Unconditional Positive Regard

What a wonderful idea! I stumbled on it last night before my mind grew quiet and I drifted out the window into the night air. I was reading Gabor Maté's book "In the realm of hungry ghosts" about his experiences working with the drug addicted and under housed in Vancouver. He said, in quoting someone else, that in this line of work (and I think in all lines of work and life as i will discuss) we need a kind of unconditional positive regard.

He was discussing working with drug addicted people and the kind of expectations we tend to have of them. He suggests that it is not fair or productive to have your own expectations of them, but rather you must learn to learn what their expectations are for themselves and see how you can't help them feel empowered by their expectations and seek and pursue them. Even if you have what you think are better ideas, having an unconditional positive regard means that you don't think in terms of better or worse, but in terms of this is what is and this is a beautiful and powerful human let's be beautiful and powerful humans together.

Drug addicted people are an obvious cohort with whom we must have an unconditional positive regard; as they have usually learned their whole lives that they are useless, worthless, failures with nothing to offer the world or themselves, it is our responsibility to be part of the team that helps them learn their life lessons are untrue and that what has happened in the past doesn't have to determine (fully) what happens next. That we have the power in us to make more in our life than numbing escaping or self-destruction (a lesson not only for drug addicts but for all addicts and all people who seek nothing new but an endless nostalgia and repetition of the good old times). It is this belief that I know everything, have experienced the most high, most positive thing in life and all that is left is to experience death.

In reading Mate's book, I am gaining a sense of what addiction attempts to fill, and how sad it is that we think addictions will fill that desire, need, curiosity, innate human spirit. But in thinking that I am right and those who do things differently are wrong, I refuse to engage an unconditional positive regard. And in the end this regard is what is the best way to help build people up, lift people up, enrage and engage minds and hearts in the positive world, in the creative world, in the uplifted and excited world.

So what is the unconditional positive regard. It seems very clear to me just in those three words. It is a way of regarding, viewing, thinking about, and interacting with other people. It is positive, it focuses on what is done, what is made, what does exist and what i believe i can do. not what i believe you can do. Even if i believe you can do more I disregard that belief and am thankful grateful and cheerful about what you do do. And it is unconditional. I will always be positive about what you do in your life, because it is what you do in your life and it is human. It is beautiful. I don't reward your good behaviour and chastise your bad, but I say always well now what and how can i help.

This might be a nice manifesto, a nice slogan, motto or the like...unconditional positive regard.