The purpose of adult education is to help them to learn, not to teach them all you know and thus stop them from learning.
I have learned that in any significant or continuing relationship, feelings which are persistent had best be expressed. If they are expressed as feelings owned by me, the result may be temporarily upsetting but ultimately far more rewarding than any attempt to deny or conceal them.
It is astonishing how elements which seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens. How confusions which seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard.
Over the years, however, the research evidence keeps piling up, and it points strongly to the conclusion that a high degree of empathy in a relationship is possibly the most potent and certainly one of the most potent factors in bringing about change and learning.
I prize the privilege of being alone.
I believe I know why it is satisfying to me to hear someone. When I can really hear someone, it puts me in touch with him; it enriches my life. It is through hearing people that I have learned all that I know about individuals, about personality, about interpersonal relationships.
The basic idea behind teaching is to teach people what they need to know.
When a person realizes he has been deeply heard, his eyes moisten. I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It is as though he were saying, “Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it’s like to be me”.
Experience is the highest authority.
Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?
Most of us consist of two separated parts, trying desperately to bring themselves together into an integrated soma, where the distinctions between mind and body, feelings and intellect, would be obliterated.
The state of empathy, or being empathic, is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person.
Don’t be a damned ammunition wagon. Be a rifle!
Although the client-centered approach had its origin purely within the limits of the psychological clinic, it is proving to have implications, often of a startling nature, for very diverse fields of effort.
Allowance of the freedom of choices in direction, either for the group or individuals particularly in the near future.
Openness to all attitudes no matter how extreme or unrealistic they may seem.
I was forced to stretch my thinking, to realize that sincere and honest people could believe in very divergent religious doctrines.
Don’t be the ammunition wagon, be the rifle knowledge exists primarily for use.
We can choose to use our growing knowledge to enslave people in ways never dreamed of before, depersonalizing them, controlling them by means so carefully selected that they will perhaps never be aware of their loss of personhood.
It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried.