On becoming a person

is an excellent book by Carl Rogers (isbn 978-1-84529-057-3). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

The first stage… There is an unwillingness to communicate self. Communication is only about externals… He is structure-bound in his manner of experiencing. That is, he reacts "to the situation of now by finding it to be like a past experience and then reacting to that past, feeling it".

The concept of "cure" is entirely inappropriate, since in most of these disorders we are dealing with learned behaviour, not with a disease.

Thus scientific methodology is seen for what it truly is - a way of preventing me from deceiving myself...

It is a type of learning which cannot be taught. The essence of it is the aspect of self-discovery.

Involved in this process of becoming himself is a profound experience of personal choice. He realises that he can choose to continue to hide behind a facade, or that he can take the risks involved in being himself.

He is more open to his feelings of fear and discouragement and pain. He is more open to his feelings of courage and tenderness, and awe.

Such living in the moment mean an absence of rigidity, of tight organisation, of the imposition of structure on experience. It means instead a maximum of adaptability, a discovery of structure in experience, a flowing, changing organisation of self and personality.

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.

He has changed, but what seems most significant, he has become an integrated process of changingness.

The process involves a shift from incongruence to congruence.

The incongruence between experience and awareness is vividly experienced as it disappears into congruence.