Below is a transcript of a talk given by one of my favorite psychologists, Carl Rogers, given November 9, 1964 at the California Institute of Technology.
The long read is well worth it– skip through and just read the bolded parts if need be, but definitely read it. Moreso than anything else, this explains the purpose behind the Reflections activity.
Reflections are a framework in which we can hear others, in which we can be heard, and in which we can bring forth our realness.
Read on, mah friend.
I have some knowledge about communication and I could assemble more. When I first agreed to give this talk I planned to gather such knowledge and organize it into a lecture. The more I thought over this plan the less satisfied I Was with it. Knowledge about is not the most important thing in the behavioral sciences today. There is a decided surge of experiential learning, or knowing at a gut level, which has to do with the human being. We are in a realm where we are not simply talking of cognitive and intellectual learnings which can nearly always be rather readily communicated inverbal terms. Instead we are speaking of something more experiential, something having to do with the whole person, visceral reactions and feelings as well as thoughts and words.
Consequently, I decided I would like, rather than talking about communication, to communicate with you at a feeling level. This is not easy. I think it is usually possible only in small groups where one feels genuinely accepted. I have been frightened at the thought of attempting it with a large group. Indeed when I learned how large the group was to be I gave up the whole idea. Since then, with encouragement from my wife, I have returned to it and decided to make such an attempt.
…I hope that in some sense this may be a communication which is given, and also received, primarily ant a feeling and experiential level.
What I would like to do is very simple indeed. I would simply like to share with you some of the things I have learned for myself in regard to communication. These are personal learning growing out of my own experience. I am not attempting at all to say that you should learn to do these same things but I feel that if I can report my own experience honestly enough perhaps you can check what I say against your own experience and decide as to its truth or falsity for you.
…The first simple feeling I want to share with you is my enjoyment when I can really hear someone. I think perhaps it has been a long standing characteristic of mine. I can remember this in my early grammar school days. A child would ask the teacher a question and the teacher would give a perfectly good answer to a completely different question. A feeling of pain and distress would always strike me. My reaction was, “But you didn’t hear him!” I felt a sort of childish despair at the lack of communication which was (and is) so common.
I believe I know why it is satisfying to me to hear someone. When I can really hear someone it puts me in touch with him. It enriches my life. It is also true that through hearing people I have learned all that I know about individuals, about personality, about interpersonal relationships. There is another peculiar satisfaction in it. When I really hear someone it is like listening to the music of the spheres, because beyond the immediate message of the person, no matter what that might be, there is the universal, the general. Hidden in all of the personal communications which I hear there seem to be orderly psychological laws, aspects of the awesome order in which we find in the universe as a whole.
When I say that I enjoy hearing someone I mean, of course, hearing deeply. I mean that I hear the words, the thoughts, the feeling tones, the personal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker. Sometimes too, in a message which superficially is not very important, I hear a deep human cry that lies buried and unknown far below the surface of the person. So I have learned to ask myself, can I hear the sounds and sense the shape of this other person’s inner world? Can I resonate to what he is saying so deeply that I sense the meaning he is afraid of yet would like to communicate, as well as those he knows?
I think, for example, of an interview I had with an adolescent boy, the recording of which I listened to only a short time ago. Like many an adolescent boy he was saying at the out set of the interview that he had no goals. When I questioned him on this he made it even stronger that he had no goals whatsoever, not even one. I said, “There isn’t anything you want to do?” “Nothing… well, yeah, I want to keep on living.” I remember very distinctly my feeling at that moment. I resonated very deeply to this phrase. He might simply be telling me, and this seemed to be a distinct possibility, that at some point the question of whether or not to live had been a real issue with him. So I tried to resonate with him at all levels. I didn’t know for certain what the message was. I simply wanted to be open to any of the meanings that this statement might have, including the meaning that he might have at one time considered suicide. I think that my being able and willing to listen to him at all levels is perhaps one of the things that made it possible for him to tell me, before the end of the interview, that not long before he had been on the point of blowing his brains out. This little episode constitues an example of what I mean by wanting to really hear someone at all the levels at which he is endeavoring to communicate.
… I find, in therapeutic interviews, and in the intensive group experiences which have meant a great deal to me, that hearing has consequences. When I do truly hear a person and the meanings that are important to him at the moment, hearing not simply his words, but him, and when I let him know that I have heard his own private personal meanings, many things happen. The first of all is a grateful look. He feels released. He wants to tell me more about his world. He surges forth in a new sense of freedom. He becomes more open to the process of change.
I have often noticed, both in therapy and in groups, that the more deeply I hear the meanings of this person the more there is that happens.
I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It is as though he were saying, “Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it’s like to be me.”
In such moments I have had the fantasy of a prisoner in a dungeon, tapping out day after day a morse code message, “Does anybody hear me? Is there anybody there? Can anyone hear me?” And finally one day he is released from his loneliness, he has become a human being again. There are many, many people living in private dungeons today, people who give no evidence of it whatever on the outside, where you have to listen very sharply to hear the faint message from the dungeon.
Let me move on to a second learning which I would like to share with you. I like to be heard. A number of times in my life i have felt myself bursting with insoluble problems, or going round in tormented circles or, during one period, overcome with feelings of worthlessness and despair. I think I have been more fortunate than most in finding at these times individuals who have been able to hear my meanings a little more deeply than I have known them.
These individuals have heard me without judging me, diagnosing me, appraising me, evaluating me. They have just listened and clarified and responded at all the levels at which I was communicating. I can testify that when you are in psychological distress and someone really hears you without passing judgment on you, without trying to take responsibility for you, without trying to mold you, it feels damn good.
At these times it has relaxed the tension in me. It has permitted me to bring out the frightening feelings, the guilts, the despair, the confusions that have been a part of my experience. When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to reperceive my world in a new way and to go on.
I have deeply appreciated the times that I have experienced this sensitive, empathetic, concentrated listening.
Let me move on to another area of my learnings.
I find it very satisfying when I can be real, when I can be close to whatever it is that is going on within me. I like it when I can listen to myself. To really know what I am experiencing in the moment is by no means an easy thing but I feel somewhat encouraged because I think that over the years I have been improving at it. I am convinced, however, that it is a life-long task and that none of us ever is really able to be comfortably close to all that is going on within our own experience.
In place of the term realness I have sometimes used the term congruence. By this I mean that when my experiencing at the moment is present in my awareness, and when what is present in my awareness is present in my communication, then each of these three levels matches or is congruent. At such moments I am integrated or whole, I am completely in one piece. Most of the time of course I, like everyone else, exhibit some degree of ingongruence. I have learned, however, that realness, or genuineness, or congruence- – whatever term you choose to give it– is a fundamental basis for the best of communication.
This is far from easy partly because what I am experiencing keeps changing in every moment. Usually there is a lag, sometimes of moments, sometimes of days, weeks or months, between the experiencing and the communication. In these cases I experience something, I feel something, but only later do I dare to communicate it, when it has become cool enough to risk sharing it with another. Yes it is a most satisfying experience whenI can communicate what is real in me at the moment that it occurs. Then I feel genuine, and spontaneous, and alive.
I trust that in your experiences too you will see some of the elements of growth-promoting interpersonal communication which have had meaning for me. A sensitive ability to hear, a deep satisfaction in being heard, an ability to be more real which in turn brings forth more realness from another, a willingness to receive warmth and caring frmo others and consequently a greater freedom to give love. These, in my experience, are the elements which make interpersonal communication enriching and enhancing.
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