The paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, I change
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Carl Rogers
12 min read
The article opens with Rogers' famous paradox about self-acceptance enabling change, which frames the entire essay. Understanding Rogers' humanistic psychology and his theory of unconditional positive regard would deepen the reader's understanding of the psychological transformation the author describes.
Almost three years ago, I wrote an essay, called “Looking for Alice,” about how I met my wife Johanna. This is a prequel of sorts. See also: part 2 and part 3 of the series.
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
—Carl Rogers
On various hard drives and USB sticks stored in our barn, I keep the diaries from my university years, 2010–2014. Last week I reread them for the first time since I wrote them. It was interesting, but also uncomfortable, to see myself at such a distance. Many of the things that were important to me then are not visible from here (I only see blurry outlines of the situations I was in and what I thought), while other things, which I couldn’t see at all then, stand out clearly now. It’s like when you zoom in on a graph, you mostly see the small daily fluctuations, while when you zoom out, you see the trend.
I spend page after page interpreting the nuances of the situations I’m in, without seeing that the situations all resemble one another and follow each other with an almost mechanical logic.
For example, I often feel miserable. (This is partly an illusion created by the fact that I wrote more in my diary when I felt agitated, so it wasn’t quite as bad as it looks, but I really did feel down a lot back then.) I was worryingly often sick: there were five hospital visits in 2012 alone. I also had much more angst than I realized. The angst I was aware of and wrote about was only a small part, the most intense part. I don’t seem to have understood that many other things I experienced were also signs of anxiety—my ceaseless work, my desperate need to always be around people, my fatigue, my feelings of unreality, the moments I would wake in the middle of the night, realizing that I would die.
And every time I’m miserable in the diary, I know what will happen on the next page: I will throw myself into some activity that can distract me from myself. It is like clockwork. As soon as I feel bad, I get busy, I seek out social situations where I feel high status (the literary world), I go to parties, get drunk, and/or flirt
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