ABSTRACT
Rogers suggests that one of the conditions for therapeutic growth and, indeed, personality change, is that the client is anxious or at least vulnerable to anxiety. What he did not say is that the outcome of successful therapy is the absence of anxiety. Just as he avoided writing of self-actualisation as an end-state, preferring to theorise about the actualising tendency, he writes about becoming ‘that self which one truly is’, not in terms of achievement but in terms of process: the process of ‘being one of the most widely sensitive, responsive and creative creatures on this planet’. Becoming congruent, for both therapists and clients, is a continuous process. We don’t reach a point where we have achieved optimal congruence, or a point where we are totally free from anxiety. Indeed—and one of the main arguments of this chapter is that—an integrated awareness of our anxiety may best be thought of both as an example and an aspect of congruence.
