PATHWAY TO JOY AND HEALING

I have always been fascinated by the idea of incongruity between who we represent to others and who we really are inside, as I have observed so many people including those in the spiritual community who appear to represent themselves in one way then in actuality they are someone else all together.  This incongruity appears to be a human condition.  Yesterday, I was speaking with my graduate assistant who is studying Counseling Education to become a therapist/counselor, and we began talking about how even her professors appear incongruent between how they represent themselves and who they really are.  One of her professors practices meditation, mindfulness, and spirituality, but his behavior and reactions are based in ego and his smaller self.

This concept of incongruity was first introduced by Carl Rogers, an influential American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach (or client-centered approach) to psychology. Rogers is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research.  “Rogers identified the “real self” as the aspect of one’s being that is founded in the actualizing tendency, follows organismic valuing, needs and receives positive regard and self-regard. It is the “you” that, if all goes well, you will become. On the other hand, to the extent that our society is out of sync with the actualizing tendency, and we are forced to live with conditions of worth that are out of step with organismic valuing, and receive only conditional positive regard and self-regard, we develop instead an “ideal self”. By ideal, Rogers is suggesting something not real, something that is always out of our reach, the standard we cannot meet. This gap between the real self and the ideal self, the “I am” and the “I should” is called incongruity.”

“Rogers described the concepts of congruence and incongruence as important ideas in his theory. In proposition #6, he refers to the actualizing tendency. At the same time, he recognized the need for positive regard. In a fully congruent person realizing their potential is not at the expense of experiencing positive regard. They are able to lead lives that are authentic and genuine. Incongruent individuals, in their pursuit of positive regard, lead lives that include falseness and do not realize their potential. Conditions put on them by those around them make it necessary for them to forego their genuine, authentic lives to meet with the approval of others. They live lives that are not true to themselves, to who they are on the inside out.”

“Rogers suggested that the incongruent individual, who is always on the defensive and cannot be open to all experiences, is not functioning ideally and may even be malfunctioning. They work hard at maintaining/protecting their self-concept. Because their lives are not authentic this is a difficult task and they are under constant threat. They deploy defense mechanisms to achieve this. He describes two mechanisms: distortion and denial. Distortion occurs when the individual perceives a threat to their self-concept. They distort the perception until it fits their self-concept.This defensive behavior reduces the consciousness of the threat but not the threat itself. And so, as the threats mount, the work of protecting the self-concept becomes more difficult and the individual becomes more defensive and rigid in their self structure.”

“If the incongruence is immoderate this process may lead the individual to a state that would typically be described as neurotic. Their functioning becomes precarious and psychologically vulnerable. If the situation worsens it is possible that the defenses cease to function altogether and the individual becomes aware of the incongruence of their situation. Their personality becomes disorganised and bizarre; irrational behavior, associated with earlier denied aspects of self, may erupt uncontrollably.”

As Roger’s theory indicates as long as we continue our distortions and denials, we will remain in this incongruity between our real self and ideal self unable to live an authentic life.  The first step is awareness of this incongruity, before we can begin to bring congruence between our real self and ideal self in order to live a more authentic spiritual life.  Blessings of light, Brooke (Excerpts from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rogers, please see this link for the full biography and works of Carl Rogers)