpful was that the therapist clarified and openly stated feelings which the client had been approaching hazily and hesitantly. ([Location 799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=799)) - Quinn (14) ([Location 808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=808)) - Seeman (16) ([Location 813](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=813)) - Dittes (4) ([Location 814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=814)) - is the attitudes and feelings of the therapist, rather than his theoretical orientation, which is important. His procedures and techniques are less important than his attitudes. It is also worth noting that it is the way in which his attitudes and procedures are perceived which makes a difference to the client, and that it is this perception which is crucial. ([Location 820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=820)) - Verplanck (17), Greenspoon (8) ([Location 825](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=825)) - Lindsley (12) ([Location 832](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=832)) - Harlow ([Location 843](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=843)) - Ends and Page ([Location 853](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=853)) - To withhold one’s self as a person and to deal with the other person as an object does not have a high probability of being helpful. ([Location 867](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=867)) - Halkides ([Location 868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=868)) - first as to the degree of empathy, second as to the counselor’s positive attitude toward the client, third as to the counselor’s congruence or genuineness, and fourth as to the degree to which the counselor’s response matched the emotional intensity ([Location 880](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=880)) - if the counselor is congruent or transparent, so that his words are in line with his feelings rather than the two being discrepant; if the counselor likes the client, unconditionally; and if the counselor understands the essential feelings of the client as they seem to the client—then there is a strong probability that this will be an effective helping relationship. ([Location 898](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=898)) - have come to recognize that being trustworthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real. ([Location 921](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=921)) - The term “congruent” is one I have used to describe the way I would like to be. By this I mean that whatever feeling or attitude I am experiencing would be matched by my awareness of that attitude. When this is true, then I am a unified or integrated person in that moment, and hence I can be whatever I deeply am. This is a reality which I find others experience as dependable. ([Location 921](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=921)) - When I am experiencing an attitude of annoyance toward another person but am unaware of it, then my communication contains contradictory messages. ([Location 926](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=926)) - the most basic learning for anyone who hopes to establish any kind of helping relationship is that it is safe to be transparently real. If in a given relationship I am reasonably congruent, if no feelings relevant to the relationship are hidden either to me or the other person, then I can be almost sure that the relationship will be a helpful one. ([Location 930](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=930)) - Can I be strong enough as a person to be separate from the other? Can I be a sturdy respecter of my own feelings, my own needs, as well as his? Can I own and, if need be, express my own feelings as something belonging to me and separate from his feelings? Am I strong enough in my own separateness that I will not be downcast by his depression, frightened by his fear, nor engulfed by his dependency? ([Location 948](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=948)) - I secure enough within myself to permit him his separateness? ([Location 954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=954)) - I let myself enter fully into the world of his feelings and personal meanings and see these as he does? ([Location 961](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=961)) - My desire to avoid even such minor threats is not due to a hypersensitivity about my client. It is simply due to the conviction based on experience that if I can free him as completely as possible from external threat, then he can begin to experience and to deal with the internal feelings and conflicts which he finds threatening within himself. ([Location 982](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=982)) - Can I free him from the threat of external evaluation? In almost every phase of our lives—at home, at school, at work—we find ourselves under the rewards and punishments of external judgments. “That’s good”; “that’s naughty.” ([Location 984](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=984)) - Curiously enough a positive evaluation is as threatening in the long run as a negative one, since to inform someone that he is good implies that you also have the right to tell him he is bad. So I have come to feel that the more I can keep a relationship free of judgment and evaluation, the more this will permit the other person to reach the point where he recognizes that the locus of evaluation, the center of responsibility, lies within himself. ([Location 989](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=989)) - The meaning and value of his experience is in the last analysis something which is up to him, and no amount of external judgment can alter this. So I should like to work toward a relationship in which I am not, even in my own feelings, evaluating him. This I believe can set him free to be a self-responsible person. ([Location 992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=992)) - One last question: Can I meet this other individual as a person who is in process of becoming, or will I be bound by his past and by my past? ([Location 995](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=995)) - I accept him as a process of becoming, then I am doing what I can to confirm or make real his potentialities. ([Location 1001](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1001)) - If I see a relationship as only an opportunity to reinforce certain types of words or opinions in the other, then I tend to confirm him as an object—a basically mechanical, manipulable object. ([Location 1004](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1004)) - If, on the other hand, I see a relationship as an opportunity to “reinforce” all that he is, the person that he is with all his existent potentialities, then he tends to act in ways which support this hypothesis. I have then—to use Buber’s term—confirmed him as a living person, capable of creative inner development. ([Location 1006](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1006)) - if I am interested in creating helping relationships I have a fascinating lifetime job ahead of me, stretching and developing my potentialities in the direction of growth. ([Location 1017](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1017)) - The more genuine and congruent the therapist in the relationship, the more probability there is that change in personality in the client will occur. ([Location 1088](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1088)) - The client changes and reorganizes his concept of himself. He moves away from perceiving himself as unacceptable to himself, as unworthy of respect, as having to live by the standards of others. He moves toward a conception of himself as a person of worth, as a self-directing person, able to form his standards and values upon the basis of his own experience. He develops much more positive attitudes toward himself. ([Location 1141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1141)) - as he speaks, I begin to feel a respect for him, to feel my kinship to him. I sense how frightening his world is for him, how tightly he tries to hold it in place. I would like to sense his feelings, and I would like him to know that I understand his feelings. I would like him to know that I stand with him in his tight, constricted little world, and that I can look upon it relatively unafraid. Perhaps I can make it a safer world for him. I would like my feelings in this relationship with him to be as clear and transparent as possible, so that they are a discernible reality for him, to which he can return again and again. I would like to go with him on the fearful journey into himself, into the buried fear, and hate, and love which he has never been able to let flow in him. ([Location 1166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1166)) - “I am a self which is different from a part of my experience.” ([Location 1271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1271)) - As therapy goes on the therapist’s feeling of acceptance and respect for the client tends to change to something approaching awe as he sees the valiant and deep struggle of the person to be himself. ([Location 1366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1366)) - To discover that it is not devastating to accept the positive feeling from another, that it does not necessarily end in hurt, that it actually “feels good” to have another person with you in your struggles to meet life—this may be one of the most profound learnings encountered by the individual whether in therapy or not. ([Location 1428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1428)) - Maslow (1) puts up a vigorous case for man’s animal nature, pointing out that the anti-social emotions—hostility, jealousy, etc.—result from frustration of more basic impulses for love and security and belonging, which are in themselves desirable. And Montagu (2) likewise develops the thesis that cooperation, rather than struggle, is the basic law of human life. ([Location 1530](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1530)) - It is very incoherent material, as verbalizations often are when the individual is trying to express something deeply emotional. ([Location 1627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1627)) - I think I’m awfully glad I found myself or brought myself or wanted to talk about self. I mean, it’s a very personal, private kind of thing that you just don’t talk about. ([Location 1693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1693)) - This kind of conclusion, that I’m going to stop looking for something terribly wrong. ([Location 1707](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1707)) - That as you’ve gone more and more deeply into yourself, and as you think about the kind of things that you’ve discovered and learned and so on, the conviction grows very, very strong that no matter how far you go, the things that you’re going to find are not dire and awful. ([Location 1713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1713)) - Here, even as she recognizes that her feeling goes against the grain of her culture, she feels bound to say that the core of herself is not bad, nor terribly wrong, but something positive. Underneath the layer of controlled surface behavior, underneath the bitterness, underneath the hurt, is a self that is positive, and that is without hate. This I believe is the lesson which our clients have been facing us with for a long time, and which we have been slow to learn. ([Location 1717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1717)) - the deeper she dug within herself, the less she had to fear; that instead of finding something terribly wrong within herself, she gradually uncovered a core of self which wanted neither to reward nor punish others, a self without hate, a self which was deeply socialized. ([Location 1740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1740)) - Therapy seems to mean a getting back to basic sensory and visceral experience. Prior to therapy the person is prone to ask himself, often unwittingly, “What do others think I should do in this situation?” ([Location 1750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1750)) - He is thus continually acting in terms of the form which should be imposed upon his behavior. This does not necessarily mean that he always acts in accord with the opinions of others. He may indeed endeavor to act so as to contradict the expectations of others. He is nevertheless acting in terms of the expectations (often introjected expectations) of others. ([Location 1752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1752)) - During the process of therapy the individual comes to ask himself, in regard to ever-widening areas of his life-space, “How do I experience this?” “What does it mean to me?” “If I behave in a certain way how do I symbolize the meaning which it will have for me?” He comes to act on a basis of what may be termed realism—a realistic balancing of the satisfactions and dissatisfactions which any action will bring to himself. ([Location 1754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1754)) - “I have thought I must feel only love for my parents, but I find that I experience both love and bitter resentment. Perhaps I can be that person who freely experiences both love and resentment.” ([Location 1759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1759)) - “I have thought I was only bad and worthless. Now I experience myself at times as one of much worth; at other times as one of little worth or usefulness. Perhaps I can be a person who experiences varying degrees of worth.” ([Location 1761](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1761)) - “I have held the conception that no one could really love me for myself. Now I experience the affectional warmth of another for me. Perhaps I can be a person who is lovable by others—perhaps I am such a person.” ([Location 1762](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1762)) - “I have been brought up to feel that I must not appreciate myself—but I do. I can cry for myself, but I can enjoy myself, too. Perhaps I am a richly varied person whom I can enjoy and for whom I can feel sorry.” ([Location 1764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1764)) - “I have thought that in some deep way I was bad, that the most basic elements in me must be dire and awful. I don’t experience that badness, but rather a positive desire to live and let live. Perhaps I can be that person who is, at heart, positive.” ([Location 1766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1766)) - In therapy the person adds to ordinary experience the full and undistorted awareness of his experiencing—of his sensory and visceral reactions. ([Location 1768](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1768)) - So the basic discovery of psychotherapy seems to me, if our observations have any validity, that we do not need to be afraid of being “merely” homo sapiens. It is the discovery that if we can add to the sensory and visceral experiencing which is characteristic of the whole animal kingdom, the gift of a free and undistorted awareness of which only the human animal seems fully capable, we have an organism which is beautifully and constructively realistic. We have then an organism which is as aware of the demands of the culture as it is of its own physiological demands for food or sex—which is just as aware of its desire for friendly relationships as it is of its desire to aggrandize itself—which is just as aware of its delicate and sensitive tenderness toward others, as it is of its hostilities toward others. When man’s unique capacity of awareness is thus functioning freely and fully, we find that we have, not an animal whom we must fear, not a beast who must be controlled, but an organism able to achieve, through the remarkable integrative capacity of its central nervous system, a balanced, realistic, self-enhancing, other-enhancing behavior as a resultant of all these elements of awareness. To ([Location 1779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1779)) - It seems to me that at bottom each person is asking, “Who am I, really? How can I get in touch with this real self, underlying all my surface behavior? How can I become myself?” ([Location 1819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1819)) - When a person comes to me, troubled by his unique combination of difficulties, I have found it most worth while to try to create a relationship with him in which he is safe and free. It is my purpose to understand the way he feels in his own inner world, to accept him as he is, to create an atmosphere of freedom in which he can move in his thinking and feeling and being, in any direction he desires. How does he use this freedom? ([Location 1823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00AD9YL6C&location=1823))