MONTHLY BLOG ONE – NOVEMBER 2023

THE GOOD LIFE

Welcome to this website and this monthly blog.  I am a person-centred counsellor and supervisor, but this blog is for both clients and fellow counsellors.  I chose my website address for a specific reason i.e., the founder/father of person-centred counselling, Carl Rogers PhD, wrote a now famous passage on what he understood to be a good life:

CARL ROGERS – THE GOOD LIFE 1961

“I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these at the appropriate times. But adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. 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. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming.”

As a professor of psychology, Carl Rogers chose all his words carefully.  Therefore, I would encourage all reading this to fully realise that the good life is not……a life for the faint-hearted.  Life in general is not; it challenges us CONTINUALLY.

There will be times when we need all our resources and all our support to deal with those challenges. That is why I remind my clients of that need - I too, sometimes need reminding.  We need to consider very carefully who may be in our support group and at what times we too might provide the right kind of support.

All book extract will be shown in italics

Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A therapists view of psychotherapy 1961 Constable and Robinson London