If people have a natural tendency to 'actualise' their potential, how is it we get so f...ed up?

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.

Critical parent or lazy slob? What's the real conflict at the heart of human being?

At the heart of each of the different approaches to therapy is an understanding of human beings in terms of a core inner conflict, and each one sees it in a slightly different way.

In the psychodynamic approaches, it's like a fight between a lecherous, aggressive drunk and a police officer who's wanting to keep the peace. And with a bossy, nasty magistrate pointing fingers over the police officer's shoulder.

In the humanistic approaches, it's like the battle between a free-spirited child and a critical, controlling parent who's worried what the neighbours will think.

In the existential approaches, it's like an argument between two disputants who cannot--and will not--seek a compromise. It doesn't matter what they're arguing about. You can guarantee that one of them will always disagree.

And in the CBT approaches, it's like a row between two flatmates: one a sensible, hardworking student (who's not averse to having fun), and the other a lazy slob who has never really developed the skills or confidence to make the most of things.

Which model is right? When you look at it this way, it's clear that there's no right or wrong, because all these different kinds of conflicts can happen between people--and within people--and there's no reason to think that only ever one of them is the 'right' one. Sometimes, we're lazy and need to give ourselves a kick, sometimes we clamp down on ourselves too much, sometimes we just can't stop arguing with ourselves and need to accept that there's always going to be some element of that. And when we view people in terms of all these possibilities, we get so much more of a richer view of human being than any one perspective can provide on its own.  All our theories are great, but they're even greater when we see them as a rich diversity of resources that we can draw on in helping to understand clients, rather than as exclusive truths. 

Choosing Your Research Topic: Some Pointers

If you're doing a research project in counselling, psychotherapy, or counselling psychology, choosing your topic can be one of the hardest things to get right. And often one of the things you get the least advice on. So how should you go about it?

Read through previous counselling/psychotherapy/counselling psychology research theses

Invaluable! Essential! Probably the most useful thing you can do to get you started. This will give you a real sense of the ‘shape’ of a research study in this field, what is expected of you, and the kinds of questions that you might want to ask.  Should be in your college library or ask a tutor.

originalITY is not everything

Often, in my experience, students come into Master’s or doctoral research projects thinking, ‘I must do something original… I must do something original.’ So they work away at finding some dark corner somewhere that no-one has ever looked into before. Of course, there does need to be originality in your research, but if you’re burrowing away into a corner somewhere then there’s a real danger that no-one else is going to be particularly interested in where you’re going—you’re off into a world of your own. So instead of asking yourself, ‘What can I do that no-one else has ever done before?’ ask yourself, ‘What can I do that builds on what has been done before?’ And that means…

…Get a sense of the field

What are the key questions being asked in your field today?  What are the issues that matter and that are of relevance to practice?  It’s great to draw on your own interests and experiences, but also make sure you develop some familiarity with the field as it currently stands.  This will help to ensure that your research is topical and relevant—of interest and importance to the wider field as well as yourself.  A great thing to do can be to find out what your tutors are researching and what they see as the key issues in the current field.  And do remember that there may be the possibility of developing your project alongside them in some way, so that you can contribute to a particular national- or international-level research initiative.

Also, right from the start, think about how your work and your research question might have the capacity to influence practice and policy.  This may be the biggest research project you’ll ever do.  So make it count.  Think about doing something that can really help others learn how to improve their practice, perhaps with a particular group of clients, or with respect to a particular method.  If it’s a doctoral level project, you’ll become a leading expert in that field, and you’ll be in a position to teach the rest of us how to be more helpful.  So think about what you’d like to find out about, which you can then disseminate to the field as a whole.

If you want to make your research count, have a really long think before you dive into doing research on therapists’ experiences or perceptions.  Lots of students study this: it’s reflexive, and it’s a relatively easy group to access.  But it also raises the question of how interested people are really going to be in how therapists’ see things.  After all, we’ve all been trained in particular beliefs and assumptions, so if we’re the subject of research, we’re often just going to reiterate what we’ve been taught to think.  Generally, clients make a much more worthwhile participant group, because you’re hearing first hand what it’s really like in therapy, and what works and what doesn’t.

Consult the literature

Once you’ve got some idea of what you’d like to look at, find out how other people have tried to answer that question. If no-one has tried to answer it before, that’s great, but you need to be really sure about that before going on to furrow your own path—after all, you don’t want to get to the end of your research to find out that somebody ‘discovered’ the same thing as you decades ago. So have a look on Google Scholar, and particularly on social science search engines like PsychInfo. Undertaking such searches also ensures that your research will be embedded within the wider research field, and it may well give you ideas about the kinds of questions that are timely to ask.

Make sure it's related to therapeutic practice

Choose a topic which is related, at least in some way, to the field of therapeutic practice. Most directly, this may include things like: clients’ experiences of helpful and unhelpful factors, how psychological interventions are perceived from those outside the field, or the applied role of counselling in such fields as education. Exploring people’s experiences of a particular phenomenon—for instance, women’s experiences of birth trauma—can also be related to therapeutic practice, but just be clear what the association might be. For instance, could that help therapists know how to work most effectively with that client group, or to know what issues to be sensitized to.

Find yourself a clearly-defined question

Try to find a single, clearly defined question as the basis for your study (see my Research Aims and Questions pointers). This can then serve as your title. If you can't encapsulate your research project into a single question/sentence at some point, the chances are, you're probably not clear about exactly what it is you are asking.

That's ‘question’, not ‘questions’

One of the biggest problems students face is that they ask too many inter-related questions, with too many constructs of interest, and therefore get very muddled in what they are doing. For instance, they’re interested in attachment styles, and how it relates to dropout as mediated by the client’s personality in EMDR for trauma. But that’s five different constructs (attachment styles, dropout, personality types, EMDR, trauma—and, indeed, a sixth implicit one, which is the outcomes of EMDR for trauma), and generally you want to focus down on just one or two constructs (particularly in qualitative research), or maybe three at most if you are doing quantitative. So, for instance, you could focus on how attachment style influences dropout, or how clients experience EMDR for trauma, or the role of personality styles in mediating outcomes in EMDR for trauma. Or you could even just focus down on how clients experience dropout. All nice, straightforward questions that you can really get into at Master’s or doctoral level depth. So think about the constructs that you definitely want to focus in on, and let go of those that are maybe less central to your concerns. Of course, that’s difficult, and three of the main reasons why are given below—along with the things you may need to remind yourself of:

'I won't have enough material otherwise.'  Your word limit may seem like a lot, but you'll be amazed at how quickly it goes. If you just focus on one question, you will be able to go into it in a great amount of depth—far more appropriate to Master’s or doctoral study than trying to answer a number of questions and subsequently coming away with numerous superficial answers.

'There's lots of different aspects of this area that I'm interested in.' That's great, but you won't be able to cover it all in this one project. You can always do further research after this one. In limiting yourself to just one question, you may well experience feelings of loss or disappointment as you let go of areas you're really interested in, but it's better to feel that loss now than after you've put months of work into areas that are just too dispersed.

'I've already started to ask this other question, and I don't want to lose the reading that I've already done'. Again, it can be painful letting go of things, but there is no value in ‘throwing good money after bad.’ Sometimes in research you need to be brutal, and cut out areas of inquiry that don't fit in—even if you've sweated blood over them. Remember what authors say: the quality of their book is defined by what they leave out!

That’s ‘question’, not ‘answer’

Some of the most problematic projects come about when researchers try to show that a particular answer is the correct one, and consequently won’t let anything—including their own findings—get in their way. So if you really believe something about psychological therapies, like ‘person-centred therapy is much more effective than cognitive-behavioural therapy’, or ‘women make much better counselling psychologists than men’ then you may want to steer clear of this topic. That is, unless you can really get yourself into a frame of mind in which you are open to the possibility that you might find the absolute opposite of what you want—and you can enthusiastically write about the implications of this finding. Good research is like good therapy: you put to one side your own assumptions as much as possible, so that the reality of whatever you are encountering can come through. So, in trying to work out your research question, here’s something to really ask yourself:

What is the question that I genuinely don’t know the answer to (but would love to find out)?

And ‘genuinely’ here means genuinely. It means you really, actually, don’t know what the answer to that question is. If you can find that question, it’ll help enormously in your whole research project, because it’ll mean that you’re genuinely open to, and interested in, finding out what’s out there. That’s research!

But make sure there’s not too much literature on it

If you ask a question on which much has already been written—like the effectiveness of person-centred therapy—then you’re likely to be drowned in material before you even get to the end of the literature review. So narrow down your question—e.g. the effectiveness of advanced empathy in person-centred therapy—until you’ve got a manageable number of references in your sights. Don’t worry if it seems too few, you’ll no doubt pick up more references as you go along. And remember, you need to have full mastery of the literature regarding the question your asking, and it is a lot easier to master the information in five or six papers than it is in hundreds.

What’s often ideal is if you can move one step on from some pre-existing literature: e.g. extending a study about depression in men to looking at depression in women, testing out a theory that you’ve found in a book, or using qualitative research to address a question that has previously only been addressed through quantitative research. So don’t get too hung up on being totally ‘original’: in fact, if you try to be too original you can end up in a sea of confusion with no theoretical or methodological concepts to anchor yourself to. Having an original twist is often much more productive—you’re saying something new, but you’re building on what’s already been laid down.

Think methodology from the start

It’s no good coming up with a brilliant question if there is no way of actually answering it, or if answering it is going to be such a headache that you’ll wish that you never started in the first place. So as you come up with ideas, think about how feasible it might actually be to put them into practice. This is something you may really want to discuss early on with a colleague or research tutor.

Respondents MUST be accessible

In terms of the feasibility of the study, probably the most important question is whether or not you are actually going to get anyone to participate—to respond to your interviews, questionnaires, etc. It is essential to the success of your study that you get a good response rate, so thinking about who you do research with is often as important as thinking about what you do (see my research pointers here on recruiting participants). A number of factors will determine how good your response is likely to be: how big the population is in total, their motivation to help you, how easy it will be for you to get in touch with them, how cautious you will need to be as a consequence of ethical safeguards. So don’t just come up with an idea and hope blindly that someone out there will be interested. However hard you think it will be to get participants, you can guarantee that it will actually be several times harder than that, so make sure this is something you think about, and address, at an early stage.

Ethics come first

The principles of non-maleficence—doing no harm to your respondent—and, ideally, beneficence—promoting the respondent’s well-being—should be an integral part of your research design. So, right from the very start of your project, think about ways in which your research might benefit those that are involved; and also make sure that you have read and familiarised yourself with appropriate ethical guidelines, as well as any other sets of relevant standards.

Aside from ‘doing the right thing’, the issue of ethics will be an important one for you because, in any research study, you will need to submit your project to an ethics committee (see above), and the more sensitive your work, the more committees and the longer the time this is likely to take. For instance, if you wish to carry out research in the National Health Service, you will almost certainly need to go through an NHS ethics committee, which can take many months to consider and respond to proposals. So, as you start to develop your research ideas, be aware of the ethical issues and processes that it might raise, and try to find out about the ethical submissions that such a study is likely to entail. That way, you won’t suddenly find yourself facing a long and uncertain wait before you can proceed with your work -- or, if you do, at least you’ll be prepared for it.