Therapeutic Self-Actualization

If self-actualization is all about becoming our potentials, if it is about finding and activating our capabilities, then coaching that level of growth change makes perfect sense, does it not? We coach a person’s self-actualization by awakening him or her to the inner possibilities and then soundly challenge that person to make those possibilities real in everyday life.

We do this with healthy people who are ready for stretching and who are hungry for challenge. With their basic needs satisfied, they are not content with those gratifications. Another has need arised, the need for challenge. They want change. They long for adventure. They want to grow, to be more, to experience more, to shake things up, to be stretched. They want to contribute, to be a part of something bigger than themselves, to contribute to the world, to make a difference socially, and to leave a legacy. They have grown to the place where the meta-needs have kicked in.

We coach such self-actualiztion by holding a fierce existential conversation about the things that really matter, about things that get to the heart of the matter. “What’s your biggest dream? What’s even bigger than that? What are you doing today about actualizing that dream? How are you hold yourself back from it? How are you selling yourself short? How are you locking your potentials from fully blossoming? What’s impossible that you are going to do today? How are you playing yourself small? Are you ready to go for your highest and best?”

All of this presupposes a generous dose of ego-strength—the ability to look reality in the face without blinking. It presupposes the ability to be authentically strong and true to oneself and to not let oneself off the hook from self-responsibility. It presupposes a healthy personality.

But what about people who are hurt and damaged? What about people who don’t have such ego- strength, self-acceptance, self-confidence, self-esteem, self-initiative, and self-responsibility? What about people who suffer from the parenting errors of parents who never darkened the door of the Parenting 101 class?

• — Can we coach self-actualization as a form of therapy?
• — Can we use the self-actualization models to coach people who are not yet “up to average” and fully free to discover and be themselves?

Before we can explore these questions, we need to define what we mean by “therapy.” Therapy, which means healing, presupposes hurt, wounds, trauma, ego-defenses, etc. This brings up the subject of pathology—how human nature can become sick and distorted, how self-description and experience can become malformed. It also brings up the degree and extent of such malformations in human personality, how much therapy will a given person need?

Obviously, anything that facilitates growth, learning, and human maturization is a therapeutic influence. Here basic human kindness, acceptance and love are therapeutic forces. Here healthy communication that’s open, honest, and transparent is therapeutic. So also are supportive relationships that provide care, understanding, geniueness, listening, etc. In this, there are lots of therapeutic influences that we can activate and provide without being a trained therapist. Maslow spoke to this in Motivation and Personality (1954):

“Accepting this, it is our clear conviction that not only is every good human being potentially an unconscious therapist, but also we must accept the conclusion that we should approve of this, encourage it, teach it. Let people realize clearly that every time they threaten someone or humiliate or hurt unnecessarily or dominate or reject another human being, they become forces for the creation of psycho-pathology, even if these be small forces. Let them recognize also that every man who is kind, helpful, decent, psychologically democratic, affectionate, and warm, is a psycho-therapeutic force even though a small one.” (p. 254)

Yet such differs from the discipline, science, and art of Therapy as such. Psychotherapy, as a profession, arose at the end of the nineteenth century as a supplementary force to the medical profession. As medicine had been making tremendous strides to heal and cure physical aliments at that time, therapy sought to heal and cure mental-emotional and personal-interpersonal aliments. It sought to deal with the pathologies of the soul (psyche) and at first to address the disorders that made people unable to cope with reality, who were unable to get along with others, to work, or to even endure themselves.

From the point of view of Self-Actualization Psychology, therapy is for people in whom the natural growth tendency has been blocked or interfered with in some way. In some way or other, the organic developmental process of growing into a healthy, autonomous, authentic, self- actualizing person has been blocked. The person is stuck. Perhaps he is “living in the past.” Perhaps she is defensive and shut down. Perhaps he is delusional. Perhaps she is trying to “finish” some “old business” deemed unfinished.

Whatever the block, the interference, or distortion of the pathology, the person is not “okay,” not “up to average,” not in the present, not open, response-able, empowered, and doesn’t have the ego-strength to get beyond the block.

That’s why a competent and qualified therapist is needed. That’s why someone who understands normal human development, who can identify where the client is in the process, and who can create a relational context for the person is so critical. This context is mostly the creation of a therapeutic relationship wherein the person can experience the acceptance, understanding, and non-judgment that was missing from parents.

That’s why therapy almost inevitably tends to activate the transference of the client’s original feelings about parents and authority figures to the therapist. Failure to recognize this, as well as the “power” differential, the possibility of counter-transference, and one’s skill set for working with various levels of dysfunction and personality disordering are essential skills for the psychotherapist. Accordingly, most states and nations have established a set of criteria of study, experience, and testing to determine competency for therapists.

Can we use the coaching methodology in doing therapy with someone? Would this be a wise choice?