On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy
Carl Rogers, 1961
Why is it that even good advice so rarely helps? Carl Rogers spent more than thirty years helping people, and he came to see that people change not when they are corrected, but when someone nearby lets them be themselves. He explains how this works in any relationship: with children, a partner, friends, and yourself.
Who it is for
For anyone who is tired of pretending, wants to listen better to the people they love, and wants to understand why people change when they are accepted rather than corrected.
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, I change.
The question Rogers asked himself again
Imagine a close person comes to you upset. You immediately see what they are doing wrong, and you start explaining what they should do. They nod, then leave just as miserable as they arrived. Sound familiar? Carl Rogers, whose work was to help people, started out in much the same way.
At the beginning of his career, Rogers asked himself, in his own words: how can I cure this person, fix them, change them? Later the question became a different one: how can I create a relationship this person can use for their own growth? The whole of “On Becoming a Person” grew out of that turn. Rogers writes it not as a scholar at a lectern but in the first person, as someone who tested everything on himself. Experience, he says, is the highest authority for him, above any theory, including his own. The book is a collection of his articles and lectures, and in each one he tests a single idea: a person changes not when they are corrected, but when they can be themselves in the presence of someone else.
Rogers was sure that this applies not only to the psychotherapist’s office. He carried his conclusions over to parents and children, teachers and students, managers and staff, and family life. That is why this book is about your life: why pretending pushes people apart, why acceptance is stronger than criticism, why an argument gets stuck, and how to stop living by other people’s expectations.
Six chapters lie ahead. They contain the mother of a difficult boy, who spoke about what mattered only when Rogers gave up; a simple rule for any argument; and the thought that a good life is more like a road than a destination. Let’s start with how Rogers realized he had been wrong.
The one who hurts knows where it hurts
Early in his career, Rogers worked at a child guidance clinic in Rochester. One day a boy with very difficult behavior was brought to him. The mother was an intelligent woman, and Rogers felt the cause was clear: in the boy’s early childhood she had rejected him. Session after session he gently led her toward this idea. Nothing worked.
In the end Rogers gave up. He said that they had both tried, but it seemed it was not working, and perhaps they should stop. The mother agreed, said goodbye and walked toward the door. But at the threshold she turned and asked whether the clinic also took adults. When he said yes, she said she would like help for herself. She came back to the chair and began to talk about her despair, the difficulties in her marriage, her sense of failure and confusion. Everything Rogers had so carefully explained to her before had nothing to do with this. The real work began only then, and in the end it proved successful.
From this case Rogers drew the idea on which his whole approach is built: the one who knows where it hurts is the person who is hurting, not the listener. He stated the idea directly: if he did not need to display his own intelligence and learning, it was better to trust the client to choose the direction. Rogers chose the word “client” rather than “patient” on purpose. The person is not an invalid to be repaired, but an adult who is searching for their own way.
Imagine a guide who leads you around a foreign city to the sight he has chosen. He is right about the beauty of the cathedral, but you needed the train station. That is what any help looks like when it already knows the answer in advance. A ready diagnosis, even a correct one, often turns out to be an answer to the wrong question.
The mistake we make all the time is confusing understanding with advice. It seems that once you see the cause, it is enough to name it. But a person who is told the cause before they are ready to see it usually defends themselves. That is exactly how the mother in Rochester defended herself, and while Rogers kept insisting, the conversation stood still.
What to take from this. When someone shares trouble, hold your explanation back for at least a few minutes. Ask what is hardest for them right now, and let them say where to begin. The conversation may go in a direction you did not plan at all. That will be the sign that the main thing has been heard.
About the author
Carl Rogers (1902–1987) was an American psychologist, one of the founders of humanistic psychology and the creator of an approach that puts the person at its center rather than a method. “On Becoming a Person” became his best-known book.
All books by this author: Carl Rogers
Terms from the book
- Empathy
- Rochester
- Kierkegaard
- Facade
- Client: The word Rogers used for a person who came for help, instead of “patient.” He wanted to stress that this was not a sick person but an adult who was looking for their own way.
- Congruence: Rogers’s term: the match between what a person experiences, what they are aware of in themselves, and what they show to others. For Rogers, this is one of the conditions for relationships that help.
- Unconditional positive regard: Rogers’s term: accepting a person as a whole, with all their feelings, without the condition “I will value you only if you become different.” This is not approval of every action.
- Openness to experience: Rogers’s term: readiness to notice and accept everything a person experiences, without defending against it or turning away from what is unpleasant.
- Fully functioning person: Rogers’s image of a person who moves toward a good life: open to experience, living in the present, and trusting themselves. A description of a direction, not an ideal and not a diagnosis.
All terms
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