Many of us go to therapy nowadays, and the concept has become more accepted and less taboo to talk about in recent years. And that’s thanks in large part to person-centered therapy becoming more popularized and influencing today’s counseling; also called client-centered therapy or Rogerian therapy, it was created by psychologist Carl Rogers (1902-1987). And in our quote of the day, we’re focusing on his words about the process of having “the good life.”
Rogers is considered a “pioneering” psychologist and is an influential figure in the development of humanistic psychology, with the American Psychological Association (APA) calling Rogers “one of the founders” of it. This is an approach to psychology that was most popular in the 1940s through the 1970s and is still the basis for a lot of “widely used approaches” to psychotherapy and counseling seen today, per the APA.
Even though he initially planned to be a minister, he was inspired by psychology classes he took and by clinical work with children he did during that time. He went on to receive his PhD from Columbia in 1931, and worked as a therapist at the Rochester Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which “laid the groundwork for the development of his client-centered approach to therapy,” per the APA.
Again, Rogers created person-centered therapy, and as Lucy Yao and Rian Kabir report in their StatPearls book, this type of psychotherapy is based on the “idea that people are inherently motivated toward” their own personal, positive mental health. In this type of therapy, the patient is considered “the expert in their life” and is the one meant to lead the “direction” of therapy.
After World War II, the need for counseling increased tremendously, as you can imagine. So Rogers and other psychologists at the time reorganized the APA, and he was elected president in 1947. He was also the recipient of the Distinguished Professional Contribution Award from the APA in 1972, for “his commitment to the whole person,” which “guided and challenged the practice of psychology.”
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Quote of the Day by Carl Rogers
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“The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.”
This quote originally comes from an essay Rogers wrote in 1953 called “The Good Life and the Fully Functioning Person,” which appears in the 1961 collection of his essays, On Becoming a Person.
Rogers writes that he’s “come to one negative conclusion about the good life,” and that’s that it’s “not any fixed state.” It can’t be equated to “nirvana,” being content, “a state of virtue” or anything of the sort. It’s also not a condition, nor is it “a state of drive-reduction” or even “homeostasis.” This is when we get our quote of the day:
“The good life is a process, not a state of being.
It is a direction not a destination.
The direction which constitutes the good life is that which is selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction.
This organismically selected direction seems to have certain discernible qualities which appear to be the same in a wide variety of unique individuals.”
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Deeper Meaning of Carl Rogers’s Quote—How To Find the ‘Good Life’
Since Rogers was such a proponent of therapy that looked at the whole person, it makes sense that he came to this conclusion. His view is all about the journey of getting somewhere—possibly the “good life,” but really wherever—not the end-point. You can’t just arrive at the “good life,” because it’s not a state of being or a destination, as he writes. It’s all a “process,” which is felt and seen through the day-to-day trials and tribulations we go through and the good memories we make along the way.
In his essay, Rogers goes into what the “characteristics of the process” look like. They include a willingness (and openness) to “experience” things, a willingness to “live fully in each moment” and “an increasing trust in his organism” (basically trusting in your ability to maneuver through situations with common sense while taking care of yourself and making the best informed decisions). This whole concept of living this “good life” and becoming a “fully functional person” has to do with his overall study into self-acceptance and personal growth.
Whatever the “good life” means to you, Rogers is saying that you’re already living it. It’s not something to aspire to, per se, or a goal to achieve one day. It’s how you live your life and all of the experiences you have day in and day out.
And when he writes that it’s a “direction not a destination,” he’s also saying that it’s all about how you go about things, the choices you make and the “direction” of the path you go down. But to achieve this happiness, you don’t have to go to a specific place or go down a specific route to “get” there. It’s all in the journey.
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More Quotes from Carl Rogers
- “The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.”
- “We cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.”
- “Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?”
- “What I am is good enough, if I could just be it openly.”
- “Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed.”
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