approve. Fully functioning people are less prone to conform to the roles
dictated by societal expectations. It ’s not that fully functioning people are
rebellious. They may follow the traditional path of college, job, marriage,
and family, but only if each of these choices is consistent with their own
interests, values, and needs.
Fully functioning people experience their feelings more deeply and more
intensely than others. This applies to both positive and negative emotions.
Fully functioning people accept and express their anger. To do otherwisewould be to cut themselves off from their feelings. Because of this sensitivity,
these individuals experience a greater richness in their lives.
Anxiety and Defense
If we all have the potential to be fully functioning, constructive members of
society, why is there so much unhappiness in the world? Why doesn ’t every-
one get the maximum enjoyment out of life? Rogers was well aware that we
often fall short of becoming happy, fully functioning adults. The problem be-
gins when we experience anxiety and respond with various psychological de-
fenses. According to Rogers, anxiety results from coming into contact withinformation that is inconsistent with the way we think of ourselves. You
may believe that you are a good tennis player, a kind person, a good student,
or a pleasant conversationalist, but occasionally you receive information thatcontradicts this self-concept. For example, you may think of yourself as the
kind of person everybody likes. But one day you overhear someone say what
a jerk he thinks you are. How do you react?
Let’s first describe how a fully functioning person would react. If you were
fully functioning, you would accept the information. Here is someone who
does not like you. You might want to think about this new information for a
while and then incorporate it into your self-concept. You might recognize that,
although you are a fine person, not everyone is going to find you pleasant and
wonderful. Unfortunately, most of us are not capable of such a well-adjusted
reaction. More commonly, the information leads to anxiety. You believe you
are liked by everyone, and here is some evidence that not everyone likes you.
If the information is excessively threatening to your self-concept, the anx-
iety will be difficult to manage. This is where Rogers ’theory takes on a slight
Freudian flavor. Rogers proposed that we receive this threatening information
at a level somewhere below consciousness. Rogers called this process
subception rather than perception . If the information is not threatening, it
easily flows into awareness. But if it contradicts our self-concept, we ’ll rely
on defenses to keep the information from entering consciousness and therebykeep the anxiety at bay.
The most common defense is distortion . Returning to the example, you
might convince yourself that the person who called you a jerk was in a badmood or is just a rude person. In more extreme cases, you might even resort to
outright denial . No, you might convince yourself, he wasn ’t really talking about
me but about someone else with a name that sounds like mine. An interesting
twist to Rogers ’theory is that we can also become anxious when encountering
positive information if that information is inconsistent with our self-concept.Carl Rogers 281