What is Humanistic Psychology & Why is it Important Right Now?

What is Humanistic Psychology? What does it Mean to me?

And why is it Important Right Now?

HP is difficult to describe because it's largely intangible.?It’s not technical or scientific.?It’s about some of the more difficult to explain subtle aspects of what it is to be a human being.

It wasn't until I took the Change Agent Skills & Strategies MSc (CASS) at Surrey in 1996-8 that I first heard of HP - and realised I’d been following the philosophy for years!?CASS was an early coaching accreditation based on an in-depth and experiential exploration of humanistic principles.?The great John Heron founded the Human Potential Research Group (HPRG) at Surrey, and developed this pioneering MSc.

I found school a tedious and insulting waste of time, later dropped out of a Social Studies degree that I found disappointing, and in general was not a fan of academia.?So - ending up on CASS was surprising - as was how this came about.?I was working as a high level executive coach, organisational transformation specialist and facilitator at The Merchants Group (TMG).?TMG was started by a group of us who met through Exegesis - a very interesting enlightenment programme in the 1970s.?TMG did a deal with Surrey Uni to run a CASS intake for a group of our people, on our premises.?I was offered a place, fully funded.?It sounded interesting, it was convenient, I accepted - not really knowing what I was saying yes to.

I suddenly realised that this was the MSc my friend Greg had been raving about.?He said it completely transformed his life - it was deep, exploratory, powerful and experiential.?To apply - due to my lack of academic experience - I had to write an essay and attend an interview.?My essay was appalling, and the interview ‘panel’ of four regarded me dubiously and began what felt like an inquisition. ?But when I mentioned Greg the panel changed in front of my eyes, and I was accepted.

The point of this story is that the event is a very humanistic thing to have happen.?The fact that I was a real, authentic and important person to somebody who they rated, having done some very deep delving together with this person, instantly made me ‘one of us’ as far as they were concerned.

So we began.?I quickly discovered that HP was absolutely congruent with my existing attitude, and I’d been practicing it - much of it intuitively.?I was finding labels for things I’d been doing for years.?I felt I’d come home to something. ?

I'll say a little bit about the HP philosophy now. ?HP is above and beyond anything else a philosophy rather than a set of techniques - although there are techniques that have been evolved from that position.

There are some fundamental assumptions that are core to the philosophy - such as …

~ Every human being has the the right and the possibility of being an effective and happy and fulfilled individual

~ Every individual has the possibility of learning and growing?

~ Unless prevented from doing so, people want to learn and grow

I learned the word ‘physis’ which means the inherent natural drive for growth and expansion that according to HP lives within all of us.?Granted - in some of us it's been squashed and stomped by various factors.

What emerges naturally is the idea of personhood that gives us certain inalienable rights in relationship to our choices and our personal growth, our professional growth, our path in life, our mission, our calling and how we want to do our lives now. ?That's a highly respectful perspective which I personally had held for years.

In my work I’d been tuning into the idea that if I get myself out of the way, and if I am welcoming and encouraging and respectful to people they will naturally want to grow and learn.

It's a very very different perspective from the more behaviourist approach I’d followed in the early 1980s.?I still believe that working on our behaviour can be beneficial.?But the approach has its limits, in the sense that it is purely about behaviour - it's not primarily about the inner world, the spirit, love.?Anyone who’s made eye contact with somebody they don't know and experienced something change inside them as a result of that simple connection knows that it's not all about behaviour.?There's more of an energetic, perhaps spiritual, perhaps heart based thing going on.?

In HP there's a very strong heart drive, a deep goodwill-oriented intention and motivation.?So alongside this idea that we all have the potential or the possibility of making our own choices, being the most we can be, infinite growth, infinite expansion, infinite contribution - there’s also then the almost inevitable notion of unconditional positive regard for other people - and perhaps even unconditional love.?And that is really very lovely.

There was a whole move after the second world war for a new way of being and living.?The humanistic approach really came out of that.?Notions such as … let's be more human with each other, more flexible, more in the present moment, more trusting and respectful of the other the other person.?Let’s focus more on our strengths, our wonderful capacities, our virtues - and how those can be tended and farmed in order to bring about the the expansion and the full activation of the individual; and then with the individual the relationships, the groups, the organisations and the society.?

So here I was entering into this MSc in 1996 at 40, with no academic background - and finding it fascinating and utterly congruent with my desire to work with people in a helping capacity, supporting and encouraging and facilitating people to grow. ?I was very happy - and realised I was in fact a humanistic psychologist!?HP profoundly informed my work after that.?A number of the methodologies we explored helped me with ready-made ideas I could try.?One great example was ‘Self & Peer Assessment’ (SAPA) - a highly intuitive, improvisational and respectful model.?I used the approach on several occasions at Board level, with superb results.?Unlike how 360 degree feedback is commonly applied, SAPA involves a team or peer group thrashing out between them the key qualities and characteristics they would like to see embodied in the team; deep self-assessment by each person, and an ‘exception based’ presentation and feedback process.?Individual sovereignty is significantly valued and reinforced.?I am grateful to the brilliant Denis Postle A.R.C.A who brought this method to my awareness.

One of the reasons SAPA works so well is that it’s done in relationship.?The inter-team relationships are called upon and strengthened. ?And that's another aspect of the humanistic approach.?When a humanistic practitioner is working with a client it's the relationship between those two people that leverages the success of the work.?Clearly the client's desire and willingness to do the work is of the highest priority out of all possible factors?- but that being a given,?the relationship between the two is the magical ingredient.?Because it's through that relationship that they are co-creating the growth.?It goes way beyond the experience of teacher:student, doctor:patient or even therapist:patient.

In the humanistic approach we look at the client and we say it's the client who does their own healing and their own growth.?It's our job to facilitate and support and to do that in relationship, where the relationship is based on positive regard, respect and in many cases actually love.

Coming back to SAPA … I’ve always been fascinated by how a board of directors can work together for years and still have only a very limited perspective on each other's strengths.?I think I know why this happens - because they're busy doing a job and so they just tap into the strengths that are needed to get the job done.?They then only tap into some of their strengths and there are all sorts of other strengths and capabilities and virtues that are overlooked.?This implies that opportunities are being missed.?SAPA helps the Board or team dive deeply into the investigation of these strengths and qualities.?The outputs lend themselves beautifully to strategic planning for a stronger Board and a more successful and happier organisation.

That's just one example of a humanistic project.?We can only facilitate something like that if we genuinely believe and feel right through our heart, mind and body that the clients have the right, the possibility and the capability of making their own choices and doing their own self-assessment.?If there was any bit of me that thought that actually I know better about these people then it wouldn't have worked.?So while I do sometimes think I know better than somebody else there's a bigger part of me that pats that little demon on the head and says no, that client knows best for themselves.

If i jump from the CASS experience forward to today - probably the vast majority of therapists, coaches, practitioners of all sorts are more humanistic than not.?The HP approach is now much more strongly embraced.?The challenge now is not so much the philosophical perspective - it’s the degree to which any given practitioner has undertaken the personal work to fully embody HP. ?

Have we as practitioners done the personal work around ego, arrogance, knowing best, do-gooding so that we can get out of the way and allow somebody to grow in our space? and encourage them to do that and delight in that??Some of us I would consider fully embodied as humanistic practitioners in the sense that the humanistic philosophy is all the way through rather than simply being something agreed with, believed but not necessarily fully metabolised.

So for somebody who's thinking of using a practitioner of some sort - have they explored their own shadow around some of the very well-meaning but in my mind ill-advised aspects of believing that they know better for the other person??It's incredibly hard to let go of that.

And if I now jump backwards from the MSc?- prior to that there were a number of experiences that nudged me in the humanistic direction.?I had a rather unusual bohemian and free-thinking upbringing. My parents were from opposite ends of the social scale - they both turned their backs on that and followed a non-conformist and creative path.?I was born in the 1950s, a conformist time.?My father was a naturopath and osteopath, my mother an artist.?They introduced us to all sorts of alternative ideas, practices and strange people.?So I came from a place of believing that thinking for yourself is the thing to do, we're all unique, we all have the potential to be infinite beings, there's always another question that can be asked.

Almost inevitably in my early 20s I took The Exegesis Programme - a British version of EST.?Still in the grip of youthful concerns about boyfriends, life purpose, who am I anyway - I was struck by friends who’d disappeared for a weekend and returned more focused, creative and happy.?After months of arguing that I didn’t need a seminar, I secretly enrolled and had a seminal experience.?Over a very long weekend we delved deeply into self-awareness, who we are, how the mind works, how emotions work, what is energy anyway, what do we care about, why is our life like it is now, how can we be a creative force in our own lives. ?This was extraordinary, highly experiential with challenging exercises, weeping, screaming and laughter.?I had a few moments of suddenly hating it and everybody because I was facing some of my difficult blind spots. I didn't realise until much later that this was HP in action - highly affirming of the individual and the individual's right and ability and possibility to lead a fuller life.

I’ve since learned that HP was begun originally in the post-war era by Maslow with his hierarchy of needs which now is used as the basis for coaching. He was a deep philosopher wanting to help people build a better life without going the route of psychoanalysis or behaviourism.

Everything I’ve said here could be challenged by experienced HP practitioners.?Because the humanistic approach is unbounded.?It's not technically defined - unlike behaviourism, freudianism and psychoanalysis.?This is part of its charm - but it also makes HP difficult to explain.?I personally find that appealing because I like things to be unbounded. But definition is sometimes helpful for choosing action.?

Following Exegesis - which gave me a significant boost on many levels - I got involved in the Exegesis community. It was only a couple of years after that some of us banded together and created a business.?That business became the organisation that eventually did the CASS deal with Surrey Uni. ?Along the way we explored deeply all kinds of personal, interpersonal and transpersonal topics. John Heron came and held some seminars for us - he said afterwards that he'd never seen a group that was so open.?These years were formative for me, very interesting and led to my doing the CASS MSc

I met other humanistic practitioners and therapists through the connection with Surrey and various conferences. ?During the CASS MSc I went solo and developed my own work. ?By that time I was already an executive coach and organisational change facilitator. ?I went deeper into the humanistic approach. I could really improvise and tailor the work to the clients which is again quite humanistic.

Eventually I was co-opted onto the Association for Humanistic Psychologists (AHPb) Board.?They said 'we like your energy’ and that was fine with me!?While I was there we ran a conference with a core theme ‘what is humanistic psychology?’.?After 3 days of talking and dancing and meditation - all of which fit in perfectly with the HP - some of us came up with this, beautifully articulated by the talented and extraordinary Martin Pollecoff :

“Humanistic Psychology … it’s hippy stuff … peace, love & understanding”

Why is HP important right now??

Similar to the post-war period of trauma, damage and loss - we’ve been through a couple of years that have been pretty brutal for most people.?Most of us are carrying a degree of wounding, fed up with being told what to think, how to live, what to do, what choices to make.?Many of us want to build on strengths, maximise our potential and bring about positive change.?HP is ideally suited for that - being highly respectful and highly facilitative rather than directive.?So yes, I do feel HP is particularly relevant right now.

Thank you for reading

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