But Rogers is just as interested in describing the healthy person. His term is "fully-functioning," and involves the following qualities:
1. Openness to experience. This is the opposite of defensiveness. It is the accurate perception of one's experiences in the world, including one's feelings. It also means being able to accept reality, again including one's feelings. Feelings are such an important part of openness because they convey organismic valuing. If you cannot be open to your feelings, you cannot be open to acualization.
2. Living in the here-and-now. Rogers, as a part of getting in touch with reality, insists that we not live in the past or the future -- the one is gone, and the other isn't here yet! The present is the only reality we have. Mind you, that doesn't mean we shouldn't remember and learn from our past. Neither does it mean we shouldn't plan or even day-dream about the future. Just recognize these things for what they are: memories and dreams, which we are experiencing here in the present.
3. Organismic trusting. We should allow ourselves to be guided by the organismic valuing process. We should trust ourselves, do what feels right, what comes natural. Keep in mind that Rogers meant trust your real self, not the neurotic self so many of us have become! In other words, organismic trusting assumes you are in contact with the actualizing tendency.
4. Freedom. Rogers felt that it was irrelevant whether or not people really have free will: We feel very much as if we do. This is not to say, of course, that we are free to do anything at all: We are surrounded by a deterministic universe, so that, flap my arms as much as I like, I will not fly like Superman. It means that we feel free when choices are available to us. Rogers says that the fully-functioning person acknowledges that feeling of freedom, and takes responsibility for his choices.
5. Creativity. If you feel free and responsible, you will act accordingly, and participate in the world. A fully-functioning person, in touch with acualization, will feel obliged by their nature to contribute to the actualization of others, even life itself. This can be through creativity in the arts or sciences, through social concern and parental love, or simply by doing one's best at one's job.
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armed with the twelve steps all things are possible
Jersey, Interesting article...can you tell us where you got it? Just wondering. I certainly do better if I live in the here and now, not the past or future.
It seems to me that, when I was taking my psychology courses, I read some of Rogers, but that was a couple of years ago and I can't remember who Rogers is. Who Rogers? and the source? Quite interesting article. I had to read that 'organismic valuing' a couple of times.
love in recovery,
amanda
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do your best and God does the rest, a step at a time
