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title:: Books / On Becoming A Person - Progressive Summarizations - **Creating a Helping Relationship** id:: 62ad09d6-a855-4cb8-b183-258f8a78b773 - Summary: - It seems to me that we have here a general hypothesis which offers exciting possibilities for the development of creative, adaptive, autonomous persons. - If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur. - 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. When these conditions are achieved, I become a companion to my client, accompanying him in the frightening search for himself, which he now feels free to undertake. - It is my hypothesis that in such a relationship the individual will reorganize himself at both the conscious and deeper levels of his personality in such a manner as to cope with life more constructively, more intelligently, and in a more socialized as well as a more satisfying way. - 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? - It has gradually been driven home to me that I cannot be of help to this troubled person by means of any intellectual or training procedure. **No approach which relies upon knowledge, upon training, upon the acceptance of something that is taught, is of any use.** - It is only by providing the genuine reality which is in me, that the other person can successfully seek for the reality in them. - As a second condition, I find that the more acceptance and liking I feel toward this individual, the more I will be creating a relationship which they can use. - By acceptance I mean a **==warm regard for them as a person of unconditional self-worth==—of value no matter what their condition, their behavior, or their feelings.** id:: 62acb8bd-19b1-4199-b43e-57ba025f6503 - It means a respect and liking for them as a separate person, a **willingness for them to possess their own feelings in their own way**. It means an acceptance of and regard for their attitudes of the moment, **no matter how negative or positive**, no matter how much they may contradict other attitudes he has held in the past. id:: 632cd676-92a2-490d-812f-0b0c761e4e4a - This acceptance of each fluctuating aspect of this other person makes it for him a relationship of warmth and safety, and the safety of being liked and prized as a person seems a highly important element in a helping relationship. - I also find that the relationship is significant to the extent that I feel a **continuing desire to understand**—a sensitive empathy with each of the their feelings and communications as they seem to them at that moment. - **Acceptance does not mean much until it involves understanding. It is only as I understand the feelings and thoughts which seem so horrible to you, or so weak, or so sentimental, or so bizarre—it is only as I see them as you see them, and accept them and you, that you feel really free to explore all the hidden nooks and frightening crannies of your inner and often buried experience.** This freedom is an important condition of the relationship. - Maturing and becoming Adult collapsed:: true - Gradually my experience has forced me to conclude that the individual has within himself the capacity and the tendency, latent if not evident, to move forward toward maturity. In a suitable psychological climate this tendency is released, and becomes actual rather than potential. - Whether one calls it a growth tendency, a drive toward self-actualization, or a forward-moving directional tendency, it is the mainspring of life, and is, in the last analysis, the tendency upon which all psychotherapy depends. - It is the urge which is evident in all organic and human life—to expand, extend, become autonomous, develop, mature—the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, to the extent that such activation enhances the organism or the self. - - Thus it seems reasonable to hypothesize that if the parent creates with his child a psychological climate such as we have described, then the child will become more self-directing, socialized, and mature. To the extent that the teacher creates such a relationship with his class, the student will become a self-initiated learner, more original, more self-disciplined, less anxious and other-directed. - If I can create a relationship characterized on my part: collapsed:: true - 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; - Then the other individual in the relationship: collapsed:: true - 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. - 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. - Attitude collapsed:: true - “understanding” of the client’s meanings is essentially an attitude of desiring to understand. - it is an **attitude of wanting to understand which is communicated**. - Monkey Mother Experiment collapsed:: true - Still another interesting study of a manufactured relationship is being carried on by Harlow and his associates (10), this time with monkeys. Infant monkeys, removed from their mothers almost immediately after birth, are, in one phase of the experiment, presented with two objects. One might be termed the “hard mother,” a sloping cylinder of wire netting with a nipple from which the baby may feed. The other is a “soft mother,” a similar cylinder made of foam rubber and terry cloth. - Even when an infant gets all his food from the “hard mother” he clearly and increasingly prefers the “soft mother.” - Motion pictures show that **he definitely “relates” to this object, playing with it, enjoying it, finding security in clinging to it when strange objects are near, and ==using that security as a home base for venturing into the frightening world.==** - It is that no amount of direct food reward can take the place of certain perceived qualities which the infant appears to need and desire. - - Questions for guiding helping behavior collapsed:: true - collapsed:: true 1. Can I be in some way which will be perceived by the other person as trustworthy, as dependable or consistent in some deep sense? - Congruence - I have come to recognize that being trustworthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real. - 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. - Can I be expressive enough as a person that what I am will be communicated unambiguously? collapsed:: true - When I am experiencing an attitude of annoyance toward another person but am unaware of it, then my communication contains contradictory messages. - It has made it seem to me that the most basic learning for anyone who hopes to establish any kind of helping relationship is that it is safe to be transparently real. - **One way of putting this which may seem strange to you is that if I can form a helping relationship to myself—if I can be sensitively aware of and acceptant toward my own feelings—then the likelihood is great that I can form a helping relationship toward another.** #boom - Can I let myself experience positive attitudes toward this other person—attitudes of warmth, caring, liking, interest, respect? collapsed:: true - I often see in others, a certain amount of fear of these feelings. We are afraid that if we let ourselves freely experience these positive feelings toward another we may be trapped by them. - **I feel quite strongly that one of the important reasons for the professionalization of every field is that it helps to keep this distance.** - It is a real achievement when we can learn, even in certain relationships or at certain times in those relationships, that it is safe to care, that it is safe to relate to the other as a person for whom we have positive feelings. - Can I be strong enough as a person to be separate from the other? collapsed:: true - 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?** Is my inner self hardy enough to realize that I am not destroyed by his anger, taken over by his need for dependence, nor enslaved by his love, but that I exist separate from him with feelings and rights of my own? - When I can freely **feel this strength of being a separate person, then I find that I can let myself go much more deeply** in understanding and accepting him because I am not fearful of losing myself. - Am I secure enough within myself to permit him his separateness? collapsed:: true - Can I permit him to be what he is—honest or deceitful, infantile or adult, despairing or over-confident? Can I give him the freedom to be? - Can I let myself enter fully into the world of his feelings and personal meanings and see these as he does? collapsed:: true - Can I step into his private world so completely that I lose all desire to evaluate or judge it? - Can I extend this understanding without limit? I think of the client who said, “Whenever I find someone who understands a part of me at the time, then it never fails that a point is reached where I know they’re not understanding me again . . . What I’ve looked for so hard is for someone to understand.” - **There is a strong temptation to set students “straight,” or to point out to a staff member the errors in his thinking.** - it is most helpful when I can see and formulate clearly the meanings in his experiencing which for him have been unclear and tangled. - collapsed:: true 7. Still another issue is whether I can be acceptant of each facet of this other person which he presents to me. Can I receive him as he is? Can I communicate this attitude? - Or can I only receive him conditionally, acceptant of some aspects of his feelings and silently or openly disapproving of other aspects? - ==**when my attitude is conditional, then he cannot change or grow in those respects in which I cannot fully receive him.**== - when my attitude is conditional, then he cannot change or grow in those respects in which I cannot fully receive him. - Can I act with sufficient sensitivity in the relationship that my behavior will not be perceived as a threat? collapsed:: true - how easily individuals are threatened at a physiological level. - 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. - Can I free him from the threat of external evaluation? collapsed:: true - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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? collapsed:: true - ==**Confirming the other**== id:: 645b8cec-240f-4aa3-91f2-e842aa1681ca - “Confirming means . . . accepting the whole potentiality of the other. . . . I can recognize in him, know in him, the person he has been . . . created to become. . . . I confirm him in myself, and then in him, in relation to this potentiality that . . . can now be developed, can evolve” - If I accept the other person as something fixed, already diagnosed and classified, already shaped by his past, then I am doing my part to confirm this limited hypothesis. - **If I accept him as a process of becoming, then I am doing what I can to confirm or make real his potentialities.** #mydeepestgift #namaste - 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. And if I see this as his potentiality, he tends to act in ways which support this hypothesis. - 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. - - optimal helping relationship is the kind of relationship created by a person who is psychologically mature. - **the degree to which I can create relationships which facilitate the growth of others as separate persons is a ==measure of the growth I have achieved in myself.==** - For it is not upon the physical sciences that the future will depend. It is upon us who are trying to understand and deal with the interactions between human beings—who are trying to create helping relationships. - Client Experience. #unconditionalPositiveRegard - The reactions of the client who experiences for a time the kind of therapeutic relationship which I have described are a reciprocal of the therapist’s attitudes. - **In the first place, as he finds someone else listening acceptantly to his feelings, ==he little by little becomes able to listen to himself.==** - He begins to receive the communications from within himself—to realize that he is angry, to recognize when he is frightened, even to realize when he is feeling courageous. - He can listen to feelings which have seemed to him so terrible, or so disorganizing, or so abnormal, or so shameful, that he has never been able to recognize their existence in himself. While he is learning to listen to himself he also becomes more acceptant of himself. - As he expresses more and more of the hidden and awful aspects of himself, **he finds the therapist showing a consistent and ==unconditional positive regard== for him and his feelings. Slowly he moves toward taking the same attitude toward himself,** accepting himself as he is, and therefore ready to move forward in the process of becoming. id:: 62acfb72-84b7-4149-a3ee-dce2f20625d1 - And finally as he listens more accurately to the feelings within, and becomes less evaluative and more acceptant toward himself, **he also moves toward greater congruence.** - As these changes occur, as he becomes more self-aware, more self-acceptant, less defensive and more open, he finds that he is at last free to change and grow in the directions natural to the human organism. - The process involves a loosening of the cognitive maps of experience. - It moves toward fluidity, changingness, immediacy of feelings and experience, acceptance of feelings and experience, tentativeness of constructs, discovery of a changing self in one’s changing experience, realness and closeness of relationships, a unity and integration of functioning. - 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.