Carl Rogers on Acceptance
Carl Rogers’ person-centered therapy has informed a lot of how we’ve developed Calm Collective’s training programs in enabling people to care for themselves and others. Here are some quotes from Carl Rogers that have provided inspiration and guidance over the years.
Accepting oneself is the first step to change:
"I find I am more effective when I can listen acceptantly to myself, and can be myself. ...I have learned to become more adequate in listening to myself; so that I know...what I am feeling at any given moment.
One way of putting this is that I feel I have become more adequate in letting myself be what I am....
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change."
Accepting another person’s differences:
"I have found it highly rewarding when I can accept another person.
I have found that truly to accept another person and his feelings is by no means an easy thing, any more than is understanding. Can I really permit another person to feel hostile toward me? Can I accept his anger as a real and legitimate part of himself? Can I accept him when he views life and its problems in a way quite different from mine? Can I accept him when he feels very positively toward me, admiring me and wanting to model himself after me? All this is involved in acceptance, and it does not come easy. I believe that it is an increasingly common pattern in our culture for each one of us to believe, "Every other person must feel and think and believe the same as I do." We find it very hard to permit our children or our parents or our spouses to feel differently than we do about particular issues or problems. …
Yet it has come to seem to me that this separateness of individuals, the right of each individual to utilize his experience in his own way and to discover his own meanings in it, - this is one of the most priceless potentialities of life.
When I can accept another person...then I am assisting him to become a person..."
On not fixing things:
"The more I am open to the realities in me and in the other person, the less do I find myself wishing to rush in to "fix things." As I try to listen to myself and the experiencing going on in me, and the more I try to extend that same listening attitude to another person, the more respect I feel for the complex processes of life. So I become less and less inclined to hurry in to fix things, to set goals, to mold people, to manipulate and push them in the way that I would like them to go. I am much more content simply to be myself and to let another person be himself. …
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."
