The Good Life and Carl Rogers

Big Frank has written before about what a great thing meetup.com is. He started a bloggers meetup a little over a year ago. Since then he's also joined a Philosophers meetup and then more recently he started another group called the Social Adventurers. This meetup's next topic for discussion is "The Good Life - Are You Leading It?" It centers on a discussion of what Carl Rogers calls a fully functioning person. Big Frank has included a fuller account of this below. If anyone in the Spokane area is interested, come and join us - it's going to be at Big Frank's house on Tuesday, August 18 at 6:30 pm. Join the group if you're interested: Social Adventurers Meetup.

Are You A Fully Functioning Person?

The Social Adventurers will take on the topic of "the good life". How good is your life? Carl Rogers, the eminent psychologist, believed that to the extent that a person fulfilled their full potential they lived "the good life." He provided a list of seven characteristics of a fully functioning person, and believed that such a person would be in the fluid process of "the good life": it being a process rather than a static state.

The Social Adventurers will discuss these seven characteristics at our next meetup. Take a look at them and consider to what extent it is that you possess these traits. Are you a "fully functioning person"? If so in what way and to what extent? If not, in what ways is it that you are lacking? Being a fully functional person, in Rogers opinion was not for the faint of heart, for such a person experiences the real fullness of life, and that means both the up sides and the down sides. And it involves growth and change. As Rogers put it:

"This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life."

The Fully Functioning Person (the seven characteristics of)
1. A growing openness to experience – they move away from defensiveness and have no need for subception (a perceptual defense that involves unconsciously applying strategies to prevent a troubling stimulus from entering consciousness).

2. An increasingly existential lifestyle – living each moment fully – not distorting the moment to fit personality or self concept but allowing personality and self concept to emanate from the experience. This results in excitement, daring, adaptability, tolerance, spontaneity, and a lack of rigidity and suggests a foundation of trust. "To open one's spirit to what is going on now, and discover in that present process whatever structure it appears to have"

3. Increasing organismic trust – they trust their own judgment and their ability to choose behaviour that is appropriate for each moment. They do not rely on existing codes and social norms but trust that as they are open to experiences they will be able to trust their own sense of right and wrong.

4. Freedom of choice – not being shackled by the restrictions that influence an incongruent individual, they are able to make a wider range of choices more fluently. They believe that they play a role in determining their own behaviour and so feel responsible for their own behaviour.

5. Creativity – it follows that they will feel more free to be creative. They will also be more creative in the way they adapt to their own circumstances without feeling a need to conform.

6. Reliability and constructiveness – they can be trusted to act constructively. An individual who is open to all their needs will be able to maintain a balance between them. Even aggressive needs will be matched and balanced by intrinsic goodness in congruent individuals.

7. A rich full life – he describes the life of the fully functioning individual as rich, full and exciting and suggests that they experience joy and pain, love and heartbreak, fear and courage more intensely.