Chapter 10 Rogers: Person-Centered Theory 301Our perceptions of other people’s view of us are called external evaluations.
These evaluations, whether positive or negative, do not foster psychological health
but, rather, prevent us from being completely open to our own experiences. For
example, we may reject pleasurable experiences because we believe that other
people do not approve of them. When our own experiences are distrusted, we
distort our awareness of them, thus solidifying the discrepancy between our organ-
ismic evaluation and the values we have introjected from others. As a result, we
experience incongruence (Rogers, 1959).
Incongruence
We have seen that the organism and the self are two separate entities that may or
may not be congruent with one another. Also recall that actualization refers to the
organism’s tendency to move toward fulfillment, whereas self-actualization is the
desire of the perceived self to reach fulfillment. These two tendencies are some-
times at variance with one another.
Psychological disequilibrium begins when we fail to recognize our organismic
experiences as self-experiences: that is, when we do not accurately symbolize organ-
ismic experiences into awareness because they appear to be inconsistent with our
emerging self-concept. This incongruence between our self-concept and our organ-
ismic experience is the source of psychological disorders. Conditions of worth that
we received during early childhood lead to a somewhat false self-concept, one based
on distortions and denials. The self-concept that emerges includes vague perceptions
that are not in harmony with our organismic experiences, and this incongruence
between self and experience leads to discrepant and seemingly inconsistent behav-
iors. Sometimes we behave in ways that maintain or enhance our actualizing ten-
dency, and at other times, we may behave in a manner designed to maintain or
enhance a self-concept founded on other people’s expectations and evaluations of us.
Vulnerability The greater the incongruence between our perceived self (self-
concept) and our organismic experience, the more vulnerable we are. Rogers
(1959) believed that people are vulnerable when they are unaware of the discrep-
ancy between their organismic self and their significant experience. Lacking aware-
ness of their incongruence, vulnerable people often behave in ways that are
incomprehensible not only to others but also to themselves.
Anxiety and Threat Whereas vulnerability exists when we have no awareness of
the incongruence within our self, anxiety and threat are experienced as we gain
awareness of such an incongruence. When we become dimly aware that the dis-
crepancy between our organismic experience and our self-concept may become
conscious, we feel anxious. Rogers (1959) defined anxiety as “a state of uneasiness
or tension whose cause is unknown” (p. 204). As we become more aware of the
incongruence between our organismic experience and our perception of self, our
anxiety begins to evolve into threat: that is, an awareness that our self is no lon-
ger whole or congruent. Anxiety and threat can represent steps toward psycho-
logical health because they signal to us that our organismic experience is
inconsistent with our self-concept. Nevertheless, they are not pleasant or comfort-
able feelings.