BLOG – No. 2
The Actualisation Tendency cont’d…..
In the last blog I shared that the actualising tendency, as argued from a Humanistic (Person-Centred) perspective is a biological (innate) force that exists in all organisms (including humans) and direct all towards survival, maintenance and growth – their fulfilment of potential.
One key psychological factor that restricts our human growth is our mentally constructed perception of who we are and how we should behave – the basis of this is our early conditioning when we learn to respond to the requirements of our environment. This conditioning reinforces a certain way of being in order to gain something of what we value from important others – this could include: survival, attention, love etc. To gain this we create a false persona/sense of self, which could be viewed as a contracted version of our true wholeness, which we came into the world as.
Every time we repeat conditioned behaviours they become strengthened and embedded in our psyche and holds the false message ‘this is the person I am’. We can then spend our life seeking to fit our everyday experiences into this false self. Any experience that doesn’t meet the demands of our self-concept we can find ourselves manipulating the experience to make it fit, using defence mechanisms, notably denial and distortion.
Living up to a self-concept can lead to exhaustion, stress, anxiety, unhappiness etc.
More about why the above happens in my next blog…
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