It’s the quandary that just about every trainee on person-centred or humanistic courses asks (or, at least, thinks) on the first day of their training program… If human beings have a natural tendency towards self-healing, if they know what’s best for them, if they have an ‘organismic valuing potential’—why is it that we can end up in such messes in our lives?
An immediate answer might be that we have this natural tendency towards actualisation and growth, but it gets suppressed by the world and others around us. The problem with that, though, is that if we’re such actualising beings, why is it that that tendency so weak? Why does it just give up the ghost the moment it gets challenged? Not much of an actualising tendency!
Based on the work I’ve been doing for my new book: ‘Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social change’ (Sage, Feb 2019), here’s three inter-related answers that, for me at least, can help to resolve this quandary.
First, we might know and feel what we want and what’s best for us, but we don’t always know how best to get there. I know, for instance, that I want to be close to my friends, or that I want to feel calmer in my life—and that’s my internal, organismic sense of what’s best for me—but that doesn’t mean that I’ll always have the skills or tools to make that happen. With the best will in the world, sometimes we just haven’t learnt the best ways of doing things (I still haven’t learnt how to change a car tyre), or we’ve learnt ways of doing things that might have worked in the past, but don’t work in our present circumstances. Maybe I learnt as a boy, for instance, that the best way to make friends was to act cool and distant because people respected me that way, but as an adult what that actually does is just keep people away. And, of course, people who have been traumatised and deeply hurt in the past learn that, to keep themselves safe, they may need to do things like avoid relationships and intimacy altogether. That’s exactly what they might have needed to get through life as a kid, but as an adult, when the world is different, it’s now become a barrier to closeness. So although we can say that people are always striving to do their best, doing our best isn’t always the best thing that we could be doing. Sometimes we need to learn better ways towards getting the things that we really want and need in life: and that’s something that therapy can be great for. We start with working out what we really want—self-worth, relatedness, autonomy, safety, etc—and work back from there to think about how we might get it more effectively.
Second, sometimes the things that we want are pulling us in opposite directions, so that the more we actualise one potential in our lives, the more we can end up actually getting less of something else that is really important to us. For instance, we really want to make the most of every moment in our lives. We want to be always doing things and being active and engaging with the world around us; but then that takes us away from actualising our potential to have a calm, relaxed, and relatively sane existence. And, of course, the basic tension at the heart of person-centred theory can be understood in this way: that we really want people to like and value us, but the problem is, the more we strive for that, the more we end up doing things that don’t suit other parts of ourselves: for instance, our desire for creativity or freedom or being unique. Again, that’s where therapy can be really helpful because it can give us a chance to weigh up these different wants, and also to find ways of living our lives more ‘synergetically’: that is, getting more of what we most deeply want more of the time. For instance, if the problem is that we want to be really creative, but the people around us are judgey’ about that, then maybe we can come to see that we need different people around us in our lives so that we can get creativity and relatedness at the same time: they don’t need to pull in opposite ways.
And that brings us to the third possibility: that some times the world around us makes it really difficult for us to get to the places that we know and feel, deep down, we really want to get to. An asylum seeker, for instance, wants safety in her life, and to feel self-respect, but living in the midst of a racist social context makes it really difficult for her to get that. And note here, it’s not that her actualising tendency gets squashed or suppressed or goes away, it’s that, with the best will in the world, she can’t get to where she wants to be because her world is standing in her way. In fact, when we look at both of the two other answers above, they’re also very much about a person’s social context. So, for instance, we don’t learn from the world about how best to actualise our most important directions; or the world creates conditions for us (like judgemental friends) that means the actualisation of one direction means the undermining of another. Here, therapy can help us think about how we change our world; but, as in the case of the asylum-seeker above, it sometimes needs more than that. If the problems are obstacles in the world, it needs real social and political change—equality, social justice, ending racism, etc—to help more people get more of what they deeply want more of the time.
So, for me, it makes really good sense to say that people know, deep down, what they want in their lives, and what’s good for them. No-one can tell me that what I really need in my life is closeness, or becoming a writer, or caring for others. I know, ‘inside’, what works best for me, what feels right. But when it comes to me trying to actually achieve that, things can get a lot more complicated, and however much I might try and do my best, I’m not always, necessarily, doing the best thing that I could be doing. Sometimes, for the world I inhabit, it’s not always the most effective way, or the most synergetic way—and that’s where therapy is great. But sometimes, however smart I am, the world just isn’t going to let me get to where I know I want to be: and then we might need to change that world, through personal or collective action. As human beings, we can be amazingly smart, but that doesn’t mean we always get it right all of the time. Recognising that things can be better—both at the individual and at the social level—is what gives us our incredible capacity to grow.