The Blindboy Podcast - On Becoming a Person

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

The Humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers, and how it helps us develop empathy for others and self-compassion Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brendan Behan is eating sweet cheesecake, eavesdrop on his toothache, smear grease on his milkshake, critique his shoelace. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. I've got a brand new microphone. Everything is running well, audio wise. I'm just going to do a little test of this microphone postman, postman postman, postman postman that's a handsome microphone I'm very happy

let's see if we can hear my squeaking chair that's a new chair that was supposed to be sans squeak when I purchased it but it is it's been subject to some weathering by my legs and arse That was supposed to be sand squeak. When I purchased it. But it is. It's been subject to some weathering. By my legs and arse.

So it has achieved. A gentle squeak. But fuck it. You know you need a chair to develop. A bit of personality. And. I suppose it feels less lonely. If I have a chair that squeaks. It's like having a co-host.

But yeah, thank you for the lovely feedback for last week's podcast, which was, I spoke to two professors, two experts in the field of psychobiotics, which is an exciting and emerging new field, psychobiotics which is an exciting and emerging new field where um they're looking at the relationship between our diets and our brains and our gut flora and our brains and they spoke about the importance of eating fermented foods and eating oily fish. And all week on Instagram. I had people. Making their own kimchi. People making their own kimchi.

Trying to make sauerkraut. Making kefir. People making their own fermented foods. As a result of last week's podcast. Which was lovely to see. Because. It's just. It's pure.

It's perfect quarantine stuff. Making, it's perfect quarantine stuff. Making fermented foods is perfect quarantine stuff. A lot of people were making the kefir. Kefir seems to be the easiest thing to make. And I would recommend making your own fermented foods. Because like I said, a lot of stuff that's marketed as fermented isn't actually fermented. It's pasteurized. marketed as fermented isn't actually fermented it's pasteurised so when you make your own stuff you know you're getting

legit fermented bacteria or whatever it is into your body I'd love to start eating more oily fish but I just, I think the thing with fish you have to be raised on fish, you have to be raised

with an appreciation for fish and I grew up in a house where my mother had a shellfish allergy You have to be raised on fish. You have to be raised with an appreciation for fish. And. I grew up in a house where my mother had a shellfish allergy. Like even last week. She got vaccinated last week. So as a treat. I ordered her fish and chips.

But then I had to ring up the fish and chip shop. And say. Have any of the fish been in contact with shellfish and they couldn't guarantee me that it wasn't so we had to cancel the order and she got a Chinese instead but I digress I'd love to be able to eat oily fish

but I just can't I wasn't raised with the taste of fish I can eat canned tuna I can eat canned tuna and I'd eat like a deep fried cod from a chipper. But canned tuna apparently doesn't contain the essential fatty oils that you want from tuna. Canned tuna is different. And you're not supposed to eat canned tuna more than three times a week, I heard, because it contains mercury.

A lot of large fish. here's something I learned about fish why the fuck am I talking about fish here's a little tidbit I learned about fish apparently if it's a particularly large fish and tuna are fucking massive tuna are like the size of a car so if a fish is really large and it lives long and it eats loads of other small fish then it accumulates mercury in its body so we're not supposed to eat tuna more than three times a week but i'd love to be eating mackerel mackerel seems to be in terms of the psychobiotics and the benefits and the essential oils that you can get, mackerel seems to be the best choice.

And I just can't do it. The thing that makes fish tasty to some people, whatever that is, I don't have it. I don't have that thing. And I'd love to have that thing because I know people that are really passionate about fish. And I... It's a bit like Star Trek. I'd love to enjoy Star Trek because I know people who like Star Trek and they fucking love it but I don't have the gift of Star Trek and I don't have the gift of appreciating mackerel so alas I'm just gonna have to eat a lot of flax

seed or something and I can't eat fresh tuna I've tried to eat fresh tuna before fresh tuna doesn't taste like canned tuna fresh tuna is weird man it tastes like steaks leathery brother that's all i can describe it as it's it's just too odd and fresh tuna tunaaks, apparently does have the essential oils you're looking for. So that was the takeaway from last week's podcast. Excuse the pun. In order to have a healthy gut biome, and for this healthy gut biome to have a positive impact on your mental well-being, then we should be eating diets that are full of proper fermented foods

loads of natural sources of fibre I don't have a problem with that that's just loads of broccoli and spinach that's grand and then oily fish and I'm going to work on it

I'm going to work on the oily fish thing I'm going to work on it and I'm going to try but I've tried a lot so I'm recording this podcast in March 2021 and we are in the middle of coronavirus lockdown so if you're listening from the future if you're listening in like 2023 um I'm going to speak about coronavirus for the next eight minutes only and then after eight minutes i won't be speaking about it again because i just think in the future when we listen back to anything about coronavirus it's

going to sound like when someone talks about christmas in june so if you are in the future and you've got a hoverboard um skip forward eight minutes and then i won't be mentioning the pandemic anymore after that. So for this week's podcast, I want to talk about the theories of a psychologist. And this psychologist theories are of great help to me in how I navigate my life. And I suppose I'm doing it because like you I'm struggling at the moment I am struggling at the moment because of

the world, because of the pandemic I'm doing a lot of work on myself at the moment daily work I've gotten back into meditating I'm meditating twice a day to I'm meditating to

fully understand my emotions to truly understand what i'm feeling to sit with my emotions and to make sure that i'm noticing them that's all i'd say meditation helps me to notice emotions because when you don't notice emotions, they will drive your behavior and your moods in ways that can lead to distress. I spoke about this two podcasts ago, about necessary pain, or no, about avoidable pain and unavoidable pain. And I'm trying to work on the avoidable pain, and meditation helps me through that. And I'm trying to work on the avoidable pain. And meditation helps me through that. If you're interested in getting into meditation.

I use an app called Headspace. Alright. Now that's a paid app. This isn't an advert. I just find that Headspace is a really really good simple app. For basic mindfulness meditation. That's what I use and it helps me. One thing I'm struggling with too.

Is. Maintaining faith in people in in humanity okay one of the struggles of this pandemic is look we're all stressed we're all under pressure we're all coping with this in a different in different ways we're all disappointed there's a lot of negativity and people are expressing this negativity and reacting to it in different ways and these ways are these ways are often disappointing and hard to be around quite you know people are on the internet being a little bit more hostile than usual that's understandable their laugh people are lashing out it's not pleasant to be around and then some people are behaving in ways that are selfish and harmful literally harmful to other people people who aren't adhering

to social distancing people who aren't wearing masks or aren't wearing their masks properly there's some people not pulling their weight okay all of us must wear masks adhere to social distancing to keep everyone else safe it's a collective effort and we all must do this to save some lives and some people simply aren't for whatever reason other people are straight up behaving obnoxiously they're deliberately not wearing masks they're deliberately calling the pandemic a hoax and these voices rise to the top like when i go to the supermarket uh which is one of the few joys in my day when I do it when I go there if one person isn't wearing their mask properly

or one person isn't adhering to social distance I will focus only on that one person and I won't notice all the other people that are pulling their weight so then I walk away from that situation feeling angry about one person who wasn't pulling their weight and then I go onto the internet and I see people being anti-vax or I see people calling the pandemic a hoax and my brain focuses only on the people who are behaving atrociously

and I'm ignoring the people that are actually putting in the effort behaving compassionately and behaving in a way that's mindful of other people's safety I'm ignoring these people and focusing on the negativity and one of the consequences of this that I have to be incredibly mindful of is when I view other people through that lens and focus only on the negative behaviors which is a minority if I go to duns and there's one person not wearing a mask that person is a minority if I focus only on that I have to be mindful that I'm not developing a negative view of humanity in general and the evidence i have for how i might be veering to toxically veering towards that view of humanity the evidence i have is i'll come back from the supermarket one person wasn't wearing a mask and then i'm at home and i'm packing away my groceries. And all of a sudden now I'm angry and I'm upset.

And the thoughts inside my head are toxic, judgmental and rigid. Which I know are bad news. So some of the thoughts I'd have in my head would be. That arsehole in the shop wasn't wearing his mask. Everybody is selfish. We're all fucked. what's the point what's the point in me even trying everyone is really selfish and then I find myself getting angry and then I find myself getting anxious and then I find myself getting upset and now I'm having a bad day now I know from awareness. I spoke about this two podcasts ago.

The statement. One man was in the shop not wearing his mask. Everybody is selfish. We are fucked. What's the point? These are irrational statements. There's no evidence for that. The evidence is.

I went to Dunn's. I saw one person who wasn't pulling their weight and I ignored everybody who was pulling their weight and then I walked away with an irrational opinion that's informed by the toxic emotion of anger because I know if I allow myself to be overcome with a reactionary toxic emotion I will receive what's called an emotional hijack where the emotion floods my body it takes over my ability to think critically and it will cause my brain to interpret facts that only suit the toxic emotion so if my toxic emotion is contempt for humanity because that's a contemptuous view of humanity everybody is selfish we are fucked what's the point that's toxic and it's contemptuous and

it's not evidence-based but if i'm angry i'll believe it so i stop myself in that moment and i say to myself no hold on a second no blind buy one person wasn't wearing a mask it's okay to be disappointed with their behavior that's still okay but i don't know where their head is at i don't know what their situation is okay so instead i'm gonna focus on everyone else who was pulling their weight and then i'm then not contemptuous of humanity in general because that's a recipe for sadness and a recipe for depression and a recipe for distrust and unhappiness so what I want to focus on this week is the theories of a psychologist called Carl Rogers because Carlgers's theories of human personality

essentially view human beings as being good that human beings when given the option will choose compassion and love and fun and when we don't do these, it's not a failure of our humanity, but rather the conditions of our environment that create negative behaviours. So that's what I want to talk about. I want to take a look at Carl Rogers' theories of human personality to restore my faith in other human beings. Because if I'm going around the place with a negative view of other people then I lose my capacity for empathy then I become afraid of people or suspicious of people and I don't want that I want to love other people understand other people and to have empathy for them that's separate to their behaviors to appreciate other people's intrinsic value because we all have intrinsic value so i've most definitely touched on the theories of carl rogers previously in other

podcasts because he is a pioneer of a type of psychology called humanistic psychology which is it's like a cornerstone of like i'm not religious I'm not a religious person but I respect people who are religious so long as their religion doesn't try and control other people's behaviour because I view people who are religious as that's just their way of maintaining mental health

if someone turns to Christianity or Islam or whatever that's their way of maintaining mental health and understanding other people and if they're not controlling other people's behaviour fucking grand, none of my business but I'm not religious so the texts that I consult

are the texts of psychology and psychotherapy that's what I use to understand myself and understand the world and try and achieve happiness because that's all I want all I want is on a day toto-day basis how can I be happy today and bad things might happen disappointing things might happen but even within all that I can still be happy in my day if I live my day with meaning that's all I want so I consult psychology and psychotherapy to achieve that to have that as part of my journey

so Rogers's humanistic theory humanistic psychology kind of comes from existentialism and existential psychology existential psychology kind of veers towards that life is meaningless, right? So there's no set meaning in life. Life is chaos. But we as humans have the freedom to find our own meaning. So life itself means nothing, but we as individuals have the freedom to find our own meaning so life itself means nothing but we as individuals have the freedom to find our own meaning that's kind of existential psychology in a nutshell now one of the one of the pitfalls of

the existential view is that that in itself is anxiety inducing the idea that life has no meaning but we have the individual freedom to find our own meaning we can get what's known as existential anxiety a sense of anxiety about simply existing because we're overwhelmed with the realization of that freedom and that choice to find our own meaning and that the freedom to find meaning can actually be stifling because what we prefer is a set path and existentialism says there's no such thing as a fucking set path. There's religion, God, fuck that. There's none of that. Life is chaos. And you must find meaning in the chaos.

And that can be a struggle. The humanistic approach, Carl Rogers' approach, is similar to existential psychology. But it's less anxiety-inducing. In that, it kind of posits that, yes, there is no meaning in life and yes we have the freedom to find our own meaning but we have what's known as the actualizing tendency so humans will naturally veer towards meaning we will actualize towards meaning what i mean is that there's

there's a force inside of us which rogers called the actualizing tendency where it's like a built-in motivation present in not just humans but every single life form that we will naturally grow and seek out the best version of ourselves if the right conditions are present and think of it this way regarding the actualizing tendency let's think of it in terms of a plant because all living creatures have actualizing tendencies so let's take a potato for instance if you plant a little potato in a pot in a room okay you get a pot of soil and you put a potato in there the potato will sprout upwards and it'll show a little green leaf and potatoes have many their actualizing tendency responds to different stimuli so one stimuli is

phototropism plants will move toward light so if your potato is in one corner of the room and there's a window on the other corner of the room then the green leaves the stem will point towards that window also potatoes respond to geotropism the roots will always move downwards towards gravity even if the plant is the pot isropism. The roots will always move downwards towards gravity. Even if the pot is on its side, the roots will move down towards gravity. Hydrotropism is another one where the roots of a plant will find water. So, potatoes will actualise towards the things that give it life. Light, water and gravity.

Now, have you ever put a potato... you ever fucking had potatoes right and they're in the cupboard and you forget about them you forget that you've got a couple of potatoes in a cupboard and you close the door and then you open the fucking cupboard a week later and then you jump with the fright because it looks like an alien like this is happening loads at the moment because of the pandemic if you type alien potato into google you'll get some horrifying pictures because over the course of the pandemic particularly with students who are living in a flat and then all of a sudden a fucking college is shut down and they have to go home for two months and then come back there's a lot of people coming back to their flats only to find that their entire cupboards

are overcome with these alien potatoes growing big long tentacles right and this poor little potato by itself in the cupboard has grown these giant root like tentacles that are trying to get out of the cupboard well that's

the potato's actualising tendency the potato needs to grow into a plant but it doesn't have any of the conditions in its environment that allows it to do it but it tries its best and because it's stuck in a dark cupboard with no soil it's this perversion of a potato it's a big long tentacle thing

with a withery little brown thing in the middle. It's a creepy, strange, alien looking creature. It's an antisocial potato. That is a potato that is engaging in toxic behaviours. Well humans are similar. That potato, that little potato still has an actualising tendency. It's still trying its best to become the best version of itself that it can be. But the locked cupboard just won't let it be.

So it's a weird bastard. I suppose I'm after realising a little bit of a hot take there that potatoes during this pandemic, they're quite similar to humans during this pandemic. We are turning into weird little alien creatures with big, long, toxic tentacles growing out of ourselves. We're still trying to realise our actualising tendency, but the environment is not conducive

with us achieving our actualising tendency. But instead of growing big long purple tentacles out of our bodies our tentacles are our thoughts and behaviors our short fuses our anger our denial our judgment of other people our sadness our unhappiness because we don't have access to the equivalent of our light, gravity and water right now. And the things that we as humans self-actualize towards are, the two big ones are love and safety. We all want to be loved and we all want to love someone or something else. love someone or something else. That's a universal part of being human. We all want safety. Who doesn't want to feel safe, to feel loved and to love someone or something else? And we will always

actualize towards these good things to become the best version of ourselves if the right environment is present for us now the thing is with being human so as humans yes we have an actualizing tendency and we will veer towards self-actualization and becoming the best version of ourselves but also as humans we created society and culture and sometimes society and culture doesn't always fit in with our actualizing tendency this is why you hear people saying you know we must build a more compassionate society think of it this way how how does a person self-actualize within a culture that discriminates on the basis of gender or discriminates on the basis of a color of a person's skin or discriminates on the basis of a person's socio-economic background or discriminates against a person's physical appearance or sexual preferences the list goes

on and on and on these are social constructs which can serve as barriers towards a human's self-actualization the human is still reaching towards safety self-love and loving other people but society stepped in and said no you're less than so the journey for you to become a happy person with meaning is is considerably more difficult society creates the collectively all of us as a society create these things called conditions of worth. That. Humans have got worth within a society. Only based on certain conditions. And the problem with these conditions of worth. Is these can. Fuck up.

Fuck up our actualizing tendency. The actualizing tendency. According to Rogers. Is informed by a thing called organismic valuing, right? Organismic valuing is basically that we as organisms, we understand what is good for us. We know what's good for us. If you're given the choice between eating a fresh piece of meat and a rotten piece of meat, you're going to choose the fresh piece of

meat because you know you just know that's what's good for me and the rotten piece of meat is what's going to make me feel sick so your organismic valuing will push you towards the fresh piece of meat but sometimes society and culture creates these conditions of worth about how we value ourselves that are a little bit closer to the rotten piece of meat and it can distort our actualizing tendency one thing or two things that humans definitely kind of have organismic valuing for things that we know are good from birth are positive regard and positive self-regard so what humans thrive in and love is positive regard that simply means from when you're a baby to right now that it's nice to receive love, affection, attention, nurturing from other people.

That feels really good. When other people approve of us, say nice things to us, when other people appear to think that we're good, that feels good. And what's also nice then as a result of that is positive self-regard. And what's also nice then as a result of that is positive self-regard. And we develop positive self-regard kind of based on the positive regard you receive from other people, like a mirror. So if you grow up and the adults around you give you positive regard, they give you love, they give you attention, they give you nurturing, then you start to feel these things towards yourself. That's called positive self-regard and that's where our self-esteem comes from,

how we value ourselves as human beings. Do you love yourself? Are you able to nurture yourself? When you think about yourself, do you feel okay with how you think about yourself? That's positive self-regard. So our actualizing tendency via organismic valuing means that we will, until we die, want to be loved by other people. We will want to love other people. And we will want to love other people and we will want to love ourselves and all three of those things create meaning and happiness now where this can go astray is that

society can create what's called conditions of worth as i mentioned earlier right and parents teachers peers the media what's on television culture in general can create conditions of worth so you are only worthy of love if and a lot of these conditions of worth aren't necessarily helpful like we live in a capitalist society so we have a condition of worth that in a capitalist society so we have a condition of worth that equates our personal value as human beings with our economic value whether how much money do you earn or how valuable are you to the economy and that condition of worth exists as a social construct within capitalism it has nothing to do with the human actualizing potential of love kindness and self love and these conditions of worth that society creates like like i said we we we know that we

want positive regard which is the approval of other people but conditions of worth within society means that we can only get positive regard from other people on certain conditions and rogers called that conditional positive regard and what can happen there is we we bend ourselves then towards because these the conditions conditional positive regard and conditions of worth in society are very powerful so what can is that, a bit like the potato that's trapped in the cupboard, we bend ourselves into a shape that isn't determined by our organismic valuing or our genuine actualising tendencies, but we bend ourselves towards conditions of worth that are created by society

that might have nothing to do with who we really are as people so for example you could be a little child and you have parents who very much value success and academic achievement and getting a good job and this is who your parents are so you're a little child and you want to be an artist or you want to be a dancer or a musician or you want to play sports and your parents are like no that's if you be an artist there's no guarantee that you're going to become wealthy you need to study hard in school and become an economist or become a doctor but who you really are is a creative person and you might not be interested in these things but your parents give you positive regard they give you praise when you appear to be studious

or interested in earning money and then they chastise you or say that you're wasting time when you try to be creative but all you know as a child is you know your organismic valuing is telling you well the adults are giving me praise when I'm good at school or the adults are giving me praise when I say that I want to be a doctor or I want to be an economist so you notice and recognize this positive regard from other people as a good thing and then this conditioning leads to conditional positive self-regard so now you start to value yourself your self-esteem based on conditions of worth that have nothing to do with who you are as a person now you're getting older and you want to be a doctor or you want to be an economist but

that's not who the fuck you are but still you're reaching towards this goal of doing well in school earning loads of money you're reaching towards this goal but it doesn't you don't feel happy you're continually chasing you don't feel happy you don't feel content and you don't know why and then when you think about doing art or drawing or making music the things you actually want to do these things now make you feel like a bad person because you've been raised with these conditional positive regard that your parents have told you you are a good person when you strive towards being wealthy and you're a person. When you strive towards being wealthy. And you're a bad person.

When you strive towards something. Quote unquote useless like art. And then you internalize that. As conditional positive self regard. I am only worthy. Worthy. I only have value and worth. On these certain conditions. And that's just one example there's a

million examples you could have parents who value physical appearance over anything else or value how nice your clothes are or they can value how polite you are to strangers and then you internalize this as I am a good person when I meet certain conditions that have been laid out to me by my parents, my peers, my teachers, the media, whatever. Time now for a little ocarina pause. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen.

Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? It's the most terrifying. Six, six, six.

It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real. Who said that? The first omen. Only in theaters April 5th. Hey! It's not real. It's not real. What's not real? Who said that?

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Also catch me on Twitch Thursday nights. For my never ending video game musical live. Twitch.tv forward slash blind buy podcast. Back to Carl Rogersgers and i was speaking about conditions of worth and rogers states this can lead towards what's called incongruity okay if we live most of our lives with these conditions of worth conditional positive self-regard you only regard yourself as a good person. Under certain conditions that were laid out by other people.

When we do that. It can lead to a fragmentation of self. We. Have. We can split into. Our real selves. And our ideal selves. Okay.

And what these two things are is your real self is who you actually are the real person the your genuine organismic valuing your actualizing tendency the light that you unique to you as person, moves towards to find meaning and happiness. The love that you want, the comfort that you want, the safety that you want, the job that you want, whatever the fuck that is, that your organismic valuing genuinely wants, that's your real self. But if you've been given these conditions of worth from parents or teachers or whatever, those conditions of worth create what's known as the ideal self and the thing with the ideal self is it's not a you that's based on your

actualizing tendency and your actual needs so to take it back it's the you that's studying to be an accountant even though you wanted to be a dancer it's the you that's studying to be an accountant even though you wanted to be a dancer it's the you that feels you need to be the most attractive person in the room it's the you that feels you need to be really financially successful and have a big house and a big car because society has created conditions of worth around this you only have self-worth when you meet these certain conditions and the problem with the ideal self is that because it's not your real self it's always out of reach it's someone else's standards and you're always chasing towards it and it's not even a thing you want to chase towards. It's the potato in the cupboard, thinking that the door is the soil.

And also with Carl Rogers' humanistic theory, he states that when our real selves and our ideal selves are too far apart, when they're too different, when your ideal self is just miles away from who you really are, this is called incongruity. It's the fragmented self. You're living a fake life, essentially, and you don't really know it.

But all you experience is neurosis, anxiety, depression, and a sense of meaninglessness. Remember I mentioned at the start about existential psychology that it says that life itself has no meaning, but we as humans have the freedom to find meaning. But within humanistic psychology, Rogers' psychology, Rogers is the same.

He says, yes, life has no meaning, but we can find our own meaning, but we will move towards the light we know what that light is well society can fuck up where the light is and that's when you develop an ideal self and if you're living mostly in your ideal self which means you believe that your sense of worth is dependent upon other people's expectations of you, that's a recipe for deep unhappiness. And the thing is too with the ideal self, the self that isn't really you, that you're continually reaching towards but you can never reach, the ideal self is very fragile.

Your ideal self will continually have you comparing yourself to other people, looking at what other people have and comparing your situation to it and feeling unhappy or looking down on other people. An ideal self will cause us to engage pretty powerful defence mechanisms

such as denial. If you were raised in a house where your parents didn't allow you to get angry like if you were unhappy about something as a kid so you try and speak about the thing that's making you unhappy or even throw a little tantrum because you're a child and that's okay if you're a child because you might be naturally assertive your real self might be to be assertive because the actualizing tendency wants love self-love and also safety and being assertive is how you create safety for yourself assertiveness is this is not okay this is okay these are my boundaries that's how you create safety through assertiveness but this was all immediately shut down with you must not get angry um no fighting nothing like that just be quiet be quiet when you do that to a little kid the child can learn i i am a bad the adults say that i'm bad when i complain but when i don't complain and i shut up the adults tell me that I'm good and then

you internalize that as conditional positive self-regard of I am a good person when I don't complain and I don't argue and I'm a bad person when I do complain and I do I do argue so then you become an adult and you're fucking terrified of conflict. So whenever conflict occurs in your life, you have developed a very fragile ideal self based around not getting into arguments and not speaking up for yourself. When you do inevitably find conflict, because that's a part of, you're going to find conflict in your life.

Conflict is going to happen. That's part of being a human being. And conflict, as I mentioned, is what part of being a human being and conflict as I mentioned is what happens when we search for safety, when we want safety and safety doesn't necessarily mean physical safety, like I said it can mean your boundaries, when we search for safety sometimes we must engage in conflict in order to achieve our safety, the healthy way is to do it through assertiveness, which is healthy conflict. But when conflict occurs, you don't speak up for yourself, you don't let your needs known to the other person,

you don't tell the other person that you're unhappy about whatever it is that is happening, and you don't meet your needs, or you engage in denial, such as passive aggression, meet your needs or you engage in denial such as passive aggression because you were raised not to be aggressive we'll say not to be aggressive or to create conflict so instead to resolve the conflict you become passive aggressive people who were raised to not to not engage in conflict or to express their anger or to let their needs be known still need to meet their needs so often adults who are like this will get their needs through being sneaky or being manipulative because these are ways to meet your needs for safety without engaging in any

conflict and that will lead to an unhappy existence because you're either lying to people all the time or instead of actually having an adult discussion about something refusing to talk to someone giving them the silent treatment or ghosting them which are defense mechanisms for healthy conflict and the nice thing too as well about rogers's theory and rogers's way of looking at that is that then allows us to be more compassionate and empathic so if you are dealing with a person and this person is passive aggressive or isn't telling the truth or is instead of arguing with you are lying to you are trying to trying to manipulate your true lies or trying to turn other people against you all these things are deeply unpleasant but isn't it healthy to be able to view that person's behaviour and say,

this person's behaviour isn't acceptable. But essentially, this is the only way they know right now how to meet their needs. Because actually having conflict and being assertive, they're not capable of that. And that then allows you to dislike the person's behaviour while still valuing them as a human being and having empathy, which then protects your boundaries. I'm happy enough with my Xbox. And you don't experience toxic anger towards someone who's lying to you.

So if, as adults, we find ourselves in a situation where there's incongruity between our real self and our ideal self and as a result of this we've got unhappiness and an inability to find a sense of meaning because you don't know where your personal meaning is and then this is unnecessary suffering like what do you do about it well that's that's where psychotherapy comes in, because Carl Rogers is also considered the founder of modern psychotherapy. And humanistic psychotherapy tries to help the person who's in therapy to find what their real self is, to kind of go back over their childhood,

to interrogate their emotions to become aware of what is my ideal self what is my real self and how can i move towards who i actually am once i find out who that person is and that there that's the journey of therapy that's the journey of psychotherapy the therapist would ask you questions for you try and arrive at your own answers to try and identify what are your conditions of worth what are the rules and values that you have about yourself or about other people whereby you apply worth and a good way to get an inkling of it outside of therapy is when with our ideal selves we tend to project these things on other people what are you jealous of what are you jealous of of other people

are you if if somebody you know is very physically attractive or gets a lot of attention from girls or from lads if this person does that make you feel jealous does that make you want to put that person down in your head or talk shit about him or does it make you want to wish bad things upon him are you are you jealous of because jealousy is jealousy is a part of being human what are you jealous about of other people how do you feel when someone has a nice car or a really good job do you want to call that person a dickhead or are you simply fair play to them fuck it that's a nice car I wouldn't mind one of them, but fuck it seems like a lot of effort. You'll find your ideal self in what deeply threatens you in other people's behaviour. Or similarly, if you have a nice car and someone else has a shit car

and all of a sudden you're going, Ha ha ha, fuck them with their shit car. Fucking pricks with their shit car. Really toxic, angry reactions to another person's possessions or appearance or behaviour that has fuck all to do with you. That's where the ideal self is. upsetting and the the most unpleasant part of my job is having to deal with every so often the utter rage of some people's ideal selves in particular when i when i released my first book of short stories some of the fucking hate mail that i got from strangers and these aren't people who'd read the book just men my own age who'd found out that I was writing a book sending me all this vicious hate mail saying things like fucking

who the fuck do you think you are you're just an idiot from limerick with a bag in his head you think you can be a writer you've no talent you're talentless. And then one person tried to call a bomb, a fucking bomb threat into a reading I was doing. Just this unparalleled rage from strangers who don't know me. And all I'd done was announce that I'm writing a book of fiction.

And this was deeply, deeply triggering to them. And the only way I could rationalize it and handle it is i had to say to myself these poor lads grew up in a house where one of their parents idolized authors and maybe this lad doesn't have the desire talent or ability to be an artist but his parents were like well artists are the only people that fucking matter and this writer is brilliant and that writer is brilliant oh if only you could write like this person and now they're an adult who thinks they want to become a writer and tries and tries and tries and then when someone else steps into that space and actually writes a fucking book it has

triggered decades and decades of unowned fury but now i'm dealing with it and there's a saying that like there's no one as angry as a failed artist and in my experience that's not the case at all because i never get shit from quote-unquote failed artists because failed artists are people who have at least tried they've tried to make something and maybe it didn't succeed these people aren't furious over it, they're a bit disappointed

the hate mail that I get is from people who never tried the anger from, it's artists who never tried because they were too scared to fail and that to me often suggests a deep ideal self it's a defense mechanism maybe they simply can't but have this deep pressure to do it because of a condition of worth that's where the blind fury comes from i'm not talking about someone.

Talking shit. Or a little bit of begrudgery. I'm talking off the scale. Blind fury from a stranger. That exists. But in therapy. In psychotherapy. A therapist would speak.

To a person. Try and find the things that has them. Feeling contempt. Extreme contempt. Jealousy. Anger. to a person try and find the things that has them feeling contempt extreme contempt jealousy anger for strangers or other people and then probing what is it about this person releasing the book that makes you want to get so angry or what is it about this person having a driving a mercedes that makes you call them a prick and then you peel back the layers and you find oh I feel that

I will only have worth if I become an author or I will only be a good person if I drive a Mercedes and where did you learn that and you delve back and back and back and the process of therapy humanistic therapy is to get

that person to arrive to a place where they themselves are identifying their real self and their ideal self and then hopefully leaving therapy no longer valuing these things no longer giving a flying shit about books or about Mercedes or how good looking they are and instead following the path of what they actually are and the thing is too with the humanistic therapy quite a lot it ends in quite a lot of divorces some people can realize that like I've chosen a career and a partner that has not fulfilled my needs in any way whatsoever because I've been living my life towards an ideal fabricated version of myself that was dependent upon conditions of work I learned from my parents or society and now I've

a better idea of who I am and these things seem really silly to me. The person moves from what's called conditional positive self-regard to unconditional positive self-regard which is basically I have intrinsic value as a human being and no aspect of my behavior defines my worth as a human being whether I'm writing books having a cool job earning money uh having a good looking partner being physically attractive these things I'm still allowed want them but they do not define my worth as a human being they do not define my worth because my worth is intrinsic and it's intrinsic to me and I'm no better than anybody else and nobody else is better than me because all humans are unique and too complex to evaluate against each other and when we through the journey of therapy

move towards unconditional positive self-regard to love ourselves unconditionally unconditionally without condition then your actualizing tendency and your organismic valuing you you you know what it is that you move towards to make you the best version of yourself which is unique to you if your issue is around conflict you learn to become an assertive person who is able to express their needs and healthily engage in conflict if you're a bank manager who should have been a dancer all of a sudden you're trying to become a dancer now because that gives you meaning if you think you were supposed to be a writer but instead you'd been better off doing science then you move towards there and that gives you meaning. Identifying what our ideal selves are, stripping these

things away, learning to love and accept ourselves, unconditional positive regard and then we're the little potato in the cupboard but we're not in the cupboard anymore we're in a pot we're in soil and we know where the light is and we know where the ground is and we know where the water is and we grow into a healthy potato plant free from the conditions of worth i hope that was a nice overview for you for the theories of car Rogers if we're interested in reading more about Carl Rogers he's got a book called On Becoming a Person which is his seminal work

he's written loads about humanistic psychotherapy and humanistic psychology Rogers' view of personality when you can view humans like that and you realise that even though some people can behave in ways that aren't helpful to those around them

that these people are essentially locked in a cycle of completely avoidable suffering and that ultimately everybody has intrinsic worth everyone wants to be loved everyone wants to love someone else and everyone wants to be safe but some people because of society are just looking in the wrong places and it's hurting them alright God bless don't know what I'll be back with next week I'd like to think a little hot take

I'd like to think a little hot take but this month has been mostly psychology podcasts because that's where my head is at that's where my head's at at the moment I'm working on myself and i'm trying to keep i'm trying to make sure that i'm fucking coping lads i'm trying to make sure that i'm coping so i've had to i've had to open some books i haven't opened in in

fucking six or seven years to be honest my carl rogers book was up on the shelf getting dusty and i opened it for the first time the last couple of days and looked through it to remind myself of this stuff so that I'm not becoming contemptuous for my fucking fellow man, cause I can't be doing that, fuck that

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