https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Eoc31dRswjo
We’re having a conversation. I’m deciding I’m going to listen to you. Right? That’s different than how people generally communicate. Because usually when they communicate, they’re doing something like, Okay, we’re going to have a conversation, and I’m going to tell you why I’m right, and I’ll win if you agree. Or maybe you’re having a conversation where, I don’t know what you’re trying to do. Maybe you’re trying to impress the person you’re talking to. So you’re not listening to them at all, you’re just thinking about what you’re going to say next. Okay, so that’s not this. This is, you might have something to tell me. And so I’m going to listen on the off chance that you’ll tell me something that would really be useful for me to know. And so you could think about it as an extension of the Piagetian… You know, Piaget talked about the fundamental… The fundamentally important element of knowledge being to describe how knowledge is sought, the process by which knowledge is generated. Well… If you agree with me and I find that out, I know nothing more than I knew before. I just know what I knew before. And maybe I’m happy about that because, you know, it didn’t get challenged. But I’m no smarter than I was before. But maybe you’re different than me, and so while I’m listening to you, you’ll tell me something I don’t like. Maybe it’s something I find contemptible, or difficult, whatever. Maybe you’ll tell me something I don’t know, and then I won’t be quite as stupid. And then maybe I won’t run painfully into quite as many things. And that’s a really useful thing to know, especially if you live with someone and you’re trying to… Make long-term peace with them, is they’re not the same as you. And their way they look at the world, and the facts that they pull out of the world, aren’t the same as your facts. And… Even though you’re going to be overwhelmed with the proclivity to demonstrate that you’re right, it is the case that two brains are better than one. And so… Maybe nine of the ten things they tell you are dispensable. Or maybe even 49 out of 50, but one thing, all you need to get out of the damn conversation is one thing you don’t know. And one of the things that’s very cool about a good psychotherapeutic session is that the whole conversation is like that. All you’re doing is trying to… Express the truth of the situation as clearly as possible. That’s it. And so… Now, Roger’s proposition… And I’ll tell you why he derived it… Was that… If you have a conversation like that with someone, it will make both of you better. It’ll make both of you psychologically healthier. So there’s an implicit presupposition that the exchange of truth is curative. Well, that’s a very cool idea. I mean, it’s a very deep idea. I think it’s the most profound idea… It’s the idea upon which Western civilization… Although not only Western civilization, is actually predicated. The idea that truth produces health. But for Roger’s, that was the entire purpose of the psychotherapeutic alliance. You come to see me because you want to be better. You don’t even know what that means necessarily, neither do I. We’re gonna figure that out together. But you come and you say, look, things are not acceptable to me, and maybe there’s something I could do about that. So that’s the minimal precondition to engage in therapy. Something’s wrong. You’re willing to talk about it truthfully, and you want it to be better. Without that, the therapeutic relationship does not get off the ground. And so then you might ask, well, what relationships are therapeutic? And the answer to that would be, if you have a real relationship, it’s therapeutic. If it isn’t, what you have is not a relationship. God only knows what you have. You’re a slave, they’re a tyrant. You’re both butting heads with one another. It’s a primate dominance hierarchy dispute. Oh, I don’t know, you’re like two cats in a barrel, or two people with their hands around each other’s throats. But what you have is not a relationship. All right. We may say that the greater the communicated congruence of experience, awareness, and behavior on the part of one individual, that’s a reference to the same idea that I was describing with regards to Jung. So let’s say you come and talk to me, and you want things to go well. Well, I’m gonna have to more or less be one thing. Because if I’m all over the place, you can’t trust any continuity in what I say. There’s no reason for you to believe that I’m capable of actually telling you, I’m capable of expressing anything that’s true. So the truth is something that emerges as a consequence of getting yourself lined up, and beating all the, what would you call, all the impurities out of your soul, for lack of a better word. You have to be integrated for that to happen, and you do that at least in part by wanting to tell the truth. The more the ensuing relationship will involve a tendency towards reciprocal communication with the same qualities. So one of the things, as I’ve been quite influenced by Rogers, one of the things I try to do in my therapeutic sessions is first of all to listen, to really listen. And then while I listen, I watch, and while I’m listening, things will happen in my head. You know, maybe I’ll get a little image of something, or I’ll get a thought, or a question will emerge, and then I’ll just tell the person what that is. But it’s sort of directionless, you know, it’s not like I have a goal, except that we’re trying to make things better. I’m on the side of the person, I’m on the side of the part of the person that wants things to be better, not worse. And so then those parts of us have a dialogue, and the consequence of that dialogue is that certain things take place, and then I’ll just tell the person what happened. And it isn’t that I’m right. That’s not the point. The point is that they get to have an hour where someone actually tells them what they think. Here’s the impact you’re having on me. You know, this is making me angry. This is making me happy. This is really interesting. This reminds me of something that you said an hour ago that I don’t quite understand. And the whole point is not for either person to make the proposition or convince the other that their position is correct, but merely to have an exchange of experience about how things are set up. And it’s extraordinarily useful for people, because it’s often difficult for anyone to find anyone to talk to that will actually listen.