What is Self-Actualization?: One Counselor’s Perspective
Within the realms of psychology and personal development, you might come across the concept of “self-actualization.” You may also hear it in a more general way to express growth and maturity—“She’s really coming into her own” or “If only he could see his full potential.”
These common phrases convey the idea of seeing growth and development in a person before it happens. This, in part, is self-actualization. It is as if they are saying, “There is a full, mature, valuable ‘self’ in there; if only they could make it come true!”
Self-actualization is the process of making “actual”—real, alive, embodied—the “self” of a person that does and could more fully exist. This includes our character traits, personal agency, desires and goals, potentialities, and more.
Carl Rogers and becoming a person
The American psychologist Carl Rogers wrote frequently about this. Rogers was a father of the humanistic or client-centered approach to therapy, and while there are legitimate questions around this approach (as I’ll address below), there are infinite treasures to be gained from what he formulated about the relationship between a therapist and a client, and a client to themselves.
Carl Rogers, in short, believed the answers to a person’s suffering lay largely within themselves, within their own internal capacity for growth. “It has been my experience,” he writes in On Becoming a Person, “that persons have a basically positive direction… the more fully the individual is understood and accepted, the more he tends to drop the false fronts with which he has been meeting life” (26-27).
Here, Rogers makes the point that in therapy—and in life—the process of simply knowing someone deeply and honestly will invite them to engage their own selves more honestly and compassionately. The building of this “therapeutic alliance” will have its own healing, growing, and fulfilling effect.
Rogers puts it another way: “If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.” (33)
Deep, honest, understanding, and accepting relationships allow us to become more fully ourselves—to self-actualize.
The work of good relationships—which, ideally, occurs in the counseling room—helps us grow the desire to become more ourselves. We tear away the defense mechanisms, false ideas of self, protective barriers barring us from others and ourselves, to become whole persons. We become the people God made us to be.
Issues with self-actualization
Christians can have some difficulty with the concept of self-actualization. Doctrines of original sin and the Fall raise questions about whether the “true self” is really within us waiting to be drawn out. The weeping prophet Jeremiah wrote, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Apostle Paul, too, wrote to the Roman church, “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.” If many verses in the Bible seem to convey that the human self is wicked and bent on its own destruction, can we place any validity in the pursuit of self-actualization? Can there be anything to Roger’s “humanistic” view of humanity?
As I have developed as a counselor and sought to foster the kind of therapeutic relationship Rogers writes about, I have found that even the most destructive habits seem in some mysterious way to have roots in a good basic longing. It has become my conviction that you can find this somewhere in a person, buried deep or cloaked in some sort of self-protective front.
The chronically angry person is hurt and wants to be heard, understood, and loved. The person in the throes of depression feels how existence is not as it should be and seeks relief, fulfillment, and joy. The fearful, anxious person is overwhelmed, vulnerable, and longing for safety. The person suffering from an addiction seeks fulfillment and relief from the deep internal distress of life’s difficulties. The narcissistic person, too, somewhere in his self-obsessed and superior front, fears failure, flees rejection, and longs for acceptance of his neglected insecurity.
These are all, of course, generalities and simplifications. Every person’s story is different. But these generalities speak to the condition of vulnerable human beings. The sinful nature permeates all parts of the self. And though people on the surface may seem evil beyond reason, insistent on their own suffering, their longings reveal a good desire to be loved—to be released from what’s “untrue” about them.
Following Jesus into becoming ourselves
It is my conviction that I follow Christ in the pursuit of self-actualization in myself and others. Jesus (in the Gospels and today) calls out “weirdos” and “jerks” to follow him around, to listen to how he sees them and wants them to live, and invites them to see the personhood both inside themselves and in their enemies.
God mysteriously leads us into Christlikeness to discover that image of him inside us all—that capacity for love and goodness. Let’s seek to actualize the selves God wants us to be.
