Many moons ago, I wrote a list of 12 Prin­ci­ples that were the basis of my under­stand­ing, both of my life and of my coun­selling prac­tice. I’ve been think­ing about pulling them together into a small book that I could give to new clients.

I’ve decided that I’d, at least for now, tackle each of the top­ics here, in the blog. We’ll see how it goes.

4. At The Phoenix Cen­tre, we teach our clients to be in charge of their lives through both accep­tance and trans­for­ma­tive action. We encour­age life­long self-actualization. And the key to that is self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-knowing, decon­struc­tion of the ego, and the recon­struc­tion of a fuller sense of self.

Self actu­al­iza­tion is a term made famous by Abra­ham Maslow, who exten­sively researched men­tal health and human poten­tial. You can read more about self actualization.

Maslow saw human beings’ needs arranged like a lad­der. The most basic needs, at the bot­tom, were phys­i­cal — air, water, food, sleep. Then came safety needs — secu­rity, sta­bil­ity — fol­lowed by psy­cho­log­i­cal, or social needs — for belong­ing, love, accep­tance. At the top of it all were the self-actualizing needs — the need to ful­fill one­self, to become all that one is capa­ble of becom­ing. Maslow felt that unful­filled needs lower on the lad­der would inhibit the per­son from climb­ing to the next step. Some­one dying of thirst quickly for­gets their thirst when they have no oxy­gen, as he pointed out. Peo­ple who dealt in man­ag­ing the higher needs were what he called self-actualizing peo­ple. Bene­dict and Wertheimer were Maslow’s mod­els of self-actualization, from which he gen­er­al­ized that, among other char­ac­ter­is­tics, self-actualizing peo­ple tend to focus on prob­lems out­side of them­selves, have a clear sense of what is true and what is phony, are spon­ta­neous and cre­ative, and are not bound too strictly by social con­ven­tions.
[from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow]

Self-Acceptance

We pro­ceed from the assump­tion that peo­ple are, at all stages of their devel­op­ment, both OK, and com­plete. This is what we mean by accep­tance, or bet­ter, self-acceptance. That this is not the nor­mal belief is obvious—we are trained from birth to judge our­selves as lacking—and also “wrong, bad, and/or evil.”

Clients tend to want symp­tom removal, which is interesting.

I some­times ask them what they want in place of the symp­tom, and they will say some­thing like, “I just don’t want this [pain, depres­sion, faulty rela­tion­ship, anger, etc.] any­more.” It’s like ask­ing some­one, “What do you want for sup­per?” and hear­ing, “I don’t want steak.” Neg­a­tive state­ments are a prob­lem, because it is impos­si­ble to list all of the things we don’t want.

All things clients name—like anger, depres­sion, sad­ness, being judgemental—these things are actu­ally symp­toms of just one thing—a lack of resources for doing things dif­fer­ently.

In other words, sit­u­a­tion ‘a’ hap­pens, and you react with anger. Sit­u­a­tion ‘b,’ (which is totally dif­fer­ent from sit­u­a­tion ‘a’,) arises,and you react with anger. And so on.

Unpack­ing, this means,
“No mat­ter what arises, the only thing I know to do is
to get angry.”

Think about it—the solu­tion is not to elim­i­nate anger. The rea­son? Well, what will take its place? Rather, one must begin with accep­tance. “Here I am, at this stage in my life, and when con­fronted with a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion, I have trained myself to respond with anger. This is no longer work­ing for me, so I will instead teach myself to [engage in another behaviour.”]

This new behav­iour falls under the cat­e­gory of
trans­for­ma­tive action.

We call it this to dif­fer­en­ti­ate it from mind­less action. In a sense, the way out of the fog of rep­e­ti­tion is to engage in thought–ful behav­iour (behav­iour that has been designed, through rea­son, to accom­plish the end goal.)

We’ve men­tioned goals before.

Let’s say you have this goal:

to stop fight­ing with your part­ner, and then to deepen the rela­tion­ship through ele­gant communication.

You could see this as a two step goal.

The first step is to notice both your anger, and when you are begin­ning to fight.

We call this self-knowing.

What do you mean I’m miss­ing something?

It’s amaz­ing how many clients do not have a clue what they are doing. I once spent 20 min­utes in a group lis­ten­ing to a woman accuse the other mem­bers of the group of not let­ting her speak, and how every­one always inter­rupted her, and kept her from speak­ing. Now, she was never once inter­rupted in 20 min­utes, other than for the leader to encour­age her to keep talk­ing. She was so clearly invested in her belief that she was unaware that she was receiv­ing exactly what she craved.

Once you notice that you have moved down a path you want to stop trod­ding, you stop your­self. With­out judge­ment. This is the tricky part, as, to say it again, we’ve been trained from birth to crit­i­cize our­selves for our sup­posed failures.

If you think about it, how­ever, crit­i­cism is a poor moti­va­tor. It’s much bet­ter to notice, then stop, the errant behaviour.

Here comes step two: 

Self-responsibility.

Not only do I accept that I am who I am, (up to and includ­ing the present moment, where I “stopped myself,”) but I am now at the trans­for­ma­tive action cross­roads. I can stop fight­ing, and this is a great improve­ment, but falls short of the sec­ond part of the goal: to deepen the rela­tion­ship through ele­gant com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In order to accom­plish this part of the goal, I have to now move my lips in another way altogether.

So,

1. I notice, and
   I stop myself from engag­ing in non-helpful behaviours.
2. I remem­ber my goal and imple­ment it.

The self-responsibility require­ment makes the choice to act a solo job.

In other words, I deepen the rela­tion­ship through ele­gant com­mu­ni­ca­tion, regard­less of what my part­ner is doing.

Mostly, peo­ple fight this. “How can I improve my rela­tion­ship if my part­ner refuses to coöper­ate?” I want to assure you that, 100% of the time, such a ques­tion is a cop out.

It’s a cop out because how you self-actualize is 100% about how you act, and how you choose to define your real­ity. It does not, and never has, had any­thing to do with the behav­iour of another.

In the end, all we can ever do is what we do as indi­vid­u­als.

And as I often say, any­one can choose to com­mu­ni­cate with any­one, and it does not require that the other per­son com­mu­ni­cate back, give per­mis­sion, or change their behaviour.

Now, granted, it’s eas­ier if both par­ties are on the same page, but it’s not required.

And wait­ing for oth­ers to coöper­ate in your self-growth project is set­ting your­self up for a long, long wait. Great excuse, though. I can’t do this until every­one else behaves. Good luck with that.

Yet, I see this all the time. Peo­ple annoyed with their part­ner, par­ents, kids, bosses, whomever, and stomp­ing their lit­tle feet­sies up and down, exclaim­ing, “Why can’t they see how unhappy they are mak­ing me, and do it my way?”

It’s as if they never grew up, and are still expect­ing magic to change the world, so they can stay the same.

We urge self-responsible, trans­for­ma­tive action. All the time, no excuses, no wait­ing, no blam­ing, judg­ing or crit­i­ciz­ing. There is what does not work (stop doing it!) and what does (start doing it!) Plain and simple.