so we're going to continue with our discussion of clinical personality theories today moving away from the psychoanalytic or de psychoanalytic theorists or the depth psychologists we're going to start to talk about the phenomenologists and the existentialists and so I need to lay down a little bit of background first and I think we'll start with a a discussion of phenomenology and existentialism now for the phenomenologist this is a tricky concept to grasp I think I'll actually start by telling you that something you something that Carl Jung wrote about in the last book he published which was called mysterium conjunction which means mysterious conjunction um he sort of believe posited that there was some extensions of moral development past the higher levels of moral development that PJ identified um and there were three of them and he said they could be symbolized by masculine feminine conjunctions or that they were in the literature that he had researched which was mostly alchemical literature from the late Middle Ages he said that one of the goals of moral development or of psychotherapy was to produce a union between the emotions and the motivations and and rationality and you can see that that's actually been a theme for all of the theorists that we've talked about so far I mean partly what Psychotherapy or personality development seems to be about is the continual integration of the personality so that the the persons the psyche isn't at odds with itself and it can move forward with a minimum of conflict that's something related to the pedian idea of an equilibrated state so if you're in an equilibrated State you don't have the sense that there are parts of you Waring against other parts because you've been able to weave everything together into a coherent identity that covers the past and the present and the future so the first stage in yung's vision of what constituted higher development was the of the of rationality with emotion and motivation and he saw that that was symbolized in the literature that he had reviewed by masculine Spirit feminine emotions and and motivation bang together in one thing so that then would be the United Mind and Spirit in a sense and then the next stage which was symbolized Again by the masculine feminine symbolism it was the un united mind spirit with the body and so what that would mean is that once you got your act together so to speak you would implement it in your behavior so that there was no contradictions between who you were in terms of how you thought and how you felt and what you wanted and what you were actually doing and modern philosophers have describe what they call a performative contradiction which they've forly described as another type of of lie essentially another type of Deceit which is that you say one thing and do another and it and it's interesting because it's not it's not a logical it's not a form of logical deceit in a sense because your conceptualizations are abstract and your behavior is concrete but there can still be a contradiction between the two especially when you start to understand that most of what your psyche is representing are schema for action rather than for representation so the point is is that once your emotions and your motivations are working alongside your rational mind really that your rational mind is properly nested within them because that's that's a much more accurate way of looking at it then the next thing you should do is act consistently in accordance with who you are so that's stage two both of those stages are pretty easy to understand but the third stage is is actually a phenomenological stage you have to think phenomenologically to understand it so here's here's one way of thinking about it so imagine that you go home and let's say you've set up a room and uh in that room it's not a very nice room you know maybe you've got some posters on the wall and they're sort of hanging a little cockeyed and you know there's dust bunnies are Ming underneath the bed and um you have piles of paperwork that you haven't done and you know homework and you know maybe there's the odd crust of bread or so forth lying about and when you walk in there it's you in the room that's one way of thinking about it but another way of thinking about it is that when you walk in there you are the room just like you're the room when you're here because the room makes up a part of what you're experiencing and the phenomenologist would say in a sense that the best way to conceptualize the self in its totality is what you experience like everything that you experience is you and so what that would mean is that there's no difference between putting the posters up on your wall properly and cleaning underneath the bed and maybe making it and finishing your homework and putting the room in order so that you feel confident and calm there and maybe so that you even enjoy being there or maybe even so that it's beautiful there there's no difference between that and fixing up your own personality so then you could say here's another way of looking at it and I I do this I believe that this is a very profound way of looking at things so then imagine that you could extend that Viewpoint it's kind of easy to understand when you think about it as your own room CU you're in there quite a lot and so maybe let's say you're in your room 10% of the day so we could say that the experiences that characterize your room are 10% of you at least for the time being and that you can have a low quality experience in there or a high quality experience in there um then let's say that you start generalizing that to the whole house you know so then you can start thinking well are there problematic places in the house are there problematic relationships among the people in the house and those problematic relationships are also used and you can tell when there's a problem because you encounter undesired negative emotion in the in relationship to some relationship or in some physical local within the house and maybe you could fix that you know little incremental bit by incremental bit you could work on that you could note that the negative emotion that you don't want to have a rise signifies something it signifies that that situation in some sense is nonoptimal and then you could work on strategies to optimize that and you don't do that until you stop making the presupposition that there's you and then there's the house it's like well the distinction between you and where you are is a very unclear distinction so then let's say you're walking down the street or you're going into a store and maybe your manners aren't as good as they could be because you know to be be really socially sophisticated is a real art you can learn it can take you decades to learn how to do that properly and people who are really really socially skilled have a much much higher quality existence because no matter where they go they immediately establish a relationship with the people that they're talking to and then it's not an impersonal and and dead or aggravating interaction so you know maybe they'll walk into a store and the first thing they do if someone comes up and helps them is they look at the person and you know ask them how they're doing and you know how their day has been and they make a little relationship and you know the person is kind of happy about that because it sort of Pops them out of their Persona role and then they can have a little discussion about what they're doing in the store and what they want and then all a sudden it's a high quality experience and that person everywhere they go if they're skilled like that so they're awake and they're attentive and they're listening everywhere they go they can have a high quality interaction you know and people who learn how to do that learn to do it partly by noticing when they're in an interaction with someone or somewhere that if it isn't going in an optimal manner or if it's producing undesired negative emotion then there's something wrong with the way that they're being in that situation and they pay attention to that and see if they can figure out how to modify it a lot of it is attention and listening which is there are key component say to rerry and Psychotherapy is attent attention and listening so you might say well so so you can go into your room and you can identify little problems that are in your room that you could fix that maybe you would fix and so then you could start fixing them and that improves the quality of that particular environment and then you can start to generalize Beyond you know the locals that are more specifically under your control because if you're walking down blur for example and you go into a store and you talk to a clerk well the probability is pretty high that the clerk is at least reasonably functional so you should be able to get beyond their barriers in a sense and have a genuine interaction with them without too much difficulty but then maybe you're wandering down blur and you run across someone who's schizophrenic and maybe alcoholic at the same time and well that's a part of your experience that might supersede your ability to transform right the the phenomenologists and and people like Rogers aren't making the claim that you should be able to solve every problem that you come across or even that you should try because there'll be things that you experience that are so complex and problematic that you might make them worse if you fiddle around with them you know you got to be very careful not to extend yourself dramatically beyond your skill level but you can certainly start in isolated locals and if you stop presum assuming a priority that there's some radical distinction between you and the environment that you happen to be in because it's all your experience if you stop making that subject object distinction which is one of the things the phenomenologists really objected to because they concentrated on being as such which was sort of lived experience as the ground of reality rather than the objective world is the ground of reality if you if you if you allow yourself to step outside that dichotomy and you start to understand that wherever you go including the places that you're in a lot that there's no distinction between fixing up those places when you notice that there's something wrong with them and you could fix them up and and fixing yourself up it's it it opens up a whole new Avenue to getting your life together because you know people always think they have to work on themselves it's like it's not this is one of the things that the psychoanalysts I think didn't get quite right although Yung touched on it in his later work it's there's not all of you isn't inside your head and for the psychoanalysts a lot of what the the work that you were doing on yourself was on your on the relationship say between your conscious and your unconscious mind but tremendous amount of that was sort of inside your skull so to speak but the phenomenologists the phenomenological approach enables you to start reconceptualizing the psyche if as something that extends Beyond you and and always will and so that you can work on its reconstruction at any level of analysis where your own nervous system is signaling to you that there's a problem and the way it does that is well it's a variety of ways but two of the most reliable ways are negative emotion there's a new paper for example that shows that conscientiousness is quite tight associated with proness to guilt so that's the negative emotion that seems to go with conscientiousness but so guilt and anxiety and shame and no sorts of emotions which are unpleasant also simultaneously signal the presence of a problem and so you and and and what resentment that's another good one so you can instead of having those emotions as enemies you say well I just want that to go away you can think okay there's my my my being my embodied being is signaling to me that something is nonoptimal here and then and then it's not an enemy it's it's because it's it's something that's trying to improve say the quality of your present experience and your future experience and if you don't push that aside or pretend it's not happening or assume instantaneously that it's the fault of the environment or the person that you're talking to then that can be incredibly instructive negative emotion is incredibly instructive but you have to adjust your attitude so that you understand that it's signaling to you the presence of corrective information if you could just figure out what that information is and that can come from anyone a person or a place or a thing or or or yourself or you don't need to make the distinctions you know and so if you're having an argument with your partner and it's not going very well I mean it there's a tremendous tendency among people to try to win the argument with their partner but you can't win an argument with your partner because then you win and they lose and then you have a loser on your hands and and if you do that a hundred times maybe you're better at arguing than they are for example or you know or maybe they think more in an intuitive way so they can't dance on their feet quite as fast as you or maybe the situation is reversed if you win the bloody argument a 100 times you're not a winner you're just someone who's beat up your partner a 100 times what you want to find out is what the hell is it that they're talking about and sometimes that takes a tremendous amount of patients and they should be doing the same thing to you because very frequently the things that people are arguing about are only the tiny it's like the snow on the surface of of a glacier the real argument is deep deep deep underneath and unless you listen intently and for a long period of time you'll never figure out what it is you're arguing about and then if you win the person won't be able to talk about it and that problem will be there for the rest of your relationship and maybe for the rest of your life like unless you solve the problem it's not going to go away now I'm going to start talking about Rogers specifically by by going over some of the things that he had to say about listening because I think I've learned more about listening from Rogers than from any other personality theorist or or psychotherapist that I've encountered now we we could go back to the fundamentals of psychotherapy I mean really what you're doing in in Psychotherapy is trying to help the person become a better person and that's not exactly a scientific formulation better person you know and it's a tricky thing to get at because people can be better persons in lots of different ways merely the fact that you're people vary in their temperaments indicate that you know your way of being a better person and your way of being a better person wouldn't necessarily be the same way you know because you it's like maybe someone's great on the violin another person's great on the piano the great is the same but but the instrument is different and and I and that's a good way of looking at it and so partly what you do in Psychotherapy and I think you do this in any genuine relationship is not only is the dialogue about how to become a better person the continuing dialogue is also always about just exactly what constitutes a better person so you're talking about the goal and the process at the same time and what you're doing is working it out so the the people go into the conversation with a specific orientation and the orientation is generally with client and therapist is the client comes with a with a problem their life isn't acceptable in its current form and they come with one more thing which is the desire to make it better and and something that you should all know because this will stop you from tangling yourself up in your life to a tremendous degree you cannot help someone who hasn't decided that they want things to be better unless they make the decision that they want to make things better forget it you're wasting your time and all it'll do is hurt you and and I should also tell you that that was one of rogers's necessary preconditions for Psychotherapy another one was honesty and communication but the the person who was coming in for the therapeutic process had to be there voluntarily and it's a weird thing and I don't know how to account for it but I don't think that you can talk someone who doesn't want to have things be better into wanting that they have to come to that decision on their own so they come in with having made that so it's for example it's very very difficult maybe it's impossible to do Psychotherapy with someone who's been remanded by the court you know because they're there involuntarily and they'll just put up a wall you know not always but a lot of the time they'll just put up a wall and just wait it out you know you're not going to get in there with a screwdriver and cry off that shell so the person has to step forward in a sense and say well you know there's something not right about the way things are going for me and it could be better and I and someone else might be able to help me figure that out so and that's a really good attitude to have by the way when you're listening to someone because disagree with them or not or agree with them or not there's always the possibility that they will tell you something you don't know and like lots of times when people are talking what they're trying to do is to impose their viewpoint on another person you hear conversations like this all the time they're arguments really and they're often ideological arguments it's like you're right and I'm wrong or sorry that never happens I'm right and you're wrong and I'm just going to hack at you until you shut up or you agree really you'll never agree because you just don't get someone to agree that way it's it's not possible but you might be able to cow them into silence or anger but that's a dominance hierarchy thing that's not a real conversation it's just just all you're doing is establishing that you're you know a lobster with bigger claws than than the person that you're trying to pick out a therapeutic conversation which is a genuine conversation is one in which both the people in the conversation are oriented towards a higher state of being while they're conversing and you can tell when you're in a conversation like that because it's very very engaging in fact if the conversation isn't engaging then that's a sign that you're not having a conversation and that's really useful thing to know too because here's another thing I could tell you that if you take to heart will save you an awful lot of grief and misery if you're talking to someone and they're not listening shut up just stop it's like you can tell if they're not listening and if they're not listening quit saying words it'll you'll just feel like a fool anyways because you're it's like you're throwing pingpong balls against a brick wall you know you're not getting anywhere if they're not listening that's a sign that the the S the situation isn't set up to allow you to progress on the path that you're choosing and so then you have to stop and you think okay well what what's going on here why is the person not listening you know am I being too forceful am I do they not understand what I'm saying is it too much about me um do they want to talk what's going on maybe they don't want to be here there's all sorts of possibilities but that's when you have to wake up past what it is that you're trying to impose on the situ situation and explore and see what's there and that's way more interesting than trying to impose your Viewpoint another thing is that if you're talking to someone you know I like to talk to people whose political beliefs are very different from mine because I can't really understand how someone's political beliefs can be really different than mine you know because I've got kind of a coherent representation of my beliefs but it's very interesting to talk to people who radically differ because they'll tell you things that you haven't considered that doesn't mean you have to agree with them but it's it's much more informative to walk away from a conversation Having learned something that you didn't know than it is having won the stupid argument which you can't win anyways and that's especially the case when you're dealing with people who are close to you that you H that you will have around for the rest of your life you cannot win an argument with them CU all that'll happen is if you win they'll get you back sooner or later they won't listen to you the next time you have something to talk about or or they'll get resentful and then they won't be helpful or it you just can't win an argument with someone that you will have repeated contact with what you can do however is you can have a conversation that's a real conversation and maybe you can come to terms about the thing that you're discussing and that's negotiation you know it's like well what do you want but you have to really want to know it's like you're we're having an argument okay what is it that I would have to do because we're having this argument what would I have to do in order to satisfy you you know and then other person will think well there's nothing you can do to satisfy me because you know I'm so mad at you it's like that's not helpful the other person has to think okay what are the conditions for my satisfaction you know so maybe you know your partner says you're not paying enough attention to me it's like all right what do you want exactly you know do you want to talk for 15 minutes at breakfast or do you want to talk for 20 minutes at lunch or do you want to spend an hour at night watching TV or or like do you want me to act differently when I come home and I'm at the door it's like you you're feeling unattended to what do you want well then they'll say well if you love me you should be able to figure that out yeah that's wrong cuz you're stupid you won't be able to figure that out cuz you know what the hell do you know so the other person unless they want to Corner you into just being the kind of loser who can't figure things out which is why are they with you then you know they need to think about that it's like oh hm what is it that I want from this person what would constitute more attention right and that's making the argument much more high resolution and then it it gives the other person a chance to actually respond and then you have to allow your partner to be a because of course they are so once you tell them what you want you have to let let them do it badly like 10 times because they're never going to do it right the first time so sometimes when I'm I've seen I've helped people sometimes with marital problems and one of the things I often recommend is that they they go on a date you know they take each other away from the their home where the kids are usually or maybe not maybe they don't have kids it doesn't matter and they do something that's just focused on each other you know and of course first of all they tell me they don't want to do that it's stupid it's like it isn't by the way it's not stupid it's like oh you don't want to go out and have an enjoyable time with your partner you think your relationship's going to survive when all you do is snipe at each other and and do horrible things together it's like well no that's not going to work so then they'll finally say okay we'll go on a date they'll both look disgusted by the whole idea and then they go and it's like it's just miserable right they like one person says something to the other that immediately sets them off when they're out on the date because they're kind of mad about going anyways and then they come back and go well that just didn't work and we're never going to do it again it's like no so you're telling me you're never going to go out and do something enjoyable with your partner again CU it didn't work very well it's like people don't think about it you know it's like so maybe when you take your partner out and you haven't been getting along it takes you like 10 times before you have it relatively okay time but 10 times if you're going to go out with them let's say I don't know let's say you go out with them every two weeks it's 25 times and let's say you're going to be with them for 30 years if you manage to you know get your act together so that's 30 * 25 so that's 750 times so if you practice 10 times then you might be able to have 740 good times out together you know and that's an underestimate so 10 times of practicing is hardly a problem for for that kind of return so this is all part of this rogerian like following this path is all part of this rogerian process of listening and listening is trying to figure out what the hell the other person is telling you and understanding at the same time that they don't know like especially if they're upset they're not even sure what they're upset about and they don't know what they want you know cuz you can you can Corner them by saying well you want to be attended to more what do you want and they'll try some weird defense like like I told you already like if you love me you'd already know which is a cliche and it's a foolish cliche so you can't let that stop you I should I should also tell you the sorts of barriers that people will put up if you listen to them too so so for example let me let me see if I can think about it for a bit yeah well usually what happens is if you're if you're pushing someone say but this is in a listening sort of way it's like what do you want why do you want that what would be the conditions of your satisfaction you're pushing them fairly hard to clearly articulate their concerns and sometimes they're afraid to do that and if you're trying to hash out an issue people usually have like five routines they can go through one is they block you with some you know cliche or they say something annoying and then maybe they've got one other verbal trick after that and then once you push through that then they cry or they get angry and if if you still don't stop then they stomp off and so if you're going to have a successful conversation about something difficult you need a routine for each of those it's like just because the person's angry doesn't mean the conversation is over and just because the person cries doesn't necessarily mean that you're a sadist it's often often tears are a trick they mask anger so and what the person is doing in part is they're using their motions as a exploratory technique to find out how important is this what what happens if I just break down will the person shut up and if the person shuts up they think oh it's not that important right because they they've been able to use a technique I'm not saying this is conscious it's it's it's deeper than conscious it's just how people rub up against each other when they're trying to figure out how things are structured and so if you quit when they get upset then they think oh well this thing isn't so important that it's worth this much upset but if you continue well then they'll run away well one of the things you have to do if you're in any kind of relationship is you got to make a rule which is you can leave but you got to come back like we're not done with this you can't run off because it's not it's it's it's it's breaking the the contract of the conversation you got to stay and hash it out so okay now I'm going to read you some of the things that Rogers talked about all right so one of the things he talked about is this idea called unconditional positive regard now I don't think that's a very good phrase because unconditional positive regard is one of those things that can be turned into a new age cliche in two seconds it's like well no matter what you do I'll love you it's like no there are lots of things you could do that that that that that is just that's just not going to Garner a lot of love so unconditional positive regard like it's not like there's not an idea behind that because there really is an idea behind that but it like like like I said it got all new Agy after Rogers formulated it and it sounds like well all you have to do is be consistently positive towards the person and you know they'll flourish it's like first of all you're going to have unconditional positive regard for Hitler it's like no and not only that you have a responsibility not to have unconditional positive regard for yourself or for other people because what you're trying to do is to make things better and so that means that the things that make things worse are bad you right if there's better there's got to be worse and if you're in favor of better then you have to be not in favor of worse so I'm going to untangle unconditional positive regard a bit and like I said I think Rogers used a his word choice wasn't very good here's here's the different way of thinking about it so if you're in a relationship with someone and this can even be a very short relationship it could be the sort of relationship you have when you go to talk to someone in a store like I said if you get sophisticated about it but let's assume it's a longer term relationship you have to decide if what if if you're going to have that person's best interests in mind when you have the conversation you got to have that as sort of the the Top Value in your value hard the reason we're talking is because I want things to be better not better for me you know may be better for me too but but the better for me is a subordinate part of the better the reason we're communicating is because we both want things to be better and then we both aren't absolutely sure what it would mean for things to be better we got to exchange information until we figure that out and neither of us are sure about how we're going to get there and so we have to exchange information until we figure out how to get there and that's that's the initial axiomatic precondition for a true conversation and that's unconditional positive regard it's like I I regard the person I'm talking with as someone who could transform in a positive direction and who's willing to attempt that and who will communicate to that end even though they might screw up and you know there's going to be things in the way and the sorts of things that the psychoanalysts talked about as resistance and then they're going to regard me the same way and you know I'm also going to make mistakes along the way so now Rogers pointed out that in order to to communicate with someone in that manner you had to be willing to put yourself in their shoes essentially and he said there you had to comprehend the alternative phenomen field so which is okay well I'm I'm here this is my viewpoint coming out from this place and now you have a Viewpoint and they're similar enough so that we can communicate about them but they're different enough so that they're not equivalent and the differences are actually meaningful so now I got to sort of Pop myself out of my framework put myself in yours and figure out where you're coming from and that's the goal of the conversation so sometimes that can even help you figure out where you're coming from you know cuz you can say well it sounds looks to me like you're really angry and the person will say well no I'm just I'm just uh I'm sad it's like well they're all red they look like they're going to bite you and say no no it really looks like I think you might be also a little bit angry and they'll be angry about you saying that of course but it it may also be that their emotions are so jumbled together in this sort of chaotic jumble that they don't actually know what it is that they're experiencing because it's it's this terrible unarticulated chaotic bodily state that is signaling something but that hasn't been articulated and so they're kind of a mess and your careful observation as long as they trust you and they should trust you if they know that you have their best interest whatever that is in mind or at least that you're trying that then they can trust you and then you can help them clarify what it is that they're feeling you know what's sort of coming up from the body and what that's associated with and what they'd like to do with it Roger says real communication occurs and the evaluative tendency avoided when we listen with understanding now the evaluative tendency he's talking about is well let's let's simplify this a little bit let's say I'm radically leftwing and I'm talking to someone who's radically right-wing and we start talking about something like uh um income distribution and the right-wing person says well let's say the leftwing person says well there's all these people at the bottom and they don't have a lot of money and and a lot of the reason that they're there is because you know theyve they've encountered very very harsh circumstances or maybe they have an illness or something like that and uh you know there's a real distribution of intelligence and so lots of times people are at the bottom because they just don't have the cognitive resources to climb and the right way Wier goes rubbish rubbish the reason that they're at the bottom is because you know they don't work hard enough and they don't take any care with with their long-term thinking and so the left Winger says well that's just Prejudice and the right winger says well you're just a bleeding heart liberal and poof that's the end of the conversation and that's the evaluative tendency it's like you just come away the same as you were when you entered the conversation there's been no exchange of information whatsoever all there's been is a hardening of prejudice and you can walk away feeling morally Superior because you know you demonstrated what a scum rat your opponent is and how morally upright you are well that's the evaluative tendency that's not a conversation that's going to lead to progress if anything it's going to lead to like increased feelings of prideful arrogance on your part because you know everything and on their part too and like increased polarization it's not a helpful way of communicating you know and this sort of thing as we'll see when we move into the more social and political consequences of um failure to communicate it's like that's a microcosm of what goes wrong in a society when it really starts to fall apart you know when the individuals within the society who have differing viewpoints can no longer communicate the whole society shakes and trembles and you can think about this from a democratic perspective too because you might say what's the purpose of Elections well people who are aligned with a particular ology think well we need to win the election because our Viewpoint is right but then you might ask yourself well why are there these other viewpoints and why do things go so bad when one Viewpoint dominates so heavily that everyone who has the other Viewpoint you know gets shot that seems like a bad thing so what exactly is going on in a democratic State and what's going on is that there is all these different viewpoints and a lot of them are temperamentally informed so we know for example that liberals are higher in openness and lower in conscientiousness than conservatives and so the conservatives are conscientious but they're not very creative and open so they're good at running things they're really good at running they're good at being managers and administrators for example but they're not very good at being Innovative the Liberals are good at being Innovative because they're open but they're not very conscientious so like and that they they have to be less conscientious in some ways if they're going to be created because conscientiousness can constrain creativity and so for the society to work properly the people with the liberal temperament the conservative temperament have to interact with each other because the Liberals think up all the new companies and the conservatives run them so and then in the political State per se it's like conscientiousness is a virtue although it if it's it exaggerated too much especially the orderly part then it can become tyranny and openness is a virtue too but you don't want every bloody thing changing every second so there's got to be some constant negotiated piece between order and Innovation and the way that that happens is that the two sides communicate it isn't that one side wins or the other side wins it's that the dialogue stays open so that the viewpoints can be represented properly and so that as the environment moves because sometimes maybe the environment is such that being conscientious is going to be better and sometimes it's going to be the environment has moved so that openness is going to be better because the environment moves the conversation has to track those movements so the society stays healthy across time and the same thing applies in any kind of long-term relationship it's like you marry someone now you've got two brains and they don't work the same it's like you want to have two brains or do you want to have one that's the first question you're going to do a lot better with two so and then so how do you optimize the functioning of the two brains well obviously they've got a community communicate you know there's got to be freedom of expression and there has to be listening so that's the evaluative tendency which is you're wrong before I even know what you're talking about at least I should know what the hell you're talking about before I decide if you're wrong and so back to the poverty issue it's like well what predicts poverty well the sorts of things that the left Winger talks about that predicts Pro poverty so do the sorts of things that the right-winger talks about so if you're really unconscientious and that makes you kind of you makes you the sort of person that will rely on others to do the work if you're unconscientious you're much more likely to be poor and so that's a real social policy problem too because you have this horrible problem where you have to sort out what's causing the poverty you know and who's taking advantage of the attempts to alleviate it as well as figuring out so so that's more of an individual temper government problem which is what the conservatives are concerned about and then you also have to figure out how to address it on a social level which of course the conservatives don't like to think about but it's not like either side has nothing to say there's information in both those perspectives it's problematic though because when you put them together the phenomena becomes paradoxical and then it's very difficult to come up with a solution it challenges your cognitive resources and what the conservative and the liberal want to do is just simplify it down to one explanation it's sociological that's the liberal it's temperamental that's the conservative and so then they have one answer to how it can be fixed we should fix Society that's the liberal those people should just get their act together that's the conservative it's like yeah well fair enough except probably the problem is complicated enough so there's more than one solution necessary since it's not even a problem right poverty is not a problem poverty is like 10,000 problems and some of them aren't even associated with each other you know like there's the the poverty that's a consequence of alcoholism that's not the same poverty that's a consequence of say very low intelligence and that's a completely different poverty than the non-c conscientious poverty or the abuse poverty or and there's no reason to assume whatsoever that those should be amenable to the same Solutions real communication occurs and the evaluative tendency avoided when we listen with understanding understanding that's an interesting word because you might ask yourself what do you mean when you understand and it's got this sort of physical aspect to it right that's the stand and then there's the underp part which sort of implies that to understand something is to be under it and standing and so partly what happens is if if I can listen to you with understanding what that means is that I get a clear enough picture of what you want so that I could change the way that I am that I am maybe the way I look at things like the perceptual scheme through which I view the world but also my actions and if I can extract that from you then I understand I would be able to take what you told me and change myself if I felt that was appropriate or maybe it would just happen automatically because now I have a deep understanding of you people are afraid of that right because let's say you've got yourself all hemmed in with some ideology and you're feeling pretty secure about that and then you listen to some dim wit who's got completely the opposite perspective from you and you listen hard and all of a sudden you got cracks in your system you know and then you have to think oh maybe things are more complicated than I thought they were everything isn't all tied together in this neat little package and that can be unsettling it's unsettling in fact if you're listening to someone and you're really listening and you're not being unsettled the probability is pretty high either that you're not listening or that you're not talking about anything of real consequence because if it's important and you're listening it's going to shift you you know so there's this it's going to set you into that at least a little bit into that state of chaos and what you're doing then just so you know is that instead of identifying with who you were which is the person that you were before the conversation you're identifying with the person you could be as you move through the conversation and that's a way better thing to identify with you know you going to identify with your beliefs this is a pan idea are you going to identify with your beliefs or you going to identify with the process that allows you to generate beliefs and often those things are in contradiction cuz if you identify with the process that allows you to change your beliefs then you're you're you're assaulting your beliefs even though you might be correcting them but it's it's it it's demanding to do that because you're reconfiguring your physiology and there's an intermediary period of uncertainty that goes along with that what if they're right well then what it's like yeah well then what real communication occurs in the evaluative tendency avoided when we listen with understanding what does this mean it means to see the expressed idea and attitude from the other person's point of view to sense how it feels to him to achieve his frame of reference in regard to the thing he is talking about so there's also Rogers is very emphasizes very much the idea of embodiment so you can listen to someone you can listen to their arguments with your mind it's a very logical process it's sort of a rational and logical process and in some sense that's what you're taught to do for example when you debate and the idea there is that you know the argument is is a cognitive phenomena and that the the logic is structured in a logical way and that the way that the argument is settled by is by the exchange of information and the relative coherence of the two perspectiv it's a very rationalist IC perspective and it's very useful to be able to debate don't get me wrong and and to have your mind organized so that you can put forward a logical arguments like that's why you're in University so to learn how to do that believe it or not and but it's not the same sort of thing that Rogers is after because when Rogers talks about the interactions between people it's embodied so like if I'm really watching you when I'm talking to you paying attention to your face you're going to be like expressing emotions with your face screen because that's what it does right your face expresses emotions so that other people can infer what it is that you're up to even more than you know cuz if you knew you could just tell them you wouldn't even need emotions but what the hell do you know about what you want that's why you're having a conversation with someone to figure it out so you're watching them like mad and you're watching their posture and maybe you're mirroring them and you can do that consciously to some degree but it's probably better if you just do it unconsciously and then when you're mirroring them with your body then you can feel what their feeling and then you can start to draw inferences about what it is that they want by noticing how you're feeling this is often one of the things that'll stop people dead in the source of a conversation because the other person will get upset and then you'll watch that and then that'll make you feel upset and then you go oh I can't deal with this anymore because it's too upsetting it's like well H maybe the fact that it's upsetting is actually an indication that you really should deal with it you know you can't just run away if it's upsetting upsetting something's being flipped over that's why it's upsetting well you don't want to bail out just because you're upset it's like you know clue in that's not the time to quit you want to maybe detach a bit from your emotions so you don't get drowned in them so you can use them in an informative manner but you don't want to stop that's you got things going then stated so briefly this may sound absurdly simple well I didn't state it so briefly but it's not it's an approach which we have found extremely potent in the field of psychotherapy it is the most effective agent we know for altering the basic personality structure of an individual and improving his relationships and his Communications with others if I can listen to what he can tell me if I can understand how it seems to him if I can see its personal meaning for him if I can sense the emotional flavor which it has for him then I will be releasing potent forces of change in H well so you can imagine like your brain is always trying to figure things out well let's extend that a bit it's not just your brain it's your psychop physiology it's your whole body is trying to figure things out right and and you can't just think about it as a logical and mental process like your emotions are they're evaluative processes they're trying to give you information but they're not very articulate you know it's like you come home and you're all angry and you're touchy and your partner says something that's you know pretty mundane and you you know you just explode it's like well they say to you why are you like that and they say well I hate it when your boots are in the way of the door it's like oh that's why you're having a fit is it cuz the boots are well they're always there it's like you could be sure that there's a big mess underneath that and it's going to be hard to approach that person because angry people are also kind of you know they're kind of well they're irritable for sure but they also have this kind of shell on them that is touchy they're touchy so you if you touch them you know they'll get irritated at you and so if you mirror that if you're listening to them and watching them then they can start to figure out that they're angry and that maybe they're too more Angry than the situation demands and if you listen to them be angry for a while which is very annoying right because maybe they'll be angry at you then maybe they'll calm down and they'll start to differentiate that emotion into articulated statements it's like well I had a really terrible day at work well what was so terrible about it then he'll tell you a little story and then they'll say well that's happening all the time and then you ask them about that and then they say well my boss is unreasonable in his demands and so then you ask him about that and you and you find out that the person e either has a tyrant for a boss cuz sometimes that happens right a real bully which when and then the answer to why they're mad about the shoes is because they should change jobs right or maybe you find out that well they have no idea how to say no to their boss they just say yes no matter what he or she says and that means they're too agreeable and then maybe you have to figure out how they can learn how to say no and how they have to sort of check with their resentment to figure out when they're being taken advantage of it's like it's very very complicated and it's no wonder people want to avoid it but you know that's another sort of truism if someone's overreacting well they're not reacting to that thing they're reacting to that thing plus a whole bunch of things that are related to that thing sort of and they don't know what it is and so then if you listen to them and they talk about it they're actually thinking because what you might think when you're talking is that you think and then you say what you think and so you you don't have to talk you could just think but that isn't right most people don't really think like they're not they don't sit down and meditate and like think logically through a whole sequence of problems the thought sort of appear in their heads you know spontaneously sort of like a revery but they're not really they're not philosophers you know they don't have that kind of command of the language and so then when they're talking to you they're actually thinking they're thinking out loud and for all we know maybe thinking is more effective when you say it out loud because maybe I'm wired up so that my brain assumes that if I'm willing to tell it to you to make it public that it's more true than those things I'd like to keep to myself and so one of the things you're doing in a psychotherapeutic session is you're just letting the person talk and you know I have clients they don't want me to do anything for the hour that I'm with them except shut up and listen and maybe now and then I can just clarify something I have one client in particular who's very isolated socially isolated and and this person has come to see me for a long time and they just wanted this person comes every two weeks and what they want to do is talk about the last two weeks and they want me listen and so I have I have to be engaged right I'm listening and and that's a communicative process listening right because your face is changing and you're nodding and you know you're reacting so you're in the communication but this person just wants to talk and then they sort themselves out you know and figure out what it is they're upset about and then that's good and they can go off and operate in the world for two weeks and that's all just listening well just listening listening is hard and people aren't taught how to do it if I can listen to what he can tell me if I can understand how it seems to him if I can sense its personal meaning then I will be releasing potent forces of change in him if I can really understand how he hates his father that that could be a conversation that go on for months or hates the University or hates Communists if I can catch the flavor of his fear of insanity or his fear of atom bombs or of Russia you can tell that this is a little old it will be of the greatest help to him in altering those very hatreds and fears and in establishing realistic and harmonious relationships with the very people and situations towards which he has felt hatred and fear so for example let's say someone comes into a therapeutic session they say geez I just I was just having a conversation my my father I just hate my father every time I talk to him it just makes me angry and like that's a that's a low resolution representation right it's like one pixel father equals anger it's not differentiated and that's a problem because like their bod is responding as if this person needs to be taken out like you might take out a prey object or something like that or destroyed because that's what anger is like right anger is sort of like you're an object to be destroyed and it's there's truth in that because it wouldn't be elicited by the father unless there was some necessity for the anger but it's so generalized and Global it's not helpful it's like okay let's talk about your father well how would you do that well what did he do recently to upset you and then you listen and you don't give the person advice about what they should have done cuz what the hell do you know about what they should have done you might have to listen for 50 hours before you could offer a helpful suggestion even then it probably won't work so you listen and then they tell you some stories about this is almost like the Freudian psychoanalytic approach they tell you some stories about what their father was like when they in their childhood and then a bunch of things that pop up in memory and you know they start laying out the story it's like they're laying cards out on a table and they just lay out all these cards there's like a thousand cards and they're all representations of the father and then they sort of exhaust themselves they're out of angry stories about their father and then maybe they say well you know there he wasn't all bad then they start laying out some things about him that you know he drank all the time but he was really he always took care of us and he wasn't he wasn't an angry drunk you know and and he stayed with my mother and you know so what's happen now is the picture of the father is getting differentiated right it's not just one pixel it's differentiated and then you might say well okay here's all these angry things how many of them are still relevant like how many of those do you have to deal with and the person will say think well these you know 80% of these anger things are dead they're in the past and you know 70% of these good things weren't good enough to make up for the rest of this mess but then you get a smaller pile of specific things and then maybe you can start figuring out ways that or the person can start figuring out ways that those might be addressed moment to moment in new conversations like it's a strategic plan what's the situation what exactly is going on here lay it out and the emotions are a great guide to that because the first thing you want to do is everything that makes you emotional those are the things that aren't dealt with yet they're not fully articulated you don't have a strategy you don't have a full developed representation system that's why it's still emotional so it's like your your body and your mind come up with emotional representations first and only as you work through them which means to talk about them essentially strategically they don't even turn into words until you do that and that that's where I think Freud went wrong it's those things aren't repressed although they can be they're not repressed they just never made it all the way up to articulated representation and lots of things are like that whenever you're in a bad mood it's like I'm in a bad mood what does that mean well you don't know why don't you know are you repressing it no you're just too stupid to figure it out and so then you got to talk to someone you I'm in a bad mood and you know well you know how are you feeling they they'll get all spiteful and tell you how they're feeling and then you know they start to differentiate it maybe they'll remember something that happened at work and then you can kind of map out the mood and that starts to loosen it we know from our research that such empathic understanding understanding with a person not about him is such an effective approach that it can bring about major changes in personality some of you may be feeling that you listen well to people and that you have never seen such results the chances are very great indeed that your listening has not been of the type I have described fortunately I can suggest a little laboratory experiment which you can try to test the quality of your understanding okay so this is this is lovely because you don't often actually get a technique from a therapist that actually works you know you get sort of vague techniques like help the person lay the cards out on the table you know it's it's kind of at a high level of abstraction but this exercise you can actually do and you can do it a lot and if you do it it will teach you to listen so the next time you get into an argument with your wife or your friends or with a small group of friends stop the discussion for a moment and for an experiment Institute this rule while you also don't have to be that formal about it you can just do it once you know the the game each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately and to that speaker satisfaction now that's so cool because here's the typical AR argument so we're arguing I want to win and so you tell me a bunch of things and so then I take those things and I turn them into the stupidest possible representation of those things you know I weaken your argument and make you look like a fool and then I destroy it and that's a straw that's by that you're making your opponent into a straw man that's the straw man argument right you take you take what they're telling you and you caricature it and that way you can make them look absurd and make them be ashamed and then of course youve set up this skinny little opponent that you can just demolish with one punch it's really crooked and it shows that you're a coward because what it means is you have to have an opponent that's you know crippled and and thin and starving and and inarticulate before you could possibly win before you could possibly progress It's a pathetic way of having an argument what you should do is listen to the person and help them make their argument as strong as you possibly can and then deal with that because then you're sure that you're you're taking them seriously so and to that speaker's satisfaction well that's so cool La so we're we're having an argument I don't know maybe we have an argument about who's going to be responsible for grocery shopping or for doing the dishes or for cooking or any of those domestic things that continually cause couples to be at each other's throat it's like so you'll have some arguments about why you should do whatever it is that you're going to do and in order for the argument to progress I have to tell you back what you said and you have to agree that I put it properly well that's so annoying like it just runs so contrary to what you want to do of course you want to make other person sound stupid so you can beat them this way you can't do that because you have to listen well enough so you actually understood what they said and then you have to formulate their argument so that they're willing to agree that that actually constitutes their argument well that's really it's difficult but it's so use useful because first of all it does mean that you understood them and second it indic immediately indicates to them that you're not just trying to win you're trying to listen and then they're much less likely to get all irritable and angry at you because at least you're trying to listen you're not making them into a fool and you know often when people are trying to tell you what they want because they're all afraid of telling you what they want because you know maybe they never got what they wanted in their whole life you know if they've had a history of bad relationship and poor parenting and that sort of thing they're just bloody terrified to tell you that they might actually want something and so as soon as you indicate to them that you actually heard what they said and you're willing to take it seriously enough to formulate it properly well then it's like one step towards trust I see you did listen you at least know where I'm coming from it's like that doesn't mean you agree you know just because you understand someone's argument doesn't mean you have to agree but at least you know what the argument is you see what this would mean so one of the things Rogers does continually in his therapy and I do this a lot it's like I listen to the person and then kind of go through a narrative it's spontaneous narrative often following a chain of associations as Freud pointed out they'll tell me a spontaneous narrative and I'll say okay it sounds to me like this is what you said and I'll try to you know lay out the argument and maybe now and then I'll I'll ask for clarification if there's a part I didn't understand or if I see that there's a part that seems contradictory you know they said this thing here and this thing there and and I'll tell them that you know seems to me that you said this here and this here and I'm not sure how to put those together I don't say well that makes your argument you know incoherent I say well I don't get how to understand that and they kind of go oh yeah there's because people will admit to that if if you just point it out flatly you know it's like I'm not involved I'm just listening it's not my problem it's a problem and that's another thing that's useful too the other person is entitled to their suffering you don't get to take it away it's their Destiny so you can listen to their problems without having to think that you know you have to take them on as if they're yours you have to mirror them but it's their problem it's like they have to figure it out and they and that's good you need a problem to figure out it's not necessarily a terrible thing that they have a problem it would simply mean that before presenting your own point of view it would be necessary for you to really achieve the other speaker's frame of reference to understand his thoughts and feelings so well that you could summarize them for him and that's useful too because you know the way we remember things is if you tell me a long story and I tell it back to you I do not tell it back to you what happens is I listen to it and I try to figure out what the thread of the argument is and then when I tell it back to you it's way shorter and Tighter and that means in some sense it's it's got all the essentials but it's got less of the baggage right that's what you're kind of doing when you ask someone to get to the point so they tell you this long story it's like this tree that is it's full of dead branches and it hasn't been pruned and there it's standing there and you know the maybe the living branches you can hardly even see but you're concentrating on them and then when you tell it back to them you just tell them the part of the story that's alive and they listen to that they think oh yes that's what I meant and then that means you've changed memory right if they agree you've changed the memory you've you've divested it of all the excess baggage just like pruning and that's what you're doing and so that that dialogue is it's mental hygiene and that's what people do you know you got to wonder well why do we talk well it's to exchange information yeah and there's utility in it you know like if you know how to do something and I don't you can tell me but that that isn't the sort of thing that people are doing most of the time most of the time they're telling their stories this is what happen happened to me right and there and then the other person will say well this is what happened to me and there's this Mutual attempt to organize that's how people are organizing their brains we organize our brains by talking and so if you don't have someone to listen to you well especially if if it's over a few decades you're going to have a brain that's like a whole Forest of trees that need it needs a forest fire it doesn't need just some you know trimming it's really in trouble so you need to have someone to listen to you and best way to get someone like that is to find a bunch of people and listen to them because you know of course then they'll that's a friendship that's a real friendship you know because you're both trying to move towards a better place whatever that place is and it's a great relationship then sounds simple doesn't it but if you try it you'll discover it's one of the most difficult things you've ever tried to do however once you've been able to see the other person's point of view your own C comments will have to be drastically revised well that's partly because now their sort of vague complaint is tightened up to a specific problem well then you have to reconfigure how you're responding to address that problem you will also find the emotion going out of the discussion the differences being reduced and those differences which remain being of a rational and understandable sort if you really willing to understand a person in this way if you're willing to enter their private world and see the life the way their life appears to them you run the risk of being changed yourself which is that's a good thing if you're involved in a real conversation the way that you will change will be beneficial to you but it's but it's it's a challenging thing because it'll mean that you can't stick to the little you know rigid framework that you had entering into the argument you have to loosen that up and be willing to open the door and you know change the walls of your house you might see it his way that wouldn't be good you might find yourself influenced or your in your attitudes or personality the risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face well imagine so you're trying to build yourself in to h a fully-fledged you well here's one way of doing it just hang around with people like you who think the same way you do and then whenever you talk they just reflect back what you have to say or you can start putting yourself in situations that you're uncomfortable with you know pushing yourself a little bit and you go out where there are people that aren't like you and then you think well how am I going to get to understand these people and the first thing you do is you got to pay attention and you got to listen and then maybe you'll be able to interact with them and then poof that's another environment that you've mastered and then there's more of you cuz now you can operate here and here and then maybe you think well that was kind of fun so now I'll go here and I'll try this and you go there and you listen and you pay attention and all of a sudden bang you you can operate there and if you do that over like a 15-year period you'll be someone who can go anywhere and and not fit in exactly that that's like you're invisible it's not like you're fitting in it's like you can operate there you can talk and listen you can gather information you can trade you're useful there and then you're not going to run up against people and you know risk unnecessary conflict because if you listen to people you just cannot believe what people will tell you if you listen to them it is ABS and you can if you can listen to people they will tell you profound things so fast that it just makes your head spin you know because people are really weird creatures they're like dovi characters they're they're they're peculiar they think in weird ways and they have weird experiences and bizarre dreams and ideas about the future and political theories they're just as crazy as you could possibly imagine and if you listen to them they'll tell you why they think these things and it's it's it's not boring that's another issue is if the conversation is boring you are not listening cuz if you're listening the conversation will change so that it won't be boring so you can tell if you're in a conversation that's boring someone at least is not listening and it could easily be you if I enter as fully as I am able into the private world of the neurotic or psychotic individual isn't there a risk that I might become lost in that world most of us are afraid to to take that risk the great majority of us cannot listen we found ourselves we find ourselves compelled to evaluate and the evaluation is I'm going to keep you away I'm going to pigeon hole you classify you make the classification negative describe you as irrelevant and push you aside because then I don't have to pay attention to you I don't have to listen and I can stay in my box of certainty my little narrow box of certainty the great majority of us cannot listen we find ourselves compelled to evaluate because listening is too dangerous the first requirement is courage and we do not always have it okay so true Carl Rogers he's a phenomenologist so he thinks it's your experience that's real you need to represent that experience and you need to communicate it to other people and you have to communicate it within a frame and the proper frame is we're trying to make things better here and you know in order to adopt that frame that's not just a simple statement right I mean you can tell yourself that try to put yourself in that state of mind but to do that you have to really think through your value hierarchy you have to decide like what are you up to are you here to make things worse or are you here to make things better and you know you might say well clearly I'm here to make things better it's like yeah sure sure no that's hard and people are full of resentment and fear and anger and they've been hurt in all sorts of ways and they want to take revenge and like they're just full of contradictory impulses and so to weave all those contradictory impulses together and to overcome all those hurts and disappointments and and reasons for revenge and resentment you got to do all that before you can say well I'm you know here to make things better because if you're still possessed by those sorts of experience es and contradictions you're going to be motivated to make things worse all the time just out of Revenge and spite you know you you've been hurt you're going to hurt and so to adopt the framework that Rogers is talking about is it's it's a difficult Enterprise and partly it'll come about the more you listen because the more you listen and you have the chance to exchange information the more you'll deal with those inner contradictions and that sort of collection of hurts and and irritations that that are corrupting you and twisting you in the wrong direction so the reran perspective is extremely useful I it's very useful the reason I concentrated on that one quote of his today is because that's such a useful thing you you can try it right away the next time you're talking to someone maybe you have a friend who wants to talk things over it's like listen to them and then when there's a pause say well it sounds to me like this is what you meant and they'll go yes that's exactly what I meant maybe if you were really listening they'll be real happy about that CU they didn't know what they meant they're just telling you this story about why they're annoying and so then you'll think oh wow I got it and then they'll be happy and they'll tell you something else and like they'll walk away from that conversation much lighter and you will too even though it's a weird thing because you might think well if you listen people are going to dump a bunch of trouble on you it's like well yes but if if you're willing to listen despite the fact that there might be a bunch of trouble dumped on you then you've also told yourself that you're the sort of person that can tolerate having a bunch of trouble dumped on yourself and that's like that's a that's an extremely positive attitude to take towards yourself you know and you're not just saying it you're acting it out and so that's a sign of faith in yourself and you're not Stu well I said you were stupid like you are in relationships but you're not totally stupid you know you'll be able to notice that you've you've you've been willing to expose yourself to a risk and when your body and your mind you're watching that they'll think oh I'm the sort of thing that can voluntarily expose itself to a risk well that's like the secret to making yourself strong it's exposure and so you can do that in every conversation and that toughens you up as well as informing you it's a very powerful technique so I would recommend try it see what happens it's it's also fun because it's like you're following a thread of the conversation if you're really listening the conversation will continue and it continues in a meaningful way and then you know that you're in the right place and it's like a challenge to your capacity to pay attention and then you get engaged in the conver all conversations you get engaged in them and then you're in engaging conversations all the time that's good thing so okay we'll see you there's