The audience sat back, relaxed in their chairs, awaiting the expected mellow retrospective of a revered septuagenarian. Instead, Rogers rocked them w… - Carl Rogers

I found myself doing this same thing — playing a role of having greater certainty and greater competence than I really possess. I can’t tell you how disgusted with myself I felt as I realized what I was doing: I was not being me, I was playing a part.

Yet the paradoxical aspect of my experience is that the more I am simply willing to be myself, in all this complexity of life and the more I am willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person, the more change seems to be stirred up. It is a very paradoxical thing — that to the degree that each one of us is willing to be himself, then he finds not only himself changing; but he finds that other people to whom he relates are also changing. At least this is a very vivid part of my experience, and one of the deepest things I think I have learned in my personal and professional life.

Small wonder that we prefer to approach therapy with many rigid preconceptions. We feel we must bring order to it. We can scarcely dare to hope that we can discover order in it.