2014 Personality Lecture 10: Carl Rogers (Phenomenological Humanism)

So we're going to continue with our discussion of clinical personality theories today, moving away from the psychoanalytic or 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. I think we'll start with 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 something that Carl Jung wrote about in the last book he published, which was called Mysterium Conjunctionis, which means "mysterious conjunction." He sort of posited that there were some extensions of moral development past the higher levels of moral development that Piaget identified, and there were three of them. 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, the motivations, and rationality. 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 psyche isn't at odds with itself, and it can move forward with a minimum of conflict.

That's something related to the Piagetian idea of an equilibrated state. If you're in an equilibrated state, you don't have the sense that there are parts of you warring against other parts because you've been able to weave everything together into a coherent identity that covers the past, the present, and the future.

So the first stage in Jung's vision of what constituted higher development was the rationality of emotion and motivation. He saw that that was symbolized in the literature that he had reviewed by masculine spirit, feminine emotions, and motivation banged together in one thing. So that then would be the united mind and spirit in a sense.

Then the next stage, which was symbolized again by the masculine-feminine symbolism, was the united mind-spirit with the body. 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 were no contradictions between who you were in terms of how you thought, how you felt, what you wanted, and what you were actually doing.

Modern philosophers have described what they call a performative contradiction, which they have aptly described as another type of lie, essentially another type of deceit, which is that you say one thing and do another. It's interesting because 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, the point is that once your emotions and your motivations are working alongside your rational mind—really, your rational mind is properly nested within them—then the next thing you should do is act consistently in accordance with who you are.

So that's stage two. Both of these stages are pretty easy to understand, but the third stage is actually a phenomenological stage; you have to think phenomenologically to understand it. So here's one way of thinking about it. Imagine that you go home, and let's say you've set up a room.

In that room, it's not a very nice room; maybe you've got some posters on the wall, and they're sort of hanging a little cockeyed. There are dust bunnies under the bed, and you have piles of paperwork that you haven't done, and maybe there's the odd crust of bread lying about. 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. The phenomenologist would say, in a sense, that the best way to conceptualize the self in its totality is what you experience; everything that you experience is you.

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 believe that this is a very profound way of looking at things. Imagine that you could extend that viewpoint. It's kind of easy to understand when you think about it as your own room; you're in there quite a lot.

Let's say you're in your room 10% of the day. We could say that the experiences that characterize your room are 10% of you, at least for the time being. You can have a low-quality experience in there or a high-quality experience in there.

Then, let's say that you start generalizing that to the whole house. You can start thinking, well, are there problematic places in the house? Are there problematic relationships among the people in the house? Those problematic relationships are also you, and you can tell when there's a problem because you encounter undesired negative emotion in relation to some relationship or in some physical locale within the house.

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 arise signifies something. It signifies that that situation, in some sense, is nonoptimal, and then you could work on strategies to optimize that.

You don't do that until you stop making the presupposition that there's you and then there's the house; the distinction between you and where you are is a very unclear distinction.

Let's say you're walking down the street or you're going into a store. Maybe your manners aren't as good as they could be, because, you know, to 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 socially skilled have a much higher quality existence because no matter where they go, they immediately establish a relationship with the people that they're talking to.

It's not an impersonal, dead, or aggravating interaction. 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 ask them how they're doing and how their day has been. 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.

All of a sudden, it's a high-quality experience, and that person, everywhere they go, if they're skilled like that—they're awake, 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. 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 a key component in therapy and psychotherapy: attention and listening. So you might say, well, 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.

Then you could start fixing them. That improves the quality of that particular environment, and then you can start to generalize beyond, you know, the locales that are more specifically under your control. Because if you're walking down the street, 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 the street, and you run across someone who's schizophrenic and maybe alcoholic at the same time. Well, that's a part of your experience that might supersede your ability to transform.

The phenomenologists 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 got to be very careful not to extend yourself dramatically beyond your skill level, but you can certainly start in isolated locales. If you stop assuming a priority that there's some radical distinction between you and the environment, 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 as the ground of reality.

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 fixing yourself up, it opens up a whole new avenue to getting your life together.

People always think they have to work on themselves. This is one of the things that the psychoanalysts I think didn't get quite right, although Jung touched on it in his later work. Not all of you is inside your head. For the psychoanalysts, a lot of the work you were doing on yourself was on the relationship, say, between your conscious and your unconscious mind, but a 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 as something that extends beyond you 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.

The way it does that is in 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 tightly associated with proneness to guilt. That's the negative emotion that seems to go with conscientiousness. Guilt, anxiety, shame—those sorts of emotions, which are unpleasant, also simultaneously signal the presence of a problem.

And so, resentment—that's another good one. Instead of having those emotions as enemies, you say, "Well, I just want that to go away." You can think, "Okay, my embodied being is signaling to me that something is nonoptimal here." It's not an enemy; it's something that's trying to improve the quality of your present experience and your future experience.

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, a place, a thing, or yourself—you don't need to make the distinctions. You know, if you're having an argument with your partner and it's not going very well, 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. If you do that a hundred times, maybe you're better at arguing than they are, for example, 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 hundred times, you're not a winner; you're just someone who's beat up your partner a hundred times. What you want to find out is, what the hell is it that they're talking about? Sometimes that takes a tremendous amount of patience, 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 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.

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. Unless you solve the problem, it's not going to go away.

Now, I'm going to start talking about Rogers specifically by going over some of the things that he had to say about listening. I think I've learned more about listening from Rogers than from any other personality theorist or psychotherapist that I've encountered.

Now, we could go back to the fundamentals of psychotherapy. I mean, really what you're doing in psychotherapy is trying to help the person become a better person. 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 people vary in their temperaments indicates that your way of being a better person and your way of being a better person wouldn't necessarily be the same way. You know, it's like maybe someone's great on the violin, and another person is great on the piano. The great is the same, but the instrument is different, and that's a good way of looking at it.

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.

The people go into the conversation with a specific orientation, and the orientation is generally with client and therapist. The client comes 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.

Something that you should all know because this will stop you from tangling yourself up in your life to a tremendous degree is that 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 I should also tell you that that was one of Rogers's necessary preconditions for psychotherapy. Another one was honesty and communication. But the person who was coming in for the therapeutic process had to be there voluntarily.

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.

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're not going to get in there with a screwdriver and pry off that shell. 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 someone else might be able to help me figure that out."

That's a really good attitude to have, by the way, when you're listening to someone. Because whether you 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.

Lots of times, when people are talking, what they're trying to do is 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 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.

All you're doing is establishing that you're a lobster with bigger claws than the person that you're trying to pick a fight with. 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.

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. That's really a 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. You'll just feel like a fool anyway because you're throwing ping pong balls against a brick wall. You know, you're not getting anywhere if they're not listening.

That's a sign that the situation isn't set up to allow you to progress on the path that you're choosing. So then you have to stop and think, "Okay, what's going on here? Why is the person not listening? Am I being too forceful? Do they not understand what I'm saying? Is it too much about me? Do they want to talk? What's going on?"

Maybe they don't want to be here—there are 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 situation and explore and see what's there. 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 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 anyway.

That's especially the case when you're dealing with people who are close to you, that you will have around for the rest of your life. You cannot win an argument with them because 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 they'll get resentful, and then they won't be helpful.

You just can't win an argument with someone that you will have repeated contact with. What you can do, however, is have a conversation that's a real conversation, and maybe you can come to terms about the thing that you're discussing.

That's negotiation. You know, it's like, "Well, what do you want?" But you have to really want to know. It's like, "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?"

Then the other person will think, "Well, there's nothing you can do to satisfy me because 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, maybe your partner says, "You're not paying enough attention to me." It's like, "All right, what do you want exactly? 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 do you want me to act differently when I come home and I'm at the door?"

It's like you're feeling unattended to—what do you want? Well, then they'll say, "Well, if you loved me, you should be able to figure that out." Yeah, that's wrong because you're stupid; you won't be able to figure that out because 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, why are they with you then, you know?—they need to think about that.

It's like, "Oh, hmm, 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. Then it gives the other person a chance to actually respond.

You then have to allow your partner to be, because of course they are. Once you tell them what you want, you have to let them do it badly like ten times because they're never going to do it right the first time.

Sometimes when I've seen, I've helped people with marital problems, and one of the things I often recommend is that they go on a date. You know, they take each other away from their home, where the kids are usually, or maybe not—it doesn't matter—and do something that's just focused on each other.

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 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 just miserable. Right?

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 anyway. 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 because it didn't work very well? It's like, people don't think about it.

It's like, so maybe when you take your partner out and you haven't been getting along, it takes you like ten times before you have a relatively okay time. But ten 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.

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 times 25, so that's 750 times. If you practice ten times, then you might be able to have 740 good times out together, you know, and that's an underestimate.

So ten times of practicing is hardly a problem for that kind of return. This is all part of this Rogerian process of listening. 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—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, because you can corner them by saying, "Well, you want to be attended to more. What do you want?" They'll try some weird defense, like, "I told you already. If you loved me, you'd already know," which is a cliché, and it's a foolish cliché, so you can't let that stop you.

I should also tell you the sorts of barriers that people will put up if you listen to them too. For example, let me see if I can think about it for a bit.

Usually what happens is 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.

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 cliché or they say something annoying. Maybe they've got one other verbal trick after that, and then once you push through that, then they cry or they get angry.

If you still don't stop, then they stomp off. 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, it doesn't mean the conversation is over. Just because the person cries doesn't necessarily mean that you're a sadist. Often, tears are a trick; they mask anger. What the person is doing in part is they're using their emotions as an exploratory technique to find out how important this is.

What happens if I just break down? Will the person shut up? If the person shuts up, they think, "Oh, it's not that important," right? Because they have been able to use a technique. I'm not saying this is conscious; 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. 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. One of the things you have to do if you're in any kind of relationship is you've got to make a rule, which is: you can leave, but you've got to come back. We're not done with this; you can't run off because it breaks the contract of the conversation. You've got to stay and hash it out.

Okay, now I'm going to read you some of the things that Rogers talked about. Alright, so one of the things he talked about is this idea called unconditional positive regard. 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 cliché 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 are just not going to garner a lot of love. Unconditional positive regard—it's not like there’s not an idea behind that, because there really is an idea behind that—but like I said, it got all New Age-y after Rogers formulated it, and it sounds like all you have to do is be consistently positive towards the person, and, you know, they'll flourish.

It's like, first of all, are you going to have unconditional positive regard for Hitler? It's like, no! 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.

That means that the things that make things worse are bad. If there's better, there's got to be worse. 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. Like I said, I think Rogers's word choice wasn't very good. Here's a different way of thinking about it. If you're in a relationship with someone—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 you're going to have that person's best interests in mind when you have the conversation. You've got to have that as sort of the top value in your value hierarchy. The reason we're talking is because I want things to be better—not better for me, you know? Maybe better for me too, but better for me is a subordinate part of the better.

The reason we're communicating is that we both want things to be better, and neither of us is absolutely sure what it would mean for things to be better. We have to exchange information until we figure that out, and neither of us is sure about how we're going to get there.

So we have to exchange information until we figure out how to get there, and that's the initial axiomatic precondition for a true conversation. That's unconditional positive regard.

It's like, 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. There are 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.

You know, I'm also going to make mistakes along the way. So now Rogers pointed out that in order to communicate with someone in that manner, you had to be willing to put yourself in their shoes. Essentially, he said you had to comprehend the alternative phenomenological field.

Which is, okay, well, I’m here; this is my viewpoint coming out from this place, and now you have a viewpoint. 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've got to sort of pop myself out of my framework, put myself in yours, and figure out where you're coming from. That's the goal of the conversation.

Sometimes that can even help you figure out where you're coming from. You know, because you can say, "Well, it sounds to me like you're really angry," and the person will say, "Well, no, I'm just sad." It's like, "Well, they're all red; they look like they're going to bite you." And you say, "No, no, it really looks like I think you might be also a little bit angry."

They'll be angry about you saying that, of course, but 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 this terrible unarticulated chaotic bodily state that is signaling something but hasn't been articulated, and so they're kind of a mess.

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—then they can trust you and 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.

Rogers says real communication occurs and the evaluative tendency is avoided when we listen with understanding. Now, the evaluative tendency he's talking about is, well, let's simplify this a little bit. Let's say I'm radically left-wing, and I'm talking to someone who's radically right-wing.

We start talking about something like income distribution, and the right-wing person says, well, let's say the left-wing person says, "Well, there are all these people at the bottom and they don't have a lot of money, and a lot of the reason that they're there is because you know they’ve encountered very, very harsh circumstances or maybe they have an illness or something like that."

And, you know, there's a real distribution of intelligence. So lots of times, people are at the bottom because they just don’t have the cognitive resources to climb. The right-winger goes, "Rubbish, rubbish! The reason that they're at the bottom is because they don't work hard enough and they don't take any care 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.

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 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 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 the failure to communicate, is like that's a microcosm of what goes wrong in a society when it really starts to fall apart.

You know, when individuals within the society who have differing viewpoints can no longer communicate, the whole society shakes and trembles. 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 ideology 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 gets shot?"

That seems like a bad thing. So what exactly is going on in a democratic state? What's going on is that there are all these different viewpoints, and a lot of them are temperamentally informed.

For example, we know that liberals are higher in openness and lower in conscientiousness than conservatives. Conservatives are conscientious, but they're not very creative and open, so they're good at running things. They're really good at running things; 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. They have to be less conscientious in some ways if they're going to be creative, because conscientiousness can constrain creativity.

For society to work properly, the people with the liberal temperament and the conservative temperament have to interact with each other because the liberals think up all the new companies and the conservatives run them.

In a political state, conscientiousness is a virtue, although if it's exaggerated too much, especially the orderly part, then it can become tyranny. Openness is a virtue too, but you don't want everything changing every second.

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 and 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.

The conversation has to track those movements so that society stays healthy across time. 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, do 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 then, how do you optimize the functioning of the two brains?

Well, obviously, they've got to 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.

Back to the poverty issue. It's like, well, what predicts poverty? Well, the sorts of things that the left-winger talks about predict poverty, so do the sorts of things that the right-winger talks about.

If you're really unconscientious, and that makes you the kind of person that will rely on others to do the work, if you're unconscientious, you're much more likely to be poor. 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 that more of an individual temperament problem, which is what the conservatives are concerned about.

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 become 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. 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. 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 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-conscientious poverty or the abuse poverty.

There's no reason to assume whatsoever that those should be amenable to the same solutions. Real communication occurs, and the evaluative tendency is avoided when we listen with understanding.

Understanding—that's an interesting word because you might ask yourself, what do you mean when you understand? It's got this sort of physical aspect to it, right? That's the stand. Then there's the underp part, which sort of implies that to understand something is to be under it and standing.

Partly what happens is 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 is, maybe the way I look at things—like the perceptual scheme through which I view the world—but also my actions.

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. Then you listen to some dimwit 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, then 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 at least a little bit into that state of chaos. 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.

That's a way better thing to identify with. Are you going to identify with your beliefs? This is a big idea. Are you going to identify with your beliefs, or are you going to identify with the process that allows you to generate beliefs? Often, those things are in contradiction because if you identify with the process that allows you to change your beliefs, then you're assaulting your beliefs even though you might be correcting them.

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, and the evaluative tendency is 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 them, to achieve their frame of reference in regard to the thing they are talking about.

Rogers emphasizes very much the idea of embodiment. 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.

In some sense, that's what you're taught to do, for example, when you debate. The idea there is that you know the argument is a cognitive phenomenon and that the logic is structured in a logical way.

The way that the argument is settled is by the exchange of information and the relative coherence of the two perspectives. It’s a very rationalistic perspective, and it's very useful to be able to debate, don't get me wrong, and to have your mind organized so that you can put forward a logical argument—that's why you're in university, to learn how to do that, believe it or not.

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, because 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. 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.

Then when you're mirroring them with your body, then you can feel what they're 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 will 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, 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; something's being flipped over; that's why it's upsetting. 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 just because you got things going.

Then, stated so briefly—this may sound absurdly simple—well, I didn't state it so briefly, but 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 their relationships and 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 him.

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 psychophysiology—it's your whole body trying to figure things out, right?

You can't just think about it as a logical and mental process; your emotions are 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 pretty mundane, and you explode.

Well, they say to you, "Why are you like that?" And you 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 because the boots are? Well, they're always there."

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—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 if you touch them, you know, they'll get irritated at you. 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 angry for the situation that demands it.

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 they'll tell you a little story, and then they'll say, "Well, that's happening all the time." Then you ask them about that, and you find out that the person either has a tyrant for a boss, because sometimes that happens, right? A real bully—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 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 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 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 think logically through a whole sequence of problems. The thoughts sort of appear in their heads, you know, spontaneously—in sort of like a reverie—but they're not really—they're not philosophers, you know?

They don’t have that kind of command of the language. So then when they're talking to you, they're actually thinking. They're thinking out loud.

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.

One of the things you're doing in a psychotherapeutic session is you're just letting the person talk. I have clients who don't want me to do anything for the hour that I'm with them except shut up and listen.

Maybe now and then I can just clarify something. I have one client in particular who's very isolated—socially isolated—and this person has come to see me for a long time, and they just want to talk about the last two weeks. They want me to listen.

I have to be engaged, right? I'm listening, 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 could be a conversation that could 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 with my father. I just hate my father. Every time I talk to him, it just makes me angry."

That's a low-resolution representation, right? It's like one pixel: father equals anger; it's not differentiated. That's a problem because, like their body 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 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? Then you listen. You don't give the person advice about what they should have done because 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 what their father was like in their childhood, and then a bunch of things that pop up in memory.

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 are like a thousand cards, and they're all representations of the father.

Then they sort of exhaust themselves; they're out of angry stories about their father. Then maybe they say, "Well, you know, he wasn't all bad." Then they start laying out some things about him that, you know, he drank all the time, but he always took care of us, and he wasn't an angry drunk, you know, and he stayed with my mother.

Now what's happened is the picture of the father is getting differentiated, right? It's not just one pixel; it's differentiated. Then you might say, "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? The person will say, think, "Well, 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.

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.

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.

That's where I think Freud went wrong: 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.

So then you've got to talk to someone: "I'm in a bad mood," and you know, "Well, you know, how are you feeling?" They'll get all spiteful and tell you how they're feeling, and then 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 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, but 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 lovely because you don't often actually get a technique from a therapist that works. You know, you get sort of vague techniques like help the person lay the cards out on the table; you know, 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. 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 institute this rule.

While you also don't have to be that formal about it, you can just do it once you know the game. Each person can speak up for themselves only after they have first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately and to that speaker’s satisfaction.

Now that's so cool because here's the typical argument. So we're arguing; I want to win. 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.

That's a straw man argument. You take what they're telling you and caricature it, and that way you can make them look absurd and make them feel ashamed, and then, of course, you've set up this skinny little opponent that you can 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 thin and starving 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 taking them seriously.

To that speaker's satisfaction—well, that's so cool. So 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 throats.

You know, 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.

That's really difficult but so useful because, first of all, it does mean that you understood them, and second, it indicates to them that you're not just trying to win; you're trying to listen.

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. You know, often when people are trying to tell you what they want, they're all afraid of telling you what they want because maybe they never got what they wanted in their whole life.

You know, if they've had a history of bad relationships and poor parenting and that sort of thing, they're just bloody terrified to tell you they might actually want something.

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, then it's like one step toward trust. I see you did listen; you at least know where I'm coming from.

It 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, a 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.

Maybe now and then 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 I'll tell them that— you know, it 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 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 you just point it out flatly.

It's like I'm not involved; I'm just listening. It's not my problem; it's a problem. 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 have to take them on as if they're yours. You have to mirror them, but it's their problem. They have to figure it out, and that's good. You need a problem to figure out; it's not necessarily a terrible thing that they have a problem.

It simply means 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.

Then when I tell it back to you, it's way shorter and tighter, and that means in some sense 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 it's standing there and, you know, 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. They listen to that and 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 divested it of all the excess baggage, just like pruning. And that's what you're doing, and so that dialogue is mental hygiene.

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 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 happened to me, right?

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.

So if you don’t have someone to listen to you, well, especially if it’s over a few decades, you’re going to have a brain that’s like a whole forest of trees that need a forest fire.

It doesn't need just some trimming; it's really in trouble. You need to have someone to listen to you, and the 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 it 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 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 are willing to understand a person in this way, if you are willing to enter their private world and see life the way their life appears to them, you run the risk of being changed yourself.

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 challenging 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 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 into 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 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. 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?

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.

Then there’s more of you because now you can operate here and here. 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 can operate there.

If you do that over a 15-year period, you'll be someone who can go anywhere and not fit in exactly. 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.

Then you're not going to run up against people and 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 absolutely—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 Dali characters. 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. It's not boring; that’s another issue.

If the conversation is boring, you are not listening. Because 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 take that risk. The great majority of us cannot listen; we find ourselves compelled to evaluate. The evaluation is: I'm going to keep you away, I'm going to pigeonhole 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.

You have to communicate it within a frame, and the proper frame is: we're trying to make things better here. You know, in order to adopt that frame—it'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?

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.

To weave all those contradictory impulses together and to overcome all those hurts and disappointments and reasons for revenge and resentment, you got to do all that before you can say, "Well, I'm here to make things better."

Because if you're still possessed by those sorts of experiences and contradictions, you're going to be motivated to make things worse all the time, just out of revenge and spite. You know, you’ve been hurt; you're going to hurt.

So to adopt the framework that Rogers is talking about is 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 irritations that are corrupting you and twisting you in the wrong direction.

The Rogers perspective is extremely useful. It's very useful. The reason I concentrated on that one quote of his today is that’s such a useful thing. 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."

They'll go, "Yes, that's exactly what I meant." Maybe if you were really listening, they'll be real happy about that because 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 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.

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.

You're not stupid; 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 been willing to expose yourself to a risk, and when your body and your mind are 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. 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 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. It’s like a challenge to your capacity to pay attention, and then you get engaged in the conversation—engaging conversations all the time; that's a good thing.

So, okay, we'll see you.