How I'm Helping Myself Unmask and Process ADHD, ASD Diagnosis - Self Parenting, A Potato + The Actualising Tendency Carl Rogers

How I'm Helping Myself Unmask and Process My ADHD, ASD Diagnosis - Self Parenting + The Actualising Tendency Carl Rogers. Here's the story of how Carl Rogers came to learn about The Actualising Tendency! AND why he developed his theory of The Three Conditions required by therapists (and yourself) to create the PERFECT environment in which a person/you can thrive, heal, grow, reach full potential and ACTUALISE  

This theory will underpin my journey towards actualisation. What's my PLAN?! How will I do it??

The Actualising Woman 🌺 is an unfiltered diary of life after a mental breakdown and a late-diagnosis of ASD and ADHD (AuDHD) at age 57 🌼 As a therapist, empty nester, and entrepreneur, I share the raw reality of recovery: grief, regret, overwhelm and confusion, alongside professional insights, research, and coping tools🌸
This channel is about living unmasked 🌷 rebuilding identity 🌻 and finding strength after years of moving through the world undiagnosed. From mental health struggles to self-actualisation 🌸 (inspired by Carl Rogers and Natalie Rogers), I talk honestly about how I experience my own neurodivergence, and how I am motivated to create a life that finally fits ME🌸

If you’re navigating late-diagnosed ADHD, autism, or AuDHD 🌼, or rebuilding after a breakdown, you’ll find community, understanding and hope here 🌺. 

☕Girl needs COFFEE! Please donate ANY amount, so that I can do this full time?! Thank you!
https://buymeacoffee.com/theactualisingwoman

Contact: clare@theactualisingwoman.co.uk for requests, stories for the show or questions.

🎧Check Out!!... STUDY SLEEP SOOTHE - Our Sound Podcast for ASD, ADHD & AuDHD-ers.  Available on Apple & Amazon Music

Clare Llewellyn-Bailey: Counselling psychotherapist, podcaster, empty-nester, and AuDHD-er!!

Transcript

Clare: 0:00

It's me, it's the actualizing woman. Hey, welcome back. This is Clare here again. Thanks for joining me on the actualizing woman today. I said at the end of the last episode that I would talk about actualization and hence the name of the podcast. So I'm gonna go into that more today and talk about a guy called Carl Carl Rogers, not Carl Rogers, Carl Rogers, uh American guy who developed person-centred counselling. And as a counsellor myself, um, I'm kind of a Rogerian kind of fan, if you like, almost a super fan. And I think what he had to say really resonates with me just as a person, let alone a person who happens to be a counsellor. I guess learning about him on my counselling degree has kind of drawn my attention to him. So that's how I know about him. So what I'm gonna do today is talk a little bit more, but then also play you a recording of an episode of The Actualizing Woman that I made a year ago when I first started the podcast, but then abandoned. And thankfully, I kept a lot of the uh audio recordings from then. I was obviously having a um what's it called, the ADHD thing, um, shiny object syndrome, and decided to abandon the actualising woman back then and started something else. But at least I'm old enough and wise enough now to remember to keep hold of the work that I've already done and don't just mass delete things from previous businesses that I didn't think I would ever need again, ever, ever. Not going there again, not doing that again. So, yay, well done, Clare. Pat on the back. You're learning as an old bird. So I will play you the story about how well, this is the story I've heard anyway, about how Carl Rogers kind of clicked on to this innate actualizing tendency that all living things have. And then after I've played the recording, I'm going to explain why I think that this is so important for all of us as a race, um, but also how it relates so very, very, bloody, very well to people who have had a huge diagnosis of ADHD or autism, and and who are trying to figure out what they need in order to move forward in their lives, having possibly masked all their lives, which is the situation I'm in. And I just thought, oh gosh, a few weeks back, bloody how. I mean, I thought the actualizing tendency was good to know anyway, and applied, but now I've been diagnosed, I think, oh my goodness, it he's absolutely right. It really means something much more much more it really means something now much more deeply than it did even back then, pre-diagnosis. So, without further ado, I am going to play your the recording about Carl Rogers. And please understand there is annoying music in the background towards the end of the clip, uh, which irritated me immediately as soon as I heard it. And there is a slightly different tone of voice for me. I I was obviously pretending to be somebody very controlled and very serious and very sensible, uh, which I ain't obviously. So be warned. Uh there's a different Clare on this one, okay? Uh you'll notice the difference immediately. But I will come back to you after the recording and we'll resume. Okay, here it is. But uni I learned about Carl Rogers. Carl Rogers was the father of person centred counselling, a humanistic therapist, and Rogers theorized about the actualizing tendency. He was the first person to come up with the concept. And I'll spare you a lecture because let's face it, I'm a teacher at heart, I can't help it, and I can dribble on a bit in teacher mode. So I'm gonna be brief here. And this is how I heard the story. Carl Rogers had been storing some homegrown potatoes in his dark, dank basement below his house, and one day he noticed that a potato had fallen out of the potato sack onto the moist kind of floor. The potato though had sprouted, unlike the others, all because of a thin shard of light that was coming through a small gap high up in the wall and was shining through the wall directly onto the potato. But the potato had nestled in the cracks on the brick floor, so it was able to get an an adequate amount of moisture too, which helped it sprout. So this is where the theory of the actualizing tendency was formed. Rogers had noticed that the potato had within it, as all potatoes do, a drive for life, an innate motivation to grow to its full potential as best it could. And given the right conditions for conditions that are good enough, it triggered its life force. And this is the tendency that all living things have inherently within them. And as living things ourselves, we also have a natural tendency to thrive and survive, to grow, heal and develop ourselves, to reach our full potential and in Rogers' terms, to actualize as long as the conditions in which we live are adequate as a bare minimum. Carl Rogers developed client centered therapy on the understanding of this inner drive, theorizing that for a client to grow and develop, he, as their counsellor, needed to embody three qualities and provide these qualities for the client in the counselling room. And these three qualities are congruence, unconditional positive regard and empathy. When he provided these adequate conditions as a bare minimum, the client will have what he needs to grow, heal, and actualise. And we must provide these three conditions for ourselves for us to be able to self-actualize to achieve authenticity and enjoy psychological well-being. And we are all able to do this for one another and for ourselves. No matter where we're from, what we are, who we are, or how troubled or idyllic our starting life was, how educated, rich, poor, indulged or downtrodden we are, we're all capable of improving our conditions. And if we're stuck in non-adequate conditions where we're unable to develop and grow, we have to change our conditions. We have to make changes. So there you go. A story about potatoes. Who da thunk it? So this experience with the potato on his cellar floor led Carl Rogers to realize that there are three conditions that are required to set the scene, to set the correct environment for a client to heal, grow, and move towards actualization. And there you go, that's person-centered therapy for you. But let's take those three things that he discovered and talk about those for a brief minute. Because this is what's going to underpin recovery for me and to bear in mind while I'm going through this next phase of my life. The story about the potato led him to understand the three qualities that a counsellor needs to embody, let's say, in the counselling room to enable a client to feel able to heal, grow, and therefore ultimately actualize. But we're not in a counselling room. I know I'm a counsellor, but it's very different if you are in a counselling room with a counsellor that's offering those qualities as opposed to a counsellor trying to survive and well, I've survived for 58 years, I mean miracle, uh, but also to thrive and grow and heal and reach my full potential. So what I'm saying is, I need to embody those three traits, not just for my clients, but for myself. Trust me, that's quite hard when you're a counsellor to turn tables on yourself. It's very, very different. So as I'm moving forward on this journey towards where I want to be, and I will talk about that in further future episodes. In fact, it's going to be a lot about that. But if I'm going to recover fully from this breakdown, I have to learn about what led me to it in the first place, but also to embody for myself those three traits. I have to be empathic to myself, to show myself empathy, I have to show myself unconditional positive regard, and I have to be congruent for myself too. This phrase just keeps going around in my head, and I know I've done an episode on it before and a little TikTok reels about it as well, but I need to self-parent. I really do need to self-parent because would you not agree that the best parents embody those three traits anyway? I can't help but think that sounds like the best parent ever. So I have to self-parent with those three traits to enable myself to be able to step forward as a neurodiverse person out in the world that is so used to berating herself and and not accepting herself and faking herself and holding herself back. So it's about for me being there for myself unconditionally accepting myself, being honest with myself, having congruence, responding as I should respond, responding from a place of authenticity, I suppose, and and having unconditional positive regard for myself, liking and loving myself unconditionally, accepting who I am and not being a critical parent to myself, which I have been for probably fifty years. Yeah, to be kind to myself, accept myself. So my message here today, really, in this episode, and it's a little bit of a shorter episode than usual, because I don't want to kind of bombard you with all of the theory of actualization, but um it will be peppered around in future episodes because it's so valid, and that's the whole point of the flipping podcast, to be honest. So I'm going to kind of tailor off by saying I'm going to self-parent, I'm going to bring those three traits forward to myself to parent myself as I go on this journey towards actualization. Just to say, not everyone reaches actualization, and that's okay, that's that's fine. I don't even know how you could even do that to completely get to a place where you are perf not perfect, because who is, but in that perfect environment for you to completely thrive, survive, grow, and reach your full potential in every single way. I mean that is really uh yeah, I I would say that was probably unreachable. However, I'm gonna have a damn good go at finding that place where I feel that I am in a place of peace, acceptance, and a kind of utopia, I suppose. Weird, in it, to think that you're setting off on a journey where you might not even reach your destination, but you're gonna have a damn good go at uh getting as close to it as you possibly can. I yeah, I have a dream. Since 2022, I've had a a dream, and I see myself a bit like I've said before, I have a vision board in my head, and I see a place where I am living. I have an idea of the feelings I will be feeling, I have an idea of the lifestyle that I want to lead when I'm there. I have it in my head where I believe my actualization will have a chance to show itself. So I I am aiming towards that, and these days it's about just processing the breakdown, processing the diagnosis of ADHD and ASD, what it means. But I have to say, because of the dream that I have of where I want to be and live and the lifestyle I want and the environment I want to be in preceded the breakdown and the diagnosis. I can see why reflecting back on where that initial dream started, why it was there in the first place. And I believe it's because I'm neurodiverse. It's all it all makes sense now why the dream was there. And I I beat myself up a lot about trying to create this environment that and going forward with that dream because I thought I was just being a bit odd and a bit of a recluse, and that's probably due to my childhood or my trauma or my whatever. You know, I analyzed it in 2022 and I thought, am I going to be able to get away with this? Or are my k kids going to insist that I go to counselling again? To sort my head out, you know, and sort out what's wrong with you, Clare. Why do you want to do that? Uh, but now, since the breakdown and particularly the diagnosis, I get it. No wonder that dream came to me. I mean, it wasn't a sleepy, sleepy dream, a real, real life bit of a eureka moment. I know exactly what I need to do to feel at peace and feel like me. But of course, um, at the time I felt a bit shameful about it. I thought, oh gosh, how do I share this with people? Now I can because okay, oh well, I understand that now. She's already HD for goodness sake. Of course, she wants to be there. So yay, I'm winning. Um yeah, so through this unsettled time, let's say, since the breakdown and the diagnosis that came in July and August, September, October, I am going to form myself embody those three qualities. So I have to be my own counsellor, my own parent, and exercise unconditional love and acceptance and empathy, and all those three things that Carl Rogers learned from that potato. It's in Carl Rogers' potato on this cellar floor. Yeah. Okay, enough for today. That's uh that's a bit teachy, I know. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be teachy, but I wanted to explain where I've had my teachy bit, where I've learned. I wanted to kind of outline that for you, where my thoughts are, and why the podcast is called what it's called. In the next episode, I will be talking a little bit further about what that means in for me as a neurodivergent person. How that actualization is going to occur, I believe. What I need to change about my life and my lifestyle and my environment in order for me to fully thrive, grow, heal, develop myself, reach my full potential, and therefore ultimately work towards my actualization. Okay, so a little bit more in-depth, but you will get it. I'm sure you will get it. Enough from Carl Rogers and for me for today. Thank you for joining me today. Please do follow the show and you take care of yourself, and I'll see you in the next one. Ta day.