*These are notes from the portions of the text I was required to read for grad school. The potential gems of wisdom from this source are not represented in their totality.

Pacifica

Ch. 1: Experiences In Communication

6. I am not attempting at all to say that you should learn or do these same things but I feel that if I can report my own experience honestly enough, perhaps you can check what I say against your own experience and decide as to its truth or falsity for you.

8. Hidden in all of the personal communications which I really hear there seem to be orderly psychological laws, aspects of the same order we find in the universe as a whole.

10. So often, as in this instance, the words convey one message and the tone of voice a sharply different one.

25. Sometimes a feeling “rises up in me” which seems to have no particular relationship to what is going on. Yet I have learned to accept and trust this feeling in my awareness and to try to communicate it to my client.

16. So it is a very satisfying thing when I sense that I have gotten close to me, to the feelings and hidden aspects of myself that live below the surface.

22. People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can let them be.

23. Thus, prizing and loving and being prized or loved is experienced as very growth enhancing. A person who is loved appreciatively, not possessively, blooms and develops his own unique self. The person who loves nonpossessively is himself enriched.

Ch. 2: My Philosophy of Interpersonal Relationships and How it Grew (27)

In a narrowly fundamentalist religious home, I introjected the value attitudes toward others that were held by my parents. Whether I truly believe in these I cannot be sure. (27)

I was now more consciously a complete outsider, an onlooker in anything involving personal relationships. (29)

I realized by now that I was peculiar, a loner, with very little place or opportunity for a place in the world of persons. I was socially incompetent in any but superficial contacts. My fantasies during this period were definitely bizarre, and probably would be classed as schizoid by a diagnostician, but fortunately I never came in contact with a psychologist. (30)

I found I could express myself more freely with older girls, and as a freshman I dated several seniors. (31)

As I look back, I realize this was the first truly caring, close, sharing relationship I had ever formed with anyone. It meant the world to me. During the first two years of marriage we learned a vitally important lesson. We learned, through some chance help, that the elements in the relationship that seemed impossible to share–the secretly disturbing, dissatisfying elements–are the most rewarding to share. (32)

I discovered the thrill that comes from observing changes in a person’s behavior. Whether these were due to my enthusiasm or my methods I cannot say. (34) #psychotherapy

As I look back, I realize that my interest in interviewing and in therapy certainly grew in part out of my early loneliness. (34)

I scarcely knew what to do, but mostly I listened. Eventually, after many more interviews, not only did her marital relationship improve, but her son’s problem behavior dropped away as she became a more real and free person. (36) #parenting

I felt greatly supported in my new approach, which I found to my surprise was a home-grown brand of existential philosophy. (39)

I now learned just what it was like to experience on one day a tremendous surge of fresh insight, only to seem to lose it all the next in a wave of despair. (39)

by and large most psychologists are not open to new ideas. (39)

We do not like the strings–often initially invisible–that are attached to large or government grants. (41) #research

I want to accept all of these feelings, ideas, and impulses as an enriching part of me. I don’t expect to act on all of them, but when I accept them all, I can be more real; my behavior, therefore, will be much more appropriate to the immediate situation. (43)

I have found that for my interpersonal relationships best exist as a rhythm: openness and expression, and then assimilation; flow and change, then a temporary quiet; risk and anxiety, then temporary security. (44)

I cannot live my life in abstractions. So real relationships with persons, hands dirtied in the soil, observing the budding of a flower, or viewing the sunset, are necessary to my life. At least one foot must be in the soil of reality. (44) #grounding

Ch. 6: The Foundations of a Person-Centered Approach

116. Briefly, as persons are accepted and prized, they tend to develop a more caring attitude towards themselves.

117. there is in every organism, at whatever level, an underlying flow of movement toward constructive fulfillment of its inherent possibilities.

124. My main thesis is this: there appears to be a formative tendency at work in the universe, which can be observed at every level.

Ch. 7: Empathic: An Unappreciated Way of Being

142. An empathic way of being with another person has several facets. It means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home it in it. It involves being sensitive, moment by moment, to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person… It means temporarily living the other’s life, moving about it in delicately without making judgments

147. In successful cases, the client comes to perceive more empathy. 

149. Brilliance and diagnostic perceptiveness are unrelated to empathy. 

151. Empathy dissolves alienation.

158. Only when a gut-level experience is fully accepted and accurately labeled in awareness can it be completed. Then the person can move beyond it.