UNCONDITIONAL PERSONAL REGARD

© 2010 Howard McQueen

Unconditional Personal Regard is the blanket acceptance of a person regardless of what they say or do. Without Unconditional Personal Regard (for themselves), people may come to see and imagine themselves in the negative ways that others have made them feel.

Further, those sharing their negative feelings may also denigrate and corrupt their image of the person they are projecting their feelings upon.

When we live and our experience is entirely filtered through the shallow field of behavior, it can be very challenging to maintain an unblemished positive potential for ourselves or for others that we are in challenging and loving relationships.

It is a challenge to step back from highly charged emotions, where our thoughts and words are so full of judgments, so fueled by our own projections. When we don’t hold ourselves and others in the field of unconditional Personal Regard, there is the very real risk that the image of self as this vast potential for innate goodness becomes obscured and covered over.

In the darkness and fog of the illusions stirred up by intense vented emotions, we begin to believe that the core of a person (ourselves or others) is corrupted, unsafe, beyond repair, beyond our ability to remain in connection with them. We become the enslaved images of our ego's dramas and we are lost in dramatic illusion and delusion.

We each can benefit from practices and disciplines, such as Unconditional Personal Regard, that help us to separate how we receive behavior from how we receive and regard the core potential of others.

~~~ ~ ~~~

More on Unconditional Personal Regard

David G. Myers says the following in his Psychology: Eight Edition in Modules:

"People also nurture our growth by being accepting—by offering us what Rogers called unconditional positive regard. This is an attitude of grace, an attitude that values us even knowing our failings. It is a profound relief to drop our pretenses, confess our worst feelings, and discover that we are still accepted. In a good marriage, a close family, or an intimate friendship, we are free to be spontaneous without fearing the loss of others' esteem."

Unconditional positive regard can be facilitated by keeping in mind Carl Rogers’ belief that all people have the internal resources required for personal growth. Rogers' theory encouraged other psychiatrists to suspend judgement, and to listen to a person with an attitude that the client has within himself the ability to change, without actually changing who he is.