Now Rogers also believed some other things.
And this is where I think he gets a little bit optimistic, but, but he's no fool so
Rogers is one of those optimists you really have to contend with.
Now,
he believed, and I think this is a classical Protestants believe this as well... that what evil was, was basically the absence of good
and that people had a strong
intrinsic impulse towards the good, that you could help them realize, and the way you helped them realize that was by setting
the preconditions for the emergence of that good. And he believed that.
The preconditions were
The provision of a space for communication
Where there was no judgment in the sense of rejection and so...
Here's the Rogerian theory with regards to therapeutic endeavor
Now the first thing is, and this seems critical,
and I think Rogers was right about this, that the client has to want to change.
And this is this is a funny thing about therapy because my observation has been that
It's not something you can impose on people
Unless they've decided that things could be better and that alterations in in in something they're doing might make it better
It's a non-starter, and so I've had clients who were court-ordered to attend therapy
and that's just complete waste of time especially if they're more on the psychopathic end of things because you just
If they don't want to change they're not going to learn. This is actually another criterion principle and
Because Rogers had an educational philosophy as well and the educational philosophy was
students will not learn things that are not relevant to them
and so one of the teachers duties was to make the material at hand relevant because that would
Help the student
Remember it why I remembered if it's not relevance one of the things I tried to do in my lectures
I try to tell people
when I'm lecturing why they should know this and the
Fundamental answer always if you push it down far enough is that if you know this
Your life will go better and so will the life of people around you
so you should listen because then there's some things that are sharp and pointy that you won't run into while you're wandering around in the
fog
So and that's the fundamental issue. It's necessary to know these things and so
if you're dealing with someone who hasn't decided that there's something wrong and that they have something to do about it then that maybe they
Could change and that would make things better
you're not going anywhere and
Rogers would also say that's actually precondition for a relationship period
because he didn't really make much of a distinction between a therapeutic relationship and a
genuine relationship because he thought that genuine relationships were therapeutic and so one of the
Principles that you can extract from that is that if you're in a relationship?
One useful
Proposition is that well you're pretty perfect
But you're probably not quite as perfect as you could be and so it's possible that your partner
No matter how deeply flawed they are might now, and then have something to say to you
That would if you incorporate it would bring you to an even higher state of profession right and so
That's that means you have to listen and it's worse than that and this again is a Rogerian
Observation you might have to help them criticize you because maybe they're not very good at it
You know and so there's something there trying to tell you in there's stumbling way, and it's it's an actual thing
But they can't articulate it and so it'd be easy for you
Just to especially if you're trying to use languages to mentally and to get away with it just to well you could even make fun
of the way, they're
Poorly articulating the problem, that's a really good one because then you can convince them not to do such things in the future
but if you take the other stance which is
Well, I've got some things to learn and you've got some things to learn and you've got some things to teach me and I've got
Some things to teach you and god only knows when that's happen
But it might happen so the object of the conversation is for each person help the other person make their point
You know and that's a lot different than winning the argument and I can tell you one thing
You will not win an argument with any intimate partner ever
because you're not playing the game of the argument you're playing the game of iterated arguments across time and
So if you win an argument you just set up another one
Winning and solving the problem aren't the same thing so from a Rotarian perspective winning would be the maintenance of your current self structure
At the cost of failure to integrate some disk integrated element of the phenomenological realm
Maybe it'd be the unhappiness of your partner that might be one of them now you can if you win the argument
that's the rationalization issues fundamentally you don't have to change but the
Fact is you do have to change because?
The way you are is giving rise to this situation and that's not gonna change unless you fix it so winning an argument
fixing something those are completely different things you fix the thing it goes away and
Often you know couples have to have
Conflict because there's no difference between conflict and thinking thinking is a form of war
It's just that you and you make it an interior form of war right you can't have a couple with conflict because life is different
Difficult and people differ from one another so they have different value structures
And so you can't just ignore that you have to set up a dialogue because it's not necessarily obvious who's right of course
We're all just bleed that therapeutic realm - so he thought of therapy as something that
Emerged as a consequence of the adoption of certain axiomatic presuppositions and those were
Things could be better than they are and you could make them that way and that's also true for me
And then the next presumption is well. Maybe we can figure out how to do that in a collaborative
with collaborative communication
So Rogers believed that
The therapist was just as transformed during the therapeutic process as the person in fact if that wasn't happening then
Whatever was happening wasn't the kind healing therapy that Rogers would like to have happen, and he also said
That's I'll read you something. He said later, but he also pointed out quite
Strongly that that's why people don't really like to listen. You know like maybe there's some flaw in your self structure at some fundamental level
Fundamentally axiomatic level you know maybe your narcissistic that'd be a good one and you know
if you listen to people they're gonna tell you you're
narcissistic well if you don't want to find that out because it's gonna blow a huge hole in your
It's gonna blow a huge hole in your self structure. That's not very fun but
Hypothetically that beats running into the obstacles that you will run into if you're narcissistic
Repeatedly as you move forward through life
so you can either live with your flaws or correct them gotsta and then
The pathway to correction is dialogue communication