Oh that There Was a Crucible for Unleashing!

When it comes to unleashing potentials, we’re talking about a very dynamic experience. Like a seed in a museum or laboratory, the potentials are there, just waiting for the right ingredients, yet in the meantime, nothing happens. So much of “nothing happens” in fact, that we are sometimes surprised when the critical variables are supplied (some soil, sun, and water) and suddenly that inert little seed that seemed so simple, so small, so insignificant begins to explode with life! Suddenly it becomes very dynamic.

When a beautiful flower, delicious food, or gigantic tree emerges from the seed, we go, “What happened?” “Where did all of that come from?” This is just as true for a human seed and even more true of a human mind, a human heart, and a human being. Who knows what possibilities might emerge? I’m sure those who saw and experienced the little blind and deaf girl named Helen had no idea of the potentials that were just awaiting to be awakened. And what awakened them? What got through the darkness and the silence? The feel of water on the hand and face and the movement of a finger “writing” a symbol for water. That’s when the magic occurred.

What are the variables in human experience for this kind of magic to occur? Do we need to study and research this question? Are there any clues about this? Actually, one of the key leaders in the Human Potential Movement has already researched and identified the critical success factors for awakening potentiality. I’m speaking about Carl Rogers. I’m also speaking about his classic work, Becoming a Person. While I read it two decades ago, until recently I didn’t have a clue as to the pioneering insights that he demonstrated in that work. It wasn’t that I had forgotten, it was that I didn’t have “ears to hear” his genius when I first read it. It took another two decades for me to be prepared.

So what’s in Becoming a Person? Rogers mostly argues from his psychotherapeutic practice and research through case studies that people who are hurt and struggling and even traumatized (his context was therapy) need involves three things: empathetic understanding, unconditional positive regard, and authenticity, genuineness, and congruency.

Rogers, the person who pioneered client-centered therapy, operated from the self-actualization premise that we are innately driven to grow, develop, and become all that we can become, that we have the necessary resources to do this, and that working with a client (even a therapy client) isn’t about doing things to him or her, but facilitating a context, atmosphere, and relationship that allows the client to show the direction.

“It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried. Unless I had a need to demonstrate my own cleverness and learning, I would do better to rely upon the client for the direction of movement in the process.” (Rogers, 1961, p. 12)

Rogers fully accepted the premises of self-actualization that Maslow had enunciated. He said that man’s nature is basically “positive” in nature, “is basically socialized, forward-moving, rational, and realistic.” (p. 91).

For Rogers, the variables that make for healing, for change, and for transformation are:

• 1) Empathy, accurate empathy, empathetic understanding of a person which accepts the person, understanding with a person and not just about him.
• 2) Positive unconditional regard for someone as a person, a non-possessive love, care, or warmth for the person.
• 3) Authenticity / genuineness, congruency: being real, honest, and forthright about what one thinks, feels, and experiences in the relationship so that one is congruent in communications.

Rogers, even more so than Maslow, believed so much in the natural organic nature of change that he argued that it should be completely non-directive. In fact, this became his calling card. For him, change just happens under good conditions.

“[Acceptance] seems to me to have value because the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change. . . . We cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.” (Rogers, 1961, p. 17 italics added)

To facilitate this organic nature of change, the therapist (or coach, helper, facilitator) uses his own authenticity and reality. The change-agent works first and foremost on self, not other.

“The more I am simply willing to be myself and the more I am willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person, the more change seems to be stirred up. It is a very paradoxical thing— that to the degree that each one of us is willing to be himself, then he finds not only himself changing but he finds that other people to whom he relates are also changing.” (p. 21)

For Rogers, the facilitator’s own authenticity and being-ness is his or her primary tool.

“Personal change is facilitated when the psychotherapist is what he is, when in the relationship with his client he is genuine and without ‘front’ or facade, openly being the feeling and attitudes which at that moment are flowing in him. The more genuine and congruent the therapist in the relationship, the more probability there is that change in personality in the client will occur.” (p. 62)

What creates the “space” —the atmosphere, the context, and the crucible for self-actualizing growth and unleashing to occur is the acceptance, care, concern, and warm regard.

“The more acceptance and liking I feel toward this individual, the more I will be creating a relationship which he can use. By acceptance I mean a warm regard for him as a person of unconditional self-worth—of value no matter what his condition, behavior or feelings. I feel a continuing desire to understand—a sensitive empathy with each of the client’s feelings and communications as they seem to him at that moment.” (p. 33).

What further creates the special space is the belief in the client’s potentialities and behaving toward him or her in that way.

“If I accept him [my client] as a process of becoming, then I am doing what I can to confirm or make real his potentialities. If I see this as his potentiality, he tends to act in ways which support this hypothesis. If I see a relationship as an opportunity to reinforce all that he is, the person that he is with all his existent potentialities, then he tends to act in ways which support this hypothesis.” (p. 55, 56)

All of these critical factors creates a crucible wherein transformation can occur. Here, by listening empathetically to the person enables that person to begin to learn how to listen to him or herself in an accepting way. That cuts out the judgment (the negative meta-stating that creates dragons) and begins to set frames for discovery and understanding. Rogers says frees the person from rigidity, fixity, and impersonality of functioning.

What is a crucible? It’s a place where we hold hot and intense emotions, thoughts, energies, needs, wants, desires, hopes, fears, angers, etc. Rogers doesn’t use the metaphor of a crucible, but that of climate and atmosphere:

“My aim has been to provide a climate which contains as much of safety, of warmth, empathetic understanding, as I can genuinely find in myself to give. Away from facades: move away from a self that one is not. Away from oughts. Away from meeting expectations, from the enormous pressures to become the characteristics expected. Away from pleasing others. Toward self- direction: becoming responsible for oneself, deciding what activities and ways of behaving having meaning for you, and what do not. Toward being process: fluidity, changing. An existing individual is constantly in process of becoming.” (p. 167)

The crucible of human change, transformation, and unleashing starts here, but it doesn’t end here. There’s more to a crucible, things that Rogers missed, and that’s the subject of the next Reflection.