The Autonomy of Person, Making Mistakes and Carl Rogers

Life is full of choices. Through the decisions we made, from little ones to vital ones, we are drawing our ways in life. But do we have a choice about everything? Aren’t there things we can't choose to get rid of and things we can't stop to affect our actions?

According to the founder of person-centered therapy, Carl Rogers, people are completely autonomous individuals who are fully responsible for their actions. They are capable of being aware of their potential and use it for the good of themselves. Some might think that it is not fair to put all the responsibility on people who are tiny little members of huge world orders under the influence of thousands of variables. Mega factors aside, sometimes people are incapable of controlling even their own body and health. It is easy to imagine a simple headache and how it affects everything. Moreover, doesn't responsibility bring guilt? Isn't it a relief for us to say, "I have no fault in this” when things go wrong? So, why Carl Rogers put emphasis on the autonomy of the person, and why he found it as an important factor of the therapy? 

Carl Rogers has a very comprehensive theory that needs to be considered as a whole. To him, the autonomy of the person has mainly positive meaning and is more than taking responsibility for actions. It represents the power of a person to change himself and to move towards better by himself. Thus, Carl Rogers reveals his confidence in man in shaping his own life. One might remember it with his presumption of “actualizing tendency”. He defines it as an inherent force of living organisms that makes them pursue better.  For this reason, person-centered therapy specifically and sensitively stays back from orienting the client's life and decisions. Because it believes that individuals know the best for themselves and they are the only ones who could determine their lives truly. But what about choices bearing results we regret? Here, I found it valuable to consider a phrase of him;

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.

(Rogers, 1967, p. 187)

Neither losses nor gains, Carl Rogers emphasizes the continuity of man in a direction he determines himself. This direction does not have an endpoint or final goal. A person constantly changes and develops in that direction. It is possible to imagine this as a pathway we are going through, where there is no end but full of experiences that we engage in throughout the way. Sometimes we can fall, sometimes we can encounter difficulties but the travel and the experiences of it go on. 

The phrase continues:

The direction is that which is selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction.

And again, the freedom of choices… In a way, he pushes us to take responsibility and own our actions no matter what the consequences are. Because this helps a person to be aware of himself and the direction he chooses. To him, awareness of one’s own potential and instinct motivation is important because they are drives for start and continuity in a self-determined direction. 

Let’s consider the first questions that I asked about things we are not able to control (one might think these uncontrollable variables prevent a person to move towards better) or completely different conditions in which people born:

For sure, Carl Rogers was aware of external factors and their differential effects on people. That is why, when he talks about actualizing tendency, he made a distinction between rich and poor social-environmental conditions. Here, Carl Rogers is sadly realistic about the inverse effect of poor conditions. How does he explain it? Let's take a look at actualization tendency once again. He characterizes the actualizing tendency also by one's effort to be free of the control of external factors. So, part of the actualizing process, according to Rogers, is being free as an individual, specifically, he emphasizes psychological freedom. However, poor conditions may prevent it, especially social conditions including conditional positive regard. Because conditional regard teaches the person to act upon external variables rather than instinctive motivational sources, it prevents the person to develop an autonomous self. The person learns to evaluate his experiences based on the reactions of his social environment. If the significant others show positive regard to behavior or attitude, the person acknowledges this action, if they respond negatively, he thinks he has made a mistake and does not repeat the action. Over time, the person moves away from his inner actualization tendency and motivations and moves in the direction shaped by external factors. He loses his autonomy and his inherent tendency to fulfill his potential cannot function. Because the path he takes is not his own choice. At this point, the difference between his inner motivation and his actions leads to psychological vulnerabilities. It causes self-defensiveness and does not let him be open to new experiences (Patterson & Joseph, 2007). 

Relying heavily on external sources causes the person to give up internal evaluation processes, too. As it is mentioned before, self-awareness and self-concept are important for the Rogerian approach because they are keys to build self–determined direction. Here, the person starts to form his self-worth according to external cues and it is an invitation to many psychological disorders. 

So, to answer the question, yes, conditions we have born in or grow with affects us because they may prevent us to explore ourselves and teach us to be dependent on others' judgments. It leads to psychological defensiveness that hides our tendency. Luckily though, we all have the capacity for self-growth and development, and this capacity will be eventually activated in the right conditions. To Rogers, a social and psychological climate characterized by unconditional positive regard, acceptance, and empathy will help the person to give up his defensive and passive attitude towards himself and the world, and help him to discover himself and his life in details including all the dissatisfactions, fears, waves of anger and everything else (Rogers, 1957). This will be the start point of change and development. Let’s look at it with Rogers’ own words:

For the client, this optimal therapy has meant an exploration of increasingly strange and unknown and dangerous feelings in himself; the exploration proving possible only because he is gradually realizing that he is accepted unconditionally. Thus, he becomes acquainted with elements of his experience which have in the past been denied to awareness as too threatening, too damaging to the structure of the self. He finds himself experiencing these feelings fully, completely, in the relationship, so that for the moment he is his fear, or his anger, or his tenderness, or his strength. And as he lives and accepts these widely varied feelings, in all their degrees of intensity, he discovers that he has experienced himself, that he is all these feelings. He finds his behavior changing in constructive fashion in accordance with his newly experienced and newly accepted self. He approaches the realization that he no longer needs to fear what experience may hold but can welcome it freely as a part of his changing and developing self.

(Rogers, 1962, p.22)

Looking back now, we may recognize that there is an existential side to Rogers' approach. Although it may be found scary at first that Rogers defines the person as fully autonomous and fully responsible for their lives, in fact, there is no wrong in making mistakes in his teaching. Therefore, taking responsibility for mistakes is not a scary situation either. In contrast, it is honorable and deserves respect. Life is a process including full of experiences of both success and failure, love and hate, fear and courage. Make mistakes and don’t afraid to embrace them. Because mistakes and feelings born with them are part of your developing self. If you don’t own your actions, it will pass by your self-awareness and you can do nothing with it. They will be missed opportunities to determine your direction. Simply, there is no place for regret, if there is, it needs to be experienced, too. 

When it comes to things that we are not able to control, pass them through your awareness system, internally evaluate, regulate, integrate with them and make them part of your direction. The important thing is not to let them govern you. 

References

Patterson, T. G., & Joseph, S. (2007). Person-Centered Personality Theory: Support from Self-Determination Theory And Positive Psychology. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 47(1), 117-139. doi:10.1177/0022167806293008

Rogers, C. R. (1957). Becoming a Person. Healing: Human and Divine: Man's Search for Health and Wholeness through Science, Faith, and Prayer., 57-67. doi:10.1037/10811-003

Rogers, C. R. (1962). Toward becoming a fully functioning person. Perceiving, Behaving, Becoming: A New Focus for Education., 21-33. doi:10.1037/14325-003

Rogers, C. R., Stevens, B., Gendlin, E. T., Shlien, J. M., & Van Dusen, W. (1967). Person to person: The problem of being human: A new trend in psychology. Lafayette, CA: Real People Press