Reading Rogers

This is a late entry. I'm aiming to provide a new post each Sunday — I envision it as a Sunday reflection, because that is the day I am typically in that more exploratory headspace. Since I became a therapist nearly 8 years or so ago, my Sundays have become more important to me. To me it is a day that I want to spend outdoors with my dog, by a body of water if the weather permits, and then usually cooking later in the day. This routine provides a sort of restorative energy for my nervous system, but it goes beyond that too. It is a space where I design times to nourish myself, my heart, my soul — I am okay with saying.

I do know that this past Sunday I spent a good part of the day thinking about Carl Rogers' Conditions for change, which he wrote about in a seminal psychotherapy paper in 1957. I reread the paper over the weekend — I have a hard copy that I printed out my first year of grad school, that I have lugged around in a file since.

I think a part of me was delaying writing about this subject because I wanted to do it justice, to really be with it experientially; I hadn't reread it in a few years now. But after reading it, I noticed that what I was paying more and more attention to was the quality of Rogers' language. It felt still very grounded, but I noticed a datedness in style that I hadn't paid as much attention to before. Even still, I find Rogers' conditions to be anchoring and timeless. If you have an interest in reading the paper, a simple search should pop it up. If anyone has read Rogers, then you would know that he has given so much thought and really lived through these conditions. For instance, his perspective on empathy is quite nuanced, and maybe not completely in vogue with how we think of empathy today. And to be congruent and genuine means being, to some degree in these moments, willing to offer oneself and one's emotional responses in accurate and honest ways. It's not so much something we manufacture, or a skill or technique to apply. It's more a way of how one orients internally, and then what filters through in interaction. Rogers trusted the client and their direction and leaning tendencies toward growth. I am intentionally being abstract here, because I don't want to turn this into a psych-ed post, but am reflecting more on my experience of reading Rogers.