"Dr. Carl Rogers on
Feeling What You Should Feel
Instead of What You Do Feel"
Thursday 8:25 PM
Estes Park, Colorado
August 7, 2006
The following is an amazing, right-on, "big ah-ha" excerpt
from Dr. Carl Rogers that I want to share with you. Carl Rogers
was one of the fore-fathers of the movement that produced Nonviolent
Communication, developed by Marshal Rosenberg, and also our method,
The Language of Peace.
The doctor is writing about a woman who went for psychological
treatment, but was sent away because the psychologist couldn't help
her. Three weeks later she committed suicide. Here is Dr. Rogers'
heart-opening interpretation of the situation:
"What went so fatally wrong in the life of Ellen West? I hope
I have indicated my belief that what went wrong is something that
occurs to some degree in the life of every one of us, but that in
her case was exaggerated.
As infants, we live in our experience; we trust it. When the baby
is hungry, he neither doubts his hunger nor questions whether he
should make every effort to get food. Without being in any way conscious
of it, he is a self-trusting organism.
But at some point, parents or others say to him, in effect, 'If
you feel that way, I won't love you.' And so he feels what he should
feel, not what he does feel. To this degree, he builds up a self
that feels what it should feel, only occasionally seeing frightening
glimpses of what his organism, of which the self is a part, is actually
experiencing.
In Ellen's case, this process operated in an extreme fashion. In
some of the most significant moments of life, she was made to feel
that her own experiencing was invalid, erroneous, wrong, and unsound,
and that what she should be feeling was something quite different.
Unfortunately, for her, her love for her parents, especially her
father, was so strong that she surrendered her own capacity for
trusting her experience and substituted theirs, or his.
She gave up being her self. This observation, made by one of her
doctors during her last year, is no surprise: 'Though as a child
she was wholly independent of the opinion of others, she is now
completely dependent on what others think." She no longer has
any way of knowing what she feels or what her opinion is. This is
the loneliest state of all--an almost complete separation from one's
autonomous organism." [paragraph breaks are my addition]
Rogers, Carl. R. "A Way of Being." Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1980, p. 173.
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