The Good Life: According to Carl R. Rogers
TL:DR
Disclaimers to the Good Life:
The Good Life is not a fixed state.
The Good Life is a direction, not a destination.
Characteristics of the Process for the Good Life
An increasing openness to experience – Que Sera Sera – Whatever will be will be type of living.
Increasingly existential living – More being and less doing.
Increasing amount of self-trust.
It is a process of becoming.
Implications of The Good Life:
Life may end up feeling more fated than self-determined.
You may end up interested in more creative pursuits.
You may assume positive intent from others and have more grace around differences.
You may end up living more fully and experience a wider range of feelings be that anger, fear, and sadness, yet also ecstasy, love, and courage.
In March, I read/listened to On Becoming a Person by Carl R. Rogers. Rogers was a psychologist and one of the founders of Humanistic Psychology, which is rooted in the premise of the client-centered or person-centered approach to psychology. This approached centers the humanity of the client allowing the client to be all of who they are openly and safely without trying to necessarily fix or diagnose. It is meant to look at each person as a whole being as they are in the present regardless of what may trouble them.
In his writing, he created The Fully Functioning Person, which was focused on what it may look like coming out on the other side of therapy. He later expanded it into what it may look like to live “The Good Life.” Last summer, I started considering why I wanted to be a life coach and what came up for me was the desire to help people find their version of the Good Life. So, I’ve had this chapter from On Becoming a Person rattling around in my brain.
I appreciate the disclaimers that Rogers provides. That feels like the best place to start. The first disclaimer, which Rogers refers to as “a negative observation,” is that “the good life is not any fixed state.” He goes on to say: “It is not, in my estimation, a state of virtue, or contentment, or nirvana, or happiness. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted, or fulfilled, or actualized.” He goes on to say that “the good life is a process, not a state of being.” This is, in my opinion, a crucial aspect to developing a relationship to the idea of The Good Life. It is a process. It is a journey. It is not some mountain that you climb where you stick a flag in the top and BAM you’re done. You are officially living The Good Life and only The Good Life from here on out. The Good Life shifts and morphs as you shift and morph as a human being. If we as human beings are always in a state of change, then so, too, is The Good Life and how we look at it.
The second disclaimer from Rogers: “It is a direction, not a destination.” Rogers states: “The direction which constitutes the good life is that which selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction. My simplification of this is that The Good Life isn’t linear. You may move in multiple directions. The Good Life will have lots of ups and downs and loops. I loved the TV Show A Good Place, which uses the measurement of Jeremy Bearimy to define non-linearity of time. I’m including the link because this is a very quirky and very niche take on non-linearity, which I think applies to The Good Life as well. Any time something comes up that is non-linear like doing the inner work and healing, I think of Jeremy Bearimy.
In short, the disclaimers are:
- The Good Life is not a fixed state.
- The Good Life is a direction, not a destination.
Now let’s get to what the process of a The Good Life looks like according to Carl Rogers with my take on it added in.
An Increasing Openness to Experience
I truly love what Rogers stated in this section.
“It is the polar opposite of defensiveness. Defensiveness I have described in the past as being the organism’s response to experiences which are perceived or anticipated as threatening, as incongruent with the individual’s existing picture of himself, or of himself in relationship to the world. These threatening experiences are temporarily rendered harmless by being distorted in awareness, or being denied awareness. I quite literally cannot see, with accuracy, those experiences, feelings, reactions in myself which are significantly at variance with the picture of myself which I already possess.”
The Good Life is moving away from defensiveness and moves toward an openness in experience. This makes me think of Kai Chang Thom’s take on conflict and how it relates to shadow work. She states: “When we are locked in what often feels like a life-or-death somatic experience of conflict, it is easy to fall into the belief that there is no common ground between oneself and one's enemy. We are on the side of good and they are on the side of evil. We could not be further from them in position, values, or moral standing.
“Yet when we are able to actually slow down and examine conflict more deeply, we often discover an internal tension that mirrors the conflict occurring in the external, interpersonal realm. We project our own shadow, our unwanted parts on our enemies, and they do the same to us. While it can result in polarization, when held with grace, it can also give way to generative unfoldings.”
Rogers says that an openness to experience and defensiveness are polar opposites. So, when we explore what is between those two points, we get to observe our relationship to our self-concept as it relates to our own individual shadow (incongruence with self or relationship to the world) and the internal conflict that creates (defensiveness). When we create a relationship with our shadow (unwanted parts), we dismantle the defensiveness (internal conflict) that we feel towards ourselves and others. The more we are able to own all the different parts of ourselves, the more we are able to be open to all experiences regardless of how they relate to our self-perception.
Another way to look at this might be in circumstances in which you yuck someone else’s yum. Openness does not suddenly mean that you’re into all the things that other people into. Openness means that you accept that there are things that you are into that others are not into and vice versa AND that that is ok. It also might mean that you explore things that you have never done before and previously judged as a “yuck” and find that you are into it or that it’s not your thing. All of it is ok and there’s nothing to judge about yourself or the other person (or people) just because they are into something you are not into. A person living The Good Life holds complexity at the forefront knowing that multiple things can be true at once.
I recently saw this reel on Instagram from Poet and Activist Andrea Gibson. They say:
“So, I believe we were all born astonished and we were never intended to grow out of our awe. And I think of awe as the most powerful medicine in the world because I have never ever felt awe and shame at the same time. Awe and loneliness at the same time. Awe and judgement at the same time and nothing has woken me to awe more than life’s brevity. Which is to say forming an intimate relationship with our mortality could not only help heal us, it could help heal our world and whenever somebody questions me on this, I say okay… well… Tell me the last time you saw anything bite with its jaw dropped.”
Increasing Existential Living
Increasing Existential Living is the premise of living in the moment. Living in the moment and showing up as present without any preconceived notions or expectations. Think of it like “C’est la vie” – That’s life or “Que Sera Sera” - Whatever will be will be. Allowing yourself to show up as you are in each moment. “What I will be in the next moment, and what I will do, grows out of that moment, and cannot be predicted in advance either by me or by others.”
Rogers goes on to say: “Such living in the moment means an absence of rigidity, of tight organization, of the imposition of structure on experience. It means instead of a maximum of adaptability, a discovery of structure in experience, a flowing, changing organization of self and personality.” It makes me think of going on a vacation and not planning anything and just letting each day flow from one moment to next, but living that way every day.
Quick note: Rogers’ uses the he pronoun a lot is his writing, so please take that with a grain of salt and use your own pronoun in its place.
An Increasing Trust in His Organism
In short, this means that a person living The Good Life has developed an increasing amount of self-trust. “…if they are open to their experience, doing what ‘feels right’ proves to be a competent and trustworthy guide to behavior which is truly satisfying.” Rogers mentions subjectivity and this feels important. It is a moving away from viewing opinions as objective and moving towards viewing more things as subjective. It is trusting your experience as truth and allowing for the subjectivity of that truth to exist.
“The individual is becoming more able to listen to himself, to experience what is going on within himself. He is more open to his feelings of fear and discouragement and pain. He is also more open to his feelings of courage and tenderness and awe. He is free to live his feelings subjectively, as they exist in him, and also free to be aware of these feelings. He is more able fully to live the experiences of his organism rather than shutting them out of awareness.” When a person is living in the moment, that person trusts that how they showed up was what was needed in that moment without judging, ruminating, or changing it.
“As they become more open to all of their experiences, they find it increasingly possible to trust their reactions. If they “feel like” expressing anger they do so and find that this comes out satisfactorily, because they are equally alive to all of their other desires for affection, affiliation, and relationship.
How might you be aware that you are moving away from The Good Life? The keyword is satisfying. If you are making choices in which you find that you are not feeling satisfied, then it is likely time to reflect on what choices would allow you to feel satisfaction.
The Process of Functioning More Fully
I am going to quote this entire section from the book.
“I should like to draw together these three threads describing the process of the good life into a more coherent picture. It appears that the person who is psychologically free moves in the direction of becoming a more fully functioning person. He is more able to live fully in and with each and all of his feelings and reactions. He makes increasing use of all of his organic equipment to sense, as accurately as possible, the existential situation within and without. He makes use of all of the information his nervous system can thus supply, using it in awareness, but recognizing that his total organism may be, and often is wiser than his awareness. He is more able to permit his total organism to function freely in all its complexity in selecting, from the multitude of possibilities, that behavior which in this moment of time will be most generally and genuinely satisfying. He is able to put more trust in his organism in this functioning, not because it is infallible, but because he can be fully open to the consequences of each of his actions and correct them if they prove to be less than satisfying.
“He is more able to experience all of his feelings, and is less afraid of any of his feelings; he is his own sifter of evidence, and is more open to evidence from all sources; he is completely engaged in the process of being and becoming himself, and thus discovers that he is soundly and realistically social; he lives more completely in this moment, but learns that this is the soundest living for all time. He is becoming a more fully functioning organism, and because of the awareness of himself which flow freely in and through his experience, he is becoming a more fully functioning person.”
Implications of The Good Life
You may end up feeling like life has been determined for you (fated) instead of it being of your own free will. “The more the person is living the good life, the more he will experience freedom of choice, and the more his choices will be effectively implemented in his behavior.”
You may end up exploring your creativity more through a multitude of medias when living The Good Life. “A person who is involved in the directional process which I have termed ‘the good life’ is a creative person. With his sensitive openness to his world, his trust of his own ability to form new relationships with his environment, he would be the type of person from whom creative products and creative living emerge.”
You may develop a basic trustworthiness of human nature with the Good Life. As you develop a better sense of self within the Good Life, it is more likely that you will be able to see the good in people and assume positive intent while dealing with other people. “Man’s behavior is exquisitely rational, moving with subtle and ordered complexity toward the goals his organism is endeavoring to achieve. The tragedy for most of us is that our defenses keep us from being aware of this rationality, so that consciously we are moving in one direction, while organismically we are moving in another.
You may end up living a richer life. “To be a part of this process means that one is involved in the frequently frightening and frequently satisfying experience of a more sensitive living, with greater range, greater variety, greater richness. It seems to me that clients who have moved significantly in therapy live more intimately with their feelings of pain, but also more vividly with their feelings of ecstasy; that anger is more clearly felt, but so also is love; that fear is an experience they know more deeply, but so is courage. And the reason they can thus live fully in a wider range is that they have this underlying confidence in themselves as trustworthy instruments for encountering life… This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one’s potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming.”
I took an End-of-Life Doula training this past May. We talked a lot about what it means to have a Good Death. A Good Death is very personal and will be different from person to person. One element of a Good Death may be reviewing the dying person’s RUGS: Regrets, Unfinished Business, Guilt, and Shame. On our death beds, when we are face to face with our mortality, we go through our hopes, dreams, and heavy events. If the dying person is able to do so with openness and compassion, then, often they are able to find freedom from lays heavy upon them.
From my INELDA Training Manual:
Regrets
Disappointment over something that has happened or been done
A lost or missed opportunity
Often experienced as “if only,” “I should have,” “I could have”
Unfinished Business
Something that a person needs to deal with or work on
Something that has not yet been done, dealt with, or completed
Guilt
An emotion of conflict one feels after doing something they believe they should not have done
Often experienced as “I did something bad”
Shame
An unpleasant self-conscious emotion typically associated with a negative evaluation of the self
Often experienced as “I am bad”
Examining your own RUGS may help offer a little insight in to the areas of your life where you are sticking to your comfort zone at the expense of experiencing your life fully. Perhaps what also helps someone have a Good Death is to have a Good Life. One where you face your fears and your shadows in order to live The Good Life.
What do think? What would The Good Life feel and look like for you?
