Unconditional Positive Regard

In the real world people worry about status. They polish their highlight reels. They secret away their Impostor Syndrome. They try to play it cool. They judge and expect to be judged. They cleave the world into good and bad and winners and losers. In the real world, people understandably stick with being tough and tough-minded.

But there is another world, call it Neverland. That world which your tough-minded striver dismisses as naive, childish, impractical, and a festering ground for hippies and anarchists (you know, people without ambition, quote-unquote). I venture to submit that perhaps this other world might have some insights to offer.

You can read about it lots of places. I was reading On Becoming a Person ("a therapist's view of psychotherapy"), by the famous twentieth century American psychoanalyst Carl Rogers and I was very glad for it. Like Impro by Keith Johnstone before it, or Men, Women and Worthiness by Brene Brown; like Book of Life by Alain de Botton; like Great Thinkers by School of Life; like War and Peace by Tolstoy and The Notebook by Agota Kristof; like Steppenwolf and Siddhartha by Herman Hesse; like Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut; and like one of my favourite books of all time, L'Etranger by Camus. Like all these books and others, and this lady speaking at Google, On Becoming a Person filled me with this joy. A joy simple and steady and tranquil, like a warm summer's day in feeling format. This was Neverland.

What was this joy, this sense of something meaningful and important, this tranquility of mind, so unlike the tough-mindedness of the real world? I kept going back and forth.

In the real world, I worry about everything all the time. Have I done a good enough job? Have I upheld my values? Have I successfully avoided disappointing the people I care about? etc.

But back in Neverland, those worries lapse. Here, Dr Rogers speaks to me with soothing reassurance thus: In my relationships with persons, I have found that it does not help, in the long run, to act as though I were something that I am not; I find I am more effective when I can listen acceptantly to myself, and can be myself [because] the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change. His approach to relationships is humbling. It's a reminder of how much more empathy I could bring to my own, of how I could be judging less, accepting more, and trying harder to understand rather than dictate, to help rather than demand.

Dr Rogers reminds me of the virtue of giving (provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth) and acceptance (a warm regard for [the other] as a person of unconditional self-worth - of value no matter what his condition, his behaviour, or his feelings; (...) a respect and liking for him as a separate person, a willingness for him to posses his own feelings in his own way; (...) an acceptance of and regard for his attitudes of the moment, no matter how negative or positive, no matter how much they may contradict other attitudes he has held in the past; and acceptance of each fluctuating aspect of this other person; (...) a continuing desire to understand).

Why these virtues? Because, he continues, it is only as I understand the feelings and thoughts which seem so horrible to you, or so weak, or so sentimental, or so bizarre - it is only as I see them as you seem; and accept them and you, that you feel really free to explore all the hidden nooks and frightening crannies of your inner and often buried experience. And as with you, so with myself.

This unconditional positive regards is what Neverland has that the real world doesn't.

I have a Virginia-Woolf-type archetypal memory that helps me return to this feeling of unconditional positive regard. It is December, a few days before Christmas. It is cold. The day is almost over. I am walking through Covent Garden and everywhere there are people: people doing their Christmas shopping, people drinking in the pub, people talking, people walking, people everywhere doing their myriad people things. And I reach the plaza at Seven Dials, whence seven roads stretch outwards like the seven spokes of a cart wheel. And still more people can be seen sauntering underneath the Christmas lights, underneath the decorations, sauntering underneath the crests and mountains of the darkening winter clouds. The seven roads are sprawling like wide riverbeds through the tall canyon of buildings. And soundtrack to all this is Girl from the North Country, in a version by Bob Dylan, and it's a melancholy song. But melancholy and uplifting, and light with the sort of calm composure that one feels when one has accepted one's yearning as definitely unending and as the normal condition of one's life. It is just the right soundtrack. And right there is that joy, that melancholy and uplifting joy akin to reverence, expansive and suffused with awe, at life's tremendous capacity for suffering and still more tremendous capacity for growth. It's a joy as if of standing before the Project of Being, so much bigger than oneself, or one's mission, bigger even than the ambitions of one's species as a whole. For a moment, I feel free from the tragedy of unyielding tradeoffs, finite resources and finite lives of intolerable vulnerability. And from that perspective, Neverland's unconditional positive regard truly does feel like the only sensible attitude to existence.