Personality Development and Self-Worth

Personal Development and Self-Worth

Personality Development is central to Rogers' personality theory which is the notion of self or self-concept. This is defined as "the organized, consistent set of perceptions and beliefs about oneself."

The Self is the humanistic term for who we really are as a person. The self is our inner personality, and can be likened to the soul, or Freud's psyche. The self is influenced by the experiences a person has in their life, and out interpretations of those experiences. Two primary sources that influence our self-concept are childhood experiences and evaluation by others.

According to Rogers (1959), we want to feel, experience and behave in ways which are consistent with our self-image and which reflect what we would like to be like, our ideal-self. The closer our self-image and ideal-self are to each other, the more consistent or congruent we are and the higher our sense of self-worth.

A person is said to be in a state of incongruence if some of the totality of their experience is unacceptable to them and is denied or distorted in the self-image.

The humanistic approach states that the self is composed of concepts unique to ourselves. The self-concept includes three components:

Self-worth

Self-worth (or self-esteem) comprises what we think about ourselves.

Self-image

How we see ourselves, which is important to good psychological health. Self-image includes the influence of our body image on inner personality.

Ideal-self

This is the person who we would like to be. It consists of our goals and ambitions in life, and is dynamic – i.e., forever changing.

Positive Regard and Self Worth

Rogers viewed the individual as having two basic needs: positive regard from other people and self-worth.

How we think about ourselves, our feelings of self-worth are of fundamental importance both to psychological health and to the likelihood that we can achieve goals and ambitions in life and achieve self-actualization.

Self-worth may be seen as a continuum from very high to very low. For Carl Rogers (1959) a person who has high self-worth, that is, has confidence and positive feelings about him or herself, faces challenges in life, accepts failure and unhappiness at times, and is open with people.

A person with low self-worth may avoid challenges in life, not accept that life can be painful and unhappy at times, and will be defensive and guarded with other people.

Rogers believed feelings of self-worth developed in early childhood and were formed from the interaction of the child with the mother and father. As a child grows older, interactions with significant others will affect feelings of self-worth.

Rogers believed that we need to be regarded positively by others; we need to feel valued, respected, treated with affection and loved. Positive regard is to do with how other people evaluate and judge us in social interaction. Rogers made a distinction between unconditional positive regard and conditional positive regard.

Unconditional Positive Regard

Unconditional positive regard is where parents, significant others (and the humanist therapist) accepts and loves the person for what he or she is. Positive regard is not withdrawn if the person does something wrong or makes a mistake.

The consequences of unconditional positive regard are that the person feels free to try things out and make mistakes, even though this may lead to getting it worse at times.

People who are able to self-actualize are more likely to have received unconditional positive regard from others, especially their parents in childhood.

Conditional Positive Regard

Conditional positive regard is where positive regard, praise, and approval, depend upon the child, for example, behaving in ways that the parents think correct.

Hence the child is not loved for the person he or she is, but on condition that he or she behaves only in ways approved by the parent(s).

At the extreme, a person who constantly seeks approval from other people is likely only to have experienced conditional positive regard as a child.

In summary to become a fully functioning person is to be a human being in flow, in process, rather than having achieved some state. Fluid change is central in the picture.

Such a person is to be sensitively open to all of their experience — sensitive to what is going on in their environment, sensitive to other individuals with whom they are in relationship with, and sensitive perhaps most of all to the feelings, reactions, and emergent meanings which they discover in themselves. The fear of some aspects of their own experience continues to diminish, so that more and more of their life is available to them.

Such a person experiences in the present, with immediacy. They are able to live in their own feelings and reactions of the moment. They are not bound by the structure of their past learnings, but these are a present resource for him, insofar as they relate to the experience of the moment. They live freely, subjectively, in an existential confrontation of this moment of life.

Such a full functioning person is trustingly able to permit their total organism/existence to function freely in all its complexity in selecting, from the multitude of possibilities, that behavior which in this moment of time will be most generally and genuinely satisfying. They thus are making use of all of the data their nervous system can supply, using this data in awareness, but recognizing that their total organism may be, and often is, wiser than there own awareness.

Such a person is a creative person. With their sensitive openness to their social world, and their trust of their own ability to form new relationships within their environment, they are the type of person from whom creative products and creative living emerge.

Finally, such a person lives a life which involves a wider range, a greater richness, than the constricted living in which most of us find ourselves. And the reason they can thus live fully in a wider range is that they have this underlying confidence in themselves as trustworthy instruments for encountering life.

To be a fully functioning person are the feelings and the adjectives which seem more generally fitting are those such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging and meaningful. This process of healthy living is not, I am convinced, a life for the fainthearted. 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 this process of becoming.

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