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4.09 AVERAGE
4.09 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
I love Carl Rogers' philosophy but he writing style is a slog
An enormously influential psychologist, Carl Rogers was one of the founders of humanistic psychology. He wanted, it seems to me, to create a non-religious view of psychology that preserves human dignity in opposition to behaviorism, where human beings are seen as just as deterministic, (albeit a bit more complex) rats and pigeons, which was led by Skinner. He wanted to steer away from the traditional psychoanalytic approach of Freud, where the psyche is essentially a battleground of dangerous forces, but instead view people as essentially good and rational, again, without any spirituality or belief in divinity. Moreover, he did not see psychology merely as a way to suppress pathology but recognized that people are driven by a force to “self-actualize,” to become what one could be, to reach for one’s potential.
One of the most influential ideas is the relationship between the client and the therapist.
Rogers argues technical skill comes second in relation to your personal character. He says that the therapy that is least effective in personal transformation is where the therapist has a professional facade, wants to diagnose the patient (like an object with a sickness), and tells them why they think this way and what to do about it. People don't want to be fixed, but rather, be given an opportunity to use a relationship of genuine care and acceptance to explore themselves and transform.
So, in psychotherapy, the interpersonal is what brings about real change. Treat the client as a person, not a patient to be cured.
The personal character of the therapist is important. To the degree, you can unconditionally accept, care for, and be congruent with yourself is what limits your relationships with other people as well. The main mission for the therapist, in other words, is something like total self-acceptance, or rather, unconditional self-liking.
Rogers backed up his theories with studies, recording the sessions, and tracking progress rigorously. Seeing how effective therapy is in this approach, he suggested we should not limit this to psychotherapy, but instead apply this to all areas of human relations. In our personal relationships, how we raise children, how teachers teach their pupils, and even how commanders lead their troops.
Rogers was (possibly) one of the earliest to make the importance of congruence explicit to the degree he did. Congruence is vital for the effectiveness of therapy because even though the patient cannot put their finger on incongruence, something in the back of their head will resist trusting you if they sense any falseness about you.
To be congruent means being what you are. Expressing your feelings and attitudes, verbally or non-verbally. Not doing anything in an attempt to hide what you are. This is what it means to be real, and is one of the fundamental necessities for a relationship to be fruitful. You could take it to the extreme and say: Nothing ultimately worthwhile or real value comes out of falsehood.
This is, of course, easier said than done, because who we are is not only complicated but also we have limited knowledge of our feelings and motives. Therefore one of the ways to become more congruent is to increase the awareness of yourself, to become in tune with your emotions and inner world, say. We need self-acceptance to allow ourselves to become more sensitive to the subtleness of our inner ocean of feeling and thought, and this, in turn, brings about a better self-understanding and provides richer self-acceptance. To the extent we can do this, we can be congruent with ourselves and therefore our next.
To summarize his approach, in a nutshell, is that a therapist should 1) Be congruent, meaning be what he is, be aware of his emotions and communicate them genuinely, 2) Have unconditional positive regard for the client, seeing them as their true selves as something actualizing and striving to do good in the world and 3) Understanding them with the ability to see the world as they see it, and feel what they feel, a real, loving, empathic understanding.
Rogers is a humanist. He believes that people are capable of moral action and self-transcendence without religious belief. He rejects the notion that we should have an unattainable ideal because self-acceptance is the way to self-transcendence. I might be putting words into Roger’s mouth, but I suppose he would say that we shouldn’t try to be like Jesus because we’re not Jesus. And therefore if we use him as an ideal, we could never accept ourselves.
He notes that the reason why psychotherapy works is that each and every individual has an inherent calling to self-actualization. You might call this the divine spark within us, but Rogers calls this the self. So in Roger’s language, we’re can be entirely dependent on ourselves for self-transformation.
Picking up on the thread of the independence of a divinity, Rogers says that every one of us is fundamentally good, and we have a deep-seated love for everyone else at the core. He says that all negative emotions and drives come from a place where our good nature could not be expressed and is turned into negative drives. The tale of Frankenstein would exemplify this point. He was born a monster with a good heart, and he wanted only to love with the purest of intentions, but he was rejected because he was a monster and eventually became murderous because he was not allowed to love.
Naturally, Rogers rejects good and evil. For him, there are only good and only warped perceptions of what good entails. For me, the jury isn’t out on this one, looking at the human capability of atrocity, virtually indistinguishable from evil, I don’t think it’s very useful to reject that notion. I think the good/evil paradigm is a more practical one, and we should look at our own motivations to find out the truth. A movie or a video game is a much stronger grip on us when it’s about defeating evil, instead of ignorance, and I believe it’s because it resonates deeper because at the root of our psyche recognizes this as true. It’s a contradiction, in my eyes, to be fascinated by Lord of the Rings while at the same time believing there is no such thing as evil in the world.
I have been probably influenced by Rogers indirectly, and now directly on my view of authenticity, something akin to congruence. The extent to which you can be congruent is determined by the level of awareness and acceptance.
One thing I don’t fully understand with Rogers is that he says when we are making value judgments, say, “That tree is green” we cannot be congruent.
Rogers’ ethics, his conception of the “ideal person” seems indistinguishable from that of the child.
As alluded to earlier, the self is a central concept for Rogers. And it’s unclear what he wants to get at here. The self is a relative concept. It does not exist in it and of itself but is a concept used to distinguish one identity from another for practical reasons, mainly because conceptualizing the world as identities is a prerequisite for establishing the narrative, which is a prerequisite for coherent thought.
An example would be saying “A dog bit me.” In order to make sense of this thought you must #1) Distinguish yourself from the dog and #2) Create a narrative where two actors, you and a dog is involved, in which the dog bit you. And #3) Formulate this narrative in thought and then language.
Rogers wants us to increase the scope of what is self. He says that the “actualized” person identifies all thoughts and motives with himself. This would be an improvement because the person who has wicked thoughts refuses to acknowledge them as “his” thoughts because they are unacceptable to him, thus practicing non-acceptance, and thus not progressing in his development.
In practicing self-acceptance, there seem to be two approaches that seem opposite approaches but have similar effects. One is Roger’s approach, the all-encompassing self, and the other is the “no-self” advocated by Buddhist teachers. The similarity between these two apparently opposite approaches is that you don’t distinguish between a “real you” and unwanted thoughts and motives. The unwanted inner turmoil is created by a belief that the “real self” is what you accept about yourself, and the things that are unaccepted about yourself. That “The self” is the rational soul stuck inside an irrational creature, and one must try to control it. Rogers wants us to drop this concept and wants us to see our entire being as rational.
My problem with Rogers’ approach is that the bodily equivalent would be to try to identify oneself with one’s finger.
We cannot split the psyche and the body entirely. So we must have some cut-off point. Is the finger a part of the “self”? It depends on the extent your finger plays a part in your identity. If you are a professional piano player and you lose your finger, your identity will have to die in the narrative more so than if you are a marathon runner.
I would say that there is a hierarchy here. The brain is more essential to the “self” than the heart. But the heart is more essential than a finger. It’s not so much what these organs or body parts are in their material manifestation but what part they play in forming identity in the narrative.
Even though I think of the finger as a part of myself, it is not, unlike my brain, vital to my identity. Likewise in the psychological realm, there is, in my opinion, a similar hierarchy. There are thoughts, motives, impulses, moods, emotions, say “sub-personalities” that are more essential to the “self” than others. So it would be justified to distinguish between a more central self with more peripheral parts of the psyche. It would be more “accurate” to say “A dog bit my finger” instead of insisting on an all-compassing self as saying “A dog bit me,” when we really want to be precise where.
As narrative necessitates an identity of self, it seems totally valid to say relate anything that is peripheral to the identity of self as something “other” than self. Whether that be the dog, the finger, or a psychological phobia of dogs. Ultimately, it is all a matter of degree, anyway.
Rogers is against fighting unwanted parts of ourselves by refusing to acknowledge them as a part of us. I would say that Rogers is right in pointing out that this is a symptom of non-acceptance and we shouldn’t cherry-pick the parts of us that are most flattering as our “true selves”. However, I don’t see any reason why we need to identify with something to accept it. Buddhist meditation practice is about accepting thoughts without identity. We’re also able to accept other people without personally identifying with them.
When Rogers says that man is essentially rational, not irrational, we have to agree on terms here. I think of rationality as believing in something to the degree it’s likely to be true given the information and experiences you’ve had. When a PTSD sufferer is getting severe anxiety from, say, a very mild threat, we could say this is rational because the trauma acts as if the present is like the past, and it has not simply been updated to new circumstances. You could say that the psyche is made out of different parts that have limited information, and each act out “rationally” based on this (potentially outdated or flawed) information. It seems to me that when you respect every part of yourself as rational but limited, it will be easier to accept oneself more deeply. In this way, we can see how Rogers thinks that the flow of information i.e. increased awareness will make our organism automatically self-correct without any deliberate effort of a “supervisor”.
Further, Rogers says that since people are fundamentally rational and ethical, with increased acceptance and awareness we want to allow more self-trust. Because the organism knows best. While I agree that our organisms are deeply autocorrecting towards the good, I fail to see how we can achieve self-trust, meaning no need for self-supervision, because that would mean every part of the psyche has all the required information to make rational decisions in the present moment and will therefore naturally cooperate, because the psyche has a common goal. The problem I see is that I don’t think information is enough, and it lacks the emphasis on the narrative, identity, and context, which are all abstractions from reality, that isn’t revealed directly from experience but has to be imposed from the top to bottom.
I mean, the reason we’re able to function at all is that we’re expecting the future to be consistent with the past. I cannot imagine how it would be possible to act or think without a certain degree of rigidity. Again I don’t think I can accept Rogers’ goal in that we become open to all experiences because we have limited CPU and we can’t just reevaluate everything all the time, like that of young children. Continuing the computer analogy, we’ve got to cache data, experiences, and responses, otherwise, we’d be totally useless practically.
Rogers decided that personal growth entails an increasing ability to be fluid and changing, instead of rigid and static. The goal, for Rogers, is not to make a person become this or that, not to change who they are, but to make them more changing. To be able to increase their awareness of what’s going on in the world and see events as they are in the present, and not respond as if it was the past. Drop all the predefined conceptions of reality and see everything as it is.
He acknowledges that not everyone would disagree with this definition. I partly agree. But there is a virtue to being close-minded, rigid, and firm in certain situations. I wonder, parenthetically, what Rogers makes of Ernest Becker’s idea that we need to “deliberately” limit awareness in order to act in the world. Otherwise, the sheer intensity of reality itself and the undeniable fact of death would stifle any form of action. In any case, there is something to be said for close-mindedness, while you’re baking the cake you shouldn’t open the door.
Further, he describes his “ethic” in terms of process, not state. Meaning the goal or ideal is not a perceived state of being, but a process or a trajectory. This seems right. Welfare can be described in many ways. It seems to me that the deepest sense of happiness is more determined by trajectory than achievement. You’re “happier” working towards something and seeing results rather than having achieved it.
His two last chapters/essays were my favorites, they were really captivating. Rogers was grappling with how the science of psychology is going to be used to control human behavior. Even though the field of psychology hasn’t been used to control people at mass, it would be naive to not consider it a possibility. He advocates that we use science not to promote happiness, which would lead to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but instead empower the individual to be able to adapt, be open to experience and face meaningful challenges. Rogers says that this has been done by him to an extent, by measuring psychotherapy.
However, I wouldn't say that the "scientific findings" Rogers are as objective as they may seem at first glance. The effectiveness of therapeutic approaches changes over time depending on what is the most common form of neurosis. In Freud's time and place, for instance, sexual repression was causing hysteria. Freud could say that there are objective scientific findings that show that if you alleviate sexual repression you remove neurosis and become saner. However, today, his approach does not yield the same positive results.
Likewise, we have to take Roger's context into consideration. And I would be careful to say that effectiveness of his approach was universal, and was not, to some degree, a response to the macho attitudes of the 50s in the States. This is not to say I disagree with Rogers, but it seems to me that his approach was very much needed at that time and place.
Another point, although I am aware I am stretching it, is that Rogers has not measured personal growth per se, but has found an approach that has worked generally well with his demographic at that place and time to promote change in behavior and the concept of self, which the therapist and the client both agree is beneficial. The reason it’s important to emphasize this is that Rogers uses words such as objective and scientific, and I think we have to be careful when we use those words in terms of personal growth. Having said that, the observation of personal change is significant and I share Roger’s belief that congruence is essential in personal growth.
In conclusion, Rogers has been enormously influential. He’s a deep thinker and he is a very likable person from what I’ve gathered from his writings. The book was worth reading. It’s a collection of essays written throughout his carrier, so a lot of his core ideas are repeated throughout, but I didn’t mind it at all.
One of the most influential ideas is the relationship between the client and the therapist.
Rogers argues technical skill comes second in relation to your personal character. He says that the therapy that is least effective in personal transformation is where the therapist has a professional facade, wants to diagnose the patient (like an object with a sickness), and tells them why they think this way and what to do about it. People don't want to be fixed, but rather, be given an opportunity to use a relationship of genuine care and acceptance to explore themselves and transform.
So, in psychotherapy, the interpersonal is what brings about real change. Treat the client as a person, not a patient to be cured.
The personal character of the therapist is important. To the degree, you can unconditionally accept, care for, and be congruent with yourself is what limits your relationships with other people as well. The main mission for the therapist, in other words, is something like total self-acceptance, or rather, unconditional self-liking.
Rogers backed up his theories with studies, recording the sessions, and tracking progress rigorously. Seeing how effective therapy is in this approach, he suggested we should not limit this to psychotherapy, but instead apply this to all areas of human relations. In our personal relationships, how we raise children, how teachers teach their pupils, and even how commanders lead their troops.
Rogers was (possibly) one of the earliest to make the importance of congruence explicit to the degree he did. Congruence is vital for the effectiveness of therapy because even though the patient cannot put their finger on incongruence, something in the back of their head will resist trusting you if they sense any falseness about you.
To be congruent means being what you are. Expressing your feelings and attitudes, verbally or non-verbally. Not doing anything in an attempt to hide what you are. This is what it means to be real, and is one of the fundamental necessities for a relationship to be fruitful. You could take it to the extreme and say: Nothing ultimately worthwhile or real value comes out of falsehood.
This is, of course, easier said than done, because who we are is not only complicated but also we have limited knowledge of our feelings and motives. Therefore one of the ways to become more congruent is to increase the awareness of yourself, to become in tune with your emotions and inner world, say. We need self-acceptance to allow ourselves to become more sensitive to the subtleness of our inner ocean of feeling and thought, and this, in turn, brings about a better self-understanding and provides richer self-acceptance. To the extent we can do this, we can be congruent with ourselves and therefore our next.
To summarize his approach, in a nutshell, is that a therapist should 1) Be congruent, meaning be what he is, be aware of his emotions and communicate them genuinely, 2) Have unconditional positive regard for the client, seeing them as their true selves as something actualizing and striving to do good in the world and 3) Understanding them with the ability to see the world as they see it, and feel what they feel, a real, loving, empathic understanding.
Rogers is a humanist. He believes that people are capable of moral action and self-transcendence without religious belief. He rejects the notion that we should have an unattainable ideal because self-acceptance is the way to self-transcendence. I might be putting words into Roger’s mouth, but I suppose he would say that we shouldn’t try to be like Jesus because we’re not Jesus. And therefore if we use him as an ideal, we could never accept ourselves.
He notes that the reason why psychotherapy works is that each and every individual has an inherent calling to self-actualization. You might call this the divine spark within us, but Rogers calls this the self. So in Roger’s language, we’re can be entirely dependent on ourselves for self-transformation.
Picking up on the thread of the independence of a divinity, Rogers says that every one of us is fundamentally good, and we have a deep-seated love for everyone else at the core. He says that all negative emotions and drives come from a place where our good nature could not be expressed and is turned into negative drives. The tale of Frankenstein would exemplify this point. He was born a monster with a good heart, and he wanted only to love with the purest of intentions, but he was rejected because he was a monster and eventually became murderous because he was not allowed to love.
Naturally, Rogers rejects good and evil. For him, there are only good and only warped perceptions of what good entails. For me, the jury isn’t out on this one, looking at the human capability of atrocity, virtually indistinguishable from evil, I don’t think it’s very useful to reject that notion. I think the good/evil paradigm is a more practical one, and we should look at our own motivations to find out the truth. A movie or a video game is a much stronger grip on us when it’s about defeating evil, instead of ignorance, and I believe it’s because it resonates deeper because at the root of our psyche recognizes this as true. It’s a contradiction, in my eyes, to be fascinated by Lord of the Rings while at the same time believing there is no such thing as evil in the world.
I have been probably influenced by Rogers indirectly, and now directly on my view of authenticity, something akin to congruence. The extent to which you can be congruent is determined by the level of awareness and acceptance.
One thing I don’t fully understand with Rogers is that he says when we are making value judgments, say, “That tree is green” we cannot be congruent.
Rogers’ ethics, his conception of the “ideal person” seems indistinguishable from that of the child.
As alluded to earlier, the self is a central concept for Rogers. And it’s unclear what he wants to get at here. The self is a relative concept. It does not exist in it and of itself but is a concept used to distinguish one identity from another for practical reasons, mainly because conceptualizing the world as identities is a prerequisite for establishing the narrative, which is a prerequisite for coherent thought.
An example would be saying “A dog bit me.” In order to make sense of this thought you must #1) Distinguish yourself from the dog and #2) Create a narrative where two actors, you and a dog is involved, in which the dog bit you. And #3) Formulate this narrative in thought and then language.
Rogers wants us to increase the scope of what is self. He says that the “actualized” person identifies all thoughts and motives with himself. This would be an improvement because the person who has wicked thoughts refuses to acknowledge them as “his” thoughts because they are unacceptable to him, thus practicing non-acceptance, and thus not progressing in his development.
In practicing self-acceptance, there seem to be two approaches that seem opposite approaches but have similar effects. One is Roger’s approach, the all-encompassing self, and the other is the “no-self” advocated by Buddhist teachers. The similarity between these two apparently opposite approaches is that you don’t distinguish between a “real you” and unwanted thoughts and motives. The unwanted inner turmoil is created by a belief that the “real self” is what you accept about yourself, and the things that are unaccepted about yourself. That “The self” is the rational soul stuck inside an irrational creature, and one must try to control it. Rogers wants us to drop this concept and wants us to see our entire being as rational.
My problem with Rogers’ approach is that the bodily equivalent would be to try to identify oneself with one’s finger.
We cannot split the psyche and the body entirely. So we must have some cut-off point. Is the finger a part of the “self”? It depends on the extent your finger plays a part in your identity. If you are a professional piano player and you lose your finger, your identity will have to die in the narrative more so than if you are a marathon runner.
I would say that there is a hierarchy here. The brain is more essential to the “self” than the heart. But the heart is more essential than a finger. It’s not so much what these organs or body parts are in their material manifestation but what part they play in forming identity in the narrative.
Even though I think of the finger as a part of myself, it is not, unlike my brain, vital to my identity. Likewise in the psychological realm, there is, in my opinion, a similar hierarchy. There are thoughts, motives, impulses, moods, emotions, say “sub-personalities” that are more essential to the “self” than others. So it would be justified to distinguish between a more central self with more peripheral parts of the psyche. It would be more “accurate” to say “A dog bit my finger” instead of insisting on an all-compassing self as saying “A dog bit me,” when we really want to be precise where.
As narrative necessitates an identity of self, it seems totally valid to say relate anything that is peripheral to the identity of self as something “other” than self. Whether that be the dog, the finger, or a psychological phobia of dogs. Ultimately, it is all a matter of degree, anyway.
Rogers is against fighting unwanted parts of ourselves by refusing to acknowledge them as a part of us. I would say that Rogers is right in pointing out that this is a symptom of non-acceptance and we shouldn’t cherry-pick the parts of us that are most flattering as our “true selves”. However, I don’t see any reason why we need to identify with something to accept it. Buddhist meditation practice is about accepting thoughts without identity. We’re also able to accept other people without personally identifying with them.
When Rogers says that man is essentially rational, not irrational, we have to agree on terms here. I think of rationality as believing in something to the degree it’s likely to be true given the information and experiences you’ve had. When a PTSD sufferer is getting severe anxiety from, say, a very mild threat, we could say this is rational because the trauma acts as if the present is like the past, and it has not simply been updated to new circumstances. You could say that the psyche is made out of different parts that have limited information, and each act out “rationally” based on this (potentially outdated or flawed) information. It seems to me that when you respect every part of yourself as rational but limited, it will be easier to accept oneself more deeply. In this way, we can see how Rogers thinks that the flow of information i.e. increased awareness will make our organism automatically self-correct without any deliberate effort of a “supervisor”.
Further, Rogers says that since people are fundamentally rational and ethical, with increased acceptance and awareness we want to allow more self-trust. Because the organism knows best. While I agree that our organisms are deeply autocorrecting towards the good, I fail to see how we can achieve self-trust, meaning no need for self-supervision, because that would mean every part of the psyche has all the required information to make rational decisions in the present moment and will therefore naturally cooperate, because the psyche has a common goal. The problem I see is that I don’t think information is enough, and it lacks the emphasis on the narrative, identity, and context, which are all abstractions from reality, that isn’t revealed directly from experience but has to be imposed from the top to bottom.
I mean, the reason we’re able to function at all is that we’re expecting the future to be consistent with the past. I cannot imagine how it would be possible to act or think without a certain degree of rigidity. Again I don’t think I can accept Rogers’ goal in that we become open to all experiences because we have limited CPU and we can’t just reevaluate everything all the time, like that of young children. Continuing the computer analogy, we’ve got to cache data, experiences, and responses, otherwise, we’d be totally useless practically.
Rogers decided that personal growth entails an increasing ability to be fluid and changing, instead of rigid and static. The goal, for Rogers, is not to make a person become this or that, not to change who they are, but to make them more changing. To be able to increase their awareness of what’s going on in the world and see events as they are in the present, and not respond as if it was the past. Drop all the predefined conceptions of reality and see everything as it is.
He acknowledges that not everyone would disagree with this definition. I partly agree. But there is a virtue to being close-minded, rigid, and firm in certain situations. I wonder, parenthetically, what Rogers makes of Ernest Becker’s idea that we need to “deliberately” limit awareness in order to act in the world. Otherwise, the sheer intensity of reality itself and the undeniable fact of death would stifle any form of action. In any case, there is something to be said for close-mindedness, while you’re baking the cake you shouldn’t open the door.
Further, he describes his “ethic” in terms of process, not state. Meaning the goal or ideal is not a perceived state of being, but a process or a trajectory. This seems right. Welfare can be described in many ways. It seems to me that the deepest sense of happiness is more determined by trajectory than achievement. You’re “happier” working towards something and seeing results rather than having achieved it.
His two last chapters/essays were my favorites, they were really captivating. Rogers was grappling with how the science of psychology is going to be used to control human behavior. Even though the field of psychology hasn’t been used to control people at mass, it would be naive to not consider it a possibility. He advocates that we use science not to promote happiness, which would lead to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but instead empower the individual to be able to adapt, be open to experience and face meaningful challenges. Rogers says that this has been done by him to an extent, by measuring psychotherapy.
However, I wouldn't say that the "scientific findings" Rogers are as objective as they may seem at first glance. The effectiveness of therapeutic approaches changes over time depending on what is the most common form of neurosis. In Freud's time and place, for instance, sexual repression was causing hysteria. Freud could say that there are objective scientific findings that show that if you alleviate sexual repression you remove neurosis and become saner. However, today, his approach does not yield the same positive results.
Likewise, we have to take Roger's context into consideration. And I would be careful to say that effectiveness of his approach was universal, and was not, to some degree, a response to the macho attitudes of the 50s in the States. This is not to say I disagree with Rogers, but it seems to me that his approach was very much needed at that time and place.
Another point, although I am aware I am stretching it, is that Rogers has not measured personal growth per se, but has found an approach that has worked generally well with his demographic at that place and time to promote change in behavior and the concept of self, which the therapist and the client both agree is beneficial. The reason it’s important to emphasize this is that Rogers uses words such as objective and scientific, and I think we have to be careful when we use those words in terms of personal growth. Having said that, the observation of personal change is significant and I share Roger’s belief that congruence is essential in personal growth.
In conclusion, Rogers has been enormously influential. He’s a deep thinker and he is a very likable person from what I’ve gathered from his writings. The book was worth reading. It’s a collection of essays written throughout his carrier, so a lot of his core ideas are repeated throughout, but I didn’t mind it at all.
informative
slow-paced
informative
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Sociolopolitically some details are very midcentury, but the general ideas Rogers puts forth are surprisingly NOT dated for a collection of essays compiled in the 1950s. I was especially struck by his description of the therapeutic relationship (early chapters) and applications to interpersonal relationships and communication later in the book.
challenging
informative
slow-paced
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
informative
reflective
medium-paced