What you learned from Rogers? (G) Oh everything! All right. Let me see.
That’s nice, you give me a chance to honour my old teacher. I was very lucky I had a presentation
together with him about six months before he died or something and I got to say there all these things. That's
nice to happen you know. First of all I learned listening from him. I was not the kind of person
who could have discovered listening. I always seemed to say and even now people have to stop
me often and say - wait wait Gene, she’s trying to say such and such. So I learned listening from
him. And then. I came though with the philosophy. So I came with an interest in what kind of - it
came from Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning - I came from knowing this thing,
this basic thing that, I'll talk about after the break, knowing that that not formulated
yet, is more than whatever you can formulate it. Already knows what you've formulated and then
it's still more. And I wanted to see how that, how that functions in therapy. And they didn't
know anything about it. They thought they were, they claim to reflect feelings. So I
brought something to it. But I learned listening from him. Also I learned from him this wonderful
thing that we have in the Focusing organization, that we don't let anybody tell anybody else
how to do something. Right? We issue a lot of instructions. And you're left to your, to your
own instructions. And if anybody after I'm dead wants to tell you how you have to do Focusing,
just go and start another Focusing Institute please. Right? Because the essence of it is
you're coming from inside, and you're gonna find your way. And if you have that freedom,
and he gave everybody that freedom, then you can listen to each other. Because you know that even
if this person is isn't pushing their thing and it's the only thing you still wonder what can I
learn from this.You know. Because you don't have to let anybody tell you what to do. And he was
magnificent there. So I come as a as a graduate student in his practicum and I'm just starting,
and I discover that they're doing research. Well I'm a philosophy student I don't even know what
research is, what does it look like is, your big machine and where is it? The Counselling Center
had three floors and I didn't even know where was the research? Must have been on the fourth floor,
but there was no fourth floor. So then I discovered what research is. Is this little
stack of statements about yourself and you sort them, where it's a questionnaire, or it's all
these things. And then I found that well, I was perfectly welcome to contribute to that research. And
then I was of course a client at the same time. So I had all this experience of being a client.
So they were talking about relationship. And they had just finished this big study,
and they were very disappointed because the relationship didn't make any difference to the
outcome.Well, so I said what do you measure when you measure the relationship? Well it turned
out they were counting statements that the client made about the therapist. Like how old are you,
or a man can't possibly understand me, or or are you married, or I like do this but not that. And
I knew from my own experience as a client, that that's got nothing to do with the relationship.
The relationship is that when I walked in, the door, I was different. How do you measure that?
Well I made a questionnaire for that and I got to be a researcher. Right. They took my questionnaire
along with everything else and two years later my correlated with outcome and nothing else did. But
that's Rogers, if you see what I mean? Opening everything up to everybody and around him went
on this marvellous discussion of everything. Groups were buzzing and everybody was doing and
he didn't know all of what people were doing. You know. And the same thing all the way across, Like
in the waiting room of the Counselling Center was a stack of papers. The counselling the discussion
papers. They were duplicated and you could take them out. There was a little list there and you
signed them out. So if you were a client you could take a discussion paper home and read it and bring
it back. Right. And there was no difference for being the staff and they in the counsellors
either. So when the secretary wanted to become a therapist, he said oh sure, yeah. Here's a
training you know. Start here and and do that. There was there was. You see what I'm saying?
I don't really do it that as well as he did, but listening of course leads straight into Focusing
sort of a continuation of listening, so you know it all came from him. Yes. I want to say one more
thing to that. The client cantered people don't like the instructions during the hour of Focusing.
And I can understand that. I think if you, you know I have arguments about it. I can understand
that somebody who's trained client-centered can feel that issuing these do this to that kind of
instructions takes the freedom away from from the client. I think there is some difference there
a little bit. And I believe in not violating that. Thing very brief and then coming right
back in it. Focusing itself though is not the instructions. Focusing is that thing that happens
from listening, people come deeper, and you make a pause, and you say it back, and you slow it down,
and you say is that right, and they say let's is that right and they're Focusing. And so listening
teaches Focusing to some people.Then we found some people it doesn't so we come