The Power of Unconditional Positive Regard
'Unfolding' author shares struggle with epilepsy and Tourette's syndrome
Throughout history, theorists have disagreed on the essence of human nature.
Sigmund Freud viewed the essence of humanity as lascivious and dangerous, and the objective of therapy was finding healthy ways to control our pleasure principle-driven id. B.F. Skinner saw people as empty boxes where our thoughts and behaviors were a byproduct of our environment, such that changing those reinforcement patterns was the only way to change behavior.
In contrast, humanist psychologist Carl Rogers presented what at the time was a bold vision of the human condition and healing process. He said that people were essentially good and kind, and that the problems people faced were consequences of an environment that was at times not supportive and even hurtful.
Rogers thought the way to treat people therapeutically was to provide them with unconditional positive regard — where the therapist could be warm and accepting of the client even if the patient was engaging in self-destructive behavior.
Over time, the unconditional positive regard would create a corrective experience where, in effect, people would come to accept themselves unconditionally.
Author Jonathan Friesen knows the power of unconditional positive regard. Throughout his life, Friesen has suffered from both Tourette’s syndrome, a disorder characterized by repetitive motor and vocal tics, and epilepsy, a disorder causing recurrent unprovoked seizures. And he found that the world did not provide him with much positive regard at all, to say the least.
Initially, Friesen felt that his tics were less of an issue because many kids in elementary school had trouble controlling their bodies in some way.
“So, when I was six years old — a pretty typical age for Tourette’s onset — that’s when I first noticed tics. And for me they came very fast, and quite a few of them all within a period of about a week,” Friesen told me. “I went from what I thought was pretty still to pretty much in constant motion. And that was all well and good because it seemed like in elementary school everyone was weird. Everyone had something.”
Receiving treatment did not help, as Friesen received care from a doctor unfamiliar with Tourette’s syndrome who misdiagnosed him and thought that his tics were a form of acting out.
“My pediatrician said that my tics — I was doing that for attention. I don’t even know if he knew what Tourette’s was … it was treated more like an emotional, behavioral disturbance,” Friesen explained. “There was no medicine for it. There was no treatment per se. There were things that scared me even more. He would try to use hypnosis to calm me down. When you’re already out of control, you don’t want to be hypnotized.”
But in junior high school, Friesen began to have seizures. “While in math class, sitting in algebra, I had this strange sensation come over me. And I knew something was different – it wasn’t a tic,” he recalled.
“So I’m moving all over the place … I’m not even sure why I’m doing this. I get quite confused. And I look to my left, and the girl I often looked at for other reasons — her face is fuzzy and blurry and then doubling … I got up, took a couple of steps and had a seizure, my first one. It was a grand mal. Apparently, pencils were stuck in my mouth to keep my tongue from covering my windpipe. It was a pretty bad scene.”
Once he began experiencing seizures, Friesen was faced with another form of stigma; namely, social isolation. “The lesson I learned from that is, you’re totally alone. There are other learning disorders and disabilities; you can’t see them. We can hide them,” he said.
“But both Tourette’s, which has our muscles moving in ways we don’t want them to, and epilepsy, where there are these grand mal seizures that throw you to the ground, are very outward,” Friesen explained. “So, as a teen, that was exceptionally difficult. And after that day with that seizure, I went home to my basement bedroom and said to myself, ‘I’m never coming out of here.’
“And while I made some forays out to the bathroom and church on Sundays, the truth is, I never really did leave home to do too much for the next two years. I would try to go to school a day a week, two days a week. And the truth is, I would make it a period. I was so mortified by how I looked and what overtook me.
“I basically imprisoned myself in a [12-foot-by-12-foot] room.”
Eventually, one of Friesen’s classmates came to visit him. And simply having someone willing to talk and caring enough to visit, meant the world to him.
“I had a visitor. It was a knock on the door by my mom. No one came to visit me, so it was unusual,” Friesen explained. “It turned out it was another classmate of mine. And this gal who I did not know — for the next hour, she came into my room and sat across from me on the stool.
“And she made me feel human.”
And for the first time since he had seizures, Friesen felt like he could venture out. “I just stared at my walls for an hour. I had covered the room with messages about myself, negative messages about myself,” he said. “I had convinced myself with all of my tics and all of my seizures that I wanted to remain invisible. So, here, someone showed up and did the exact opposite of what I wanted. And it set me free.
“And it was the first time I realized the power of being made visible.”
Unfortunately, Friesen’s fears of going to school were well-founded, as he was the target of merciless bullying. “I went to school for three days and four days and five days. Being back in school, life was better than being locked in a house. But it was still horrible, the kids mocking as they were,” he said. “My grand mals became once every month. But every day, I would have petite mals — quite a few, maybe 30, 40, 50 that would space me out.
“I’d be in front of the drinking fountain, and then I wasn’t there. I was nowhere. And when I came to, someone behind me would have pushed my face into the porcelain, but I didn’t feel the blood start to come out.”
Perhaps worse than the seizures themselves was the ongoing anticipatory anxiety of having a seizure. “I felt like I was always on the cusp of one or coming out of one … That constant, ‘Is it coming now?’ feeling in me produced such anxiety that when I think back now to my teen experience with Tourette’s and epilepsy, the word I put most on it is ‘anxious,’” Friesen said.
“Those spacing seizures took away my life.”
Friesen thinks that the root of the problem is the social comparison that is inherent in school systems.
“School is the only time that you’re thrown together with all other people of your own age. So there’s this inherent comparison that is made. So we’re all in this big fishbowl, and we’re all swimming around. And everybody’s looking at everybody; half because they’re interested, but more because they want to see where they fit in. Are they swimming towards the top or are they belly up towards the bottom?”
he said.
“Someone gave me a sideways glance … I assume they’re looking at my tics. Which then makes the tics worse. Which then feeds the anxiety, which makes me think I can’t go more places. So I retreat further from eyes. And it’s all ‘Let me swim to the bottom of this little fishbowl, where no one’s going to see me, because that’s where I’m going to be safe.’”
Eventually, Friesen was placed on a cocktail of medications that helped control his seizures. But he still found himself at the age of 21 isolated and friendless. And it was at this lowest point that he experienced the power of unconditional positive regard from his visits with his grandmother.
“As far as friendships, by the time my tics and seizures were in full swing, they vanished. So I didn’t have anybody. But I had a grandma. It’s strange to think back now that my best friend at 21 was my 84-year-old grandmother. But it was true,” Friesen explained.
“And during the days, I would just talk, and she would be hunched over, eyes half-shut, and she’d be listening. And sometimes, I’d just weep, and she’d just listen. And there was this combination of this sense of ‘no-matter-whatness’ plus the sense of safety that she gave me.
“Both of those things combined are what made my exit from anxiety. And what it really turned out to be was a personal acceptance. It felt so arms-wide-open all the time.
“The knowledge that someone knew exactly what I looked like at my absolute worst and still cared about me so much did something that I don’t know if medicine could have done.”
Having experienced the power of unconditional positive regard from his grandmother, he chose to pay it forward by working for several years as a special-education teacher. And he found an immediate kinship with the kids who he was helping, such that the experience became therapeutic for Friesen.
“They were like me, messed up like me. And in there, I found such resilience. And I found a beauty of small steps. And it was amazing how freeing that special-ed environment was for me. It was actually healing for me as a teacher. I could walk through there without a second glance.”
In 2008, Friesen began writing, eventually writing books such as
“Jerk, California.”
“When I was younger, writing a book wasn’t a possibility because my arm jerked around so much. But storytelling was. And so I became very good at storytelling and embellishing. And then with the beautiful advent of a computer keyboard where it could quickly correct a mistake, it became a nice venue,” he explained.
“[‘Jerk, California’] was about a young man who had Tourette’s. His father gave it to him, but his father passed on. So he’s left with all this anger at the man who gave him this frustrating condition.”
And just like teaching, writing became a form of therapy for Friesen. “And I would just go to the library, and I would just weep. I cried, and I wrote. Reliving all sorts of these moments. I didn’t write my moments, but I used the emotion and put them into scenarios. It was terrible, but it was therapeutic.”
And while Friesen used to be terrified of people for fear of being ostracized, soon he found himself sought after as a public speaker.
“I never thought I’d start talking or speaking, but I had an opportunity to do a book signing at Barnes & Noble, and they said, ‘Why don’t you come talk about your book?’” Friesen explained. “I didn’t know what to say. I thought I’d become a reclusive writer. I had been reclusive my whole life. I spoke for 15 minutes. And the next day, I opened my email. I had five invitations for conferences and from schools to come speak.
“Wow! Who would’ve thought that?”
Friesen continued to publish, with his characters often having mental health issues and disorders.
“The stories that I’ve written, it just seems that they come out with characters that have mental health concerns or struggles and disorders,” he explained. “I don’t attempt to write them that way. But I think from my years teaching in special-ed, those are the characters that are most vivid to me. And, to tell you the truth, those are the characters that I most admire.”
In his newest book, “Unfolding,” Friesen chooses a prison as the story’s setting. “How many secrets are bound up by guys in these prisons? And that idea, of all the secrets a prison could hold, became the inspiration for ‘Unfolding,’ which starts with one secret inside one old man inside a prison,” he said.
“And how that one secret germinates and it takes the whole town by surprise. And about a young epileptic main character who gets tied into this old guy … Because when I had epilepsy, I had secrets, and I couldn’t let anyone know of these secrets. We want to be seen, but we want to be invisible at the same time.”
While Friesen continues to be busy writing, he still finds time for substitute teaching when he can. “A student of mine came up to me, and said right from the beginning, ‘I’m the bad kid and the worst kid in this class.’ This was a kid who was kicked out of the classroom regularly,” he explained.
“And then the whole day he tried to live out that prophecy. At the end of the day, we were all sitting on the floor. He came, and he put his leg right up to my leg, and he put his head on my shoulder. He let somebody else in. Now that would not be seen by some people as a big step.
“But to me, what we did, what we accomplished, was heroic.”
Sigmund Freud viewed the essence of humanity as lascivious and dangerous, and the objective of therapy was finding healthy ways to control our pleasure principle-driven id. B.F. Skinner saw people as empty boxes where our thoughts and behaviors were a byproduct of our environment, such that changing those reinforcement patterns was the only way to change behavior.
In contrast, humanist psychologist Carl Rogers presented what at the time was a bold vision of the human condition and healing process. He said that people were essentially good and kind, and that the problems people faced were consequences of an environment that was at times not supportive and even hurtful.
Rogers thought the way to treat people therapeutically was to provide them with unconditional positive regard — where the therapist could be warm and accepting of the client even if the patient was engaging in self-destructive behavior.
Over time, the unconditional positive regard would create a corrective experience where, in effect, people would come to accept themselves unconditionally.
Author Jonathan Friesen knows the power of unconditional positive regard. Throughout his life, Friesen has suffered from both Tourette’s syndrome, a disorder characterized by repetitive motor and vocal tics, and epilepsy, a disorder causing recurrent unprovoked seizures. And he found that the world did not provide him with much positive regard at all, to say the least.
Source: Photo credit: Jonathan Friesen
Initially, Friesen felt that his tics were less of an issue because many kids in elementary school had trouble controlling their bodies in some way.
“So, when I was six years old — a pretty typical age for Tourette’s onset — that’s when I first noticed tics. And for me they came very fast, and quite a few of them all within a period of about a week,” Friesen told me. “I went from what I thought was pretty still to pretty much in constant motion. And that was all well and good because it seemed like in elementary school everyone was weird. Everyone had something.”
Receiving treatment did not help, as Friesen received care from a doctor unfamiliar with Tourette’s syndrome who misdiagnosed him and thought that his tics were a form of acting out.
“My pediatrician said that my tics — I was doing that for attention. I don’t even know if he knew what Tourette’s was … it was treated more like an emotional, behavioral disturbance,” Friesen explained. “There was no medicine for it. There was no treatment per se. There were things that scared me even more. He would try to use hypnosis to calm me down. When you’re already out of control, you don’t want to be hypnotized.”
But in junior high school, Friesen began to have seizures. “While in math class, sitting in algebra, I had this strange sensation come over me. And I knew something was different – it wasn’t a tic,” he recalled.
“So I’m moving all over the place … I’m not even sure why I’m doing this. I get quite confused. And I look to my left, and the girl I often looked at for other reasons — her face is fuzzy and blurry and then doubling … I got up, took a couple of steps and had a seizure, my first one. It was a grand mal. Apparently, pencils were stuck in my mouth to keep my tongue from covering my windpipe. It was a pretty bad scene.”
Once he began experiencing seizures, Friesen was faced with another form of stigma; namely, social isolation. “The lesson I learned from that is, you’re totally alone. There are other learning disorders and disabilities; you can’t see them. We can hide them,” he said.
“But both Tourette’s, which has our muscles moving in ways we don’t want them to, and epilepsy, where there are these grand mal seizures that throw you to the ground, are very outward,” Friesen explained. “So, as a teen, that was exceptionally difficult. And after that day with that seizure, I went home to my basement bedroom and said to myself, ‘I’m never coming out of here.’
“And while I made some forays out to the bathroom and church on Sundays, the truth is, I never really did leave home to do too much for the next two years. I would try to go to school a day a week, two days a week. And the truth is, I would make it a period. I was so mortified by how I looked and what overtook me.
“I basically imprisoned myself in a [12-foot-by-12-foot] room.”
Eventually, one of Friesen’s classmates came to visit him. And simply having someone willing to talk and caring enough to visit, meant the world to him.
“I had a visitor. It was a knock on the door by my mom. No one came to visit me, so it was unusual,” Friesen explained. “It turned out it was another classmate of mine. And this gal who I did not know — for the next hour, she came into my room and sat across from me on the stool.
“And she made me feel human.”
And for the first time since he had seizures, Friesen felt like he could venture out. “I just stared at my walls for an hour. I had covered the room with messages about myself, negative messages about myself,” he said. “I had convinced myself with all of my tics and all of my seizures that I wanted to remain invisible. So, here, someone showed up and did the exact opposite of what I wanted. And it set me free.
“And it was the first time I realized the power of being made visible.”
Unfortunately, Friesen’s fears of going to school were well-founded, as he was the target of merciless bullying. “I went to school for three days and four days and five days. Being back in school, life was better than being locked in a house. But it was still horrible, the kids mocking as they were,” he said. “My grand mals became once every month. But every day, I would have petite mals — quite a few, maybe 30, 40, 50 that would space me out.
“I’d be in front of the drinking fountain, and then I wasn’t there. I was nowhere. And when I came to, someone behind me would have pushed my face into the porcelain, but I didn’t feel the blood start to come out.”
Perhaps worse than the seizures themselves was the ongoing anticipatory anxiety of having a seizure. “I felt like I was always on the cusp of one or coming out of one … That constant, ‘Is it coming now?’ feeling in me produced such anxiety that when I think back now to my teen experience with Tourette’s and epilepsy, the word I put most on it is ‘anxious,’” Friesen said.
“Those spacing seizures took away my life.”
Friesen thinks that the root of the problem is the social comparison that is inherent in school systems.
“School is the only time that you’re thrown together with all other people of your own age. So there’s this inherent comparison that is made. So we’re all in this big fishbowl, and we’re all swimming around. And everybody’s looking at everybody; half because they’re interested, but more because they want to see where they fit in. Are they swimming towards the top or are they belly up towards the bottom?”
he said.
“Someone gave me a sideways glance … I assume they’re looking at my tics. Which then makes the tics worse. Which then feeds the anxiety, which makes me think I can’t go more places. So I retreat further from eyes. And it’s all ‘Let me swim to the bottom of this little fishbowl, where no one’s going to see me, because that’s where I’m going to be safe.’”
Eventually, Friesen was placed on a cocktail of medications that helped control his seizures. But he still found himself at the age of 21 isolated and friendless. And it was at this lowest point that he experienced the power of unconditional positive regard from his visits with his grandmother.
“As far as friendships, by the time my tics and seizures were in full swing, they vanished. So I didn’t have anybody. But I had a grandma. It’s strange to think back now that my best friend at 21 was my 84-year-old grandmother. But it was true,” Friesen explained.
“And during the days, I would just talk, and she would be hunched over, eyes half-shut, and she’d be listening. And sometimes, I’d just weep, and she’d just listen. And there was this combination of this sense of ‘no-matter-whatness’ plus the sense of safety that she gave me.
“Both of those things combined are what made my exit from anxiety. And what it really turned out to be was a personal acceptance. It felt so arms-wide-open all the time.
“The knowledge that someone knew exactly what I looked like at my absolute worst and still cared about me so much did something that I don’t know if medicine could have done.”
Having experienced the power of unconditional positive regard from his grandmother, he chose to pay it forward by working for several years as a special-education teacher. And he found an immediate kinship with the kids who he was helping, such that the experience became therapeutic for Friesen.
“They were like me, messed up like me. And in there, I found such resilience. And I found a beauty of small steps. And it was amazing how freeing that special-ed environment was for me. It was actually healing for me as a teacher. I could walk through there without a second glance.”
In 2008, Friesen began writing, eventually writing books such as
“Jerk, California.”
“When I was younger, writing a book wasn’t a possibility because my arm jerked around so much. But storytelling was. And so I became very good at storytelling and embellishing. And then with the beautiful advent of a computer keyboard where it could quickly correct a mistake, it became a nice venue,” he explained.
“[‘Jerk, California’] was about a young man who had Tourette’s. His father gave it to him, but his father passed on. So he’s left with all this anger at the man who gave him this frustrating condition.”
And just like teaching, writing became a form of therapy for Friesen. “And I would just go to the library, and I would just weep. I cried, and I wrote. Reliving all sorts of these moments. I didn’t write my moments, but I used the emotion and put them into scenarios. It was terrible, but it was therapeutic.”
And while Friesen used to be terrified of people for fear of being ostracized, soon he found himself sought after as a public speaker.
“I never thought I’d start talking or speaking, but I had an opportunity to do a book signing at Barnes & Noble, and they said, ‘Why don’t you come talk about your book?’” Friesen explained. “I didn’t know what to say. I thought I’d become a reclusive writer. I had been reclusive my whole life. I spoke for 15 minutes. And the next day, I opened my email. I had five invitations for conferences and from schools to come speak.
“Wow! Who would’ve thought that?”
Friesen continued to publish, with his characters often having mental health issues and disorders.
“The stories that I’ve written, it just seems that they come out with characters that have mental health concerns or struggles and disorders,” he explained. “I don’t attempt to write them that way. But I think from my years teaching in special-ed, those are the characters that are most vivid to me. And, to tell you the truth, those are the characters that I most admire.”
In his newest book, “Unfolding,” Friesen chooses a prison as the story’s setting. “How many secrets are bound up by guys in these prisons? And that idea, of all the secrets a prison could hold, became the inspiration for ‘Unfolding,’ which starts with one secret inside one old man inside a prison,” he said.
“And how that one secret germinates and it takes the whole town by surprise. And about a young epileptic main character who gets tied into this old guy … Because when I had epilepsy, I had secrets, and I couldn’t let anyone know of these secrets. We want to be seen, but we want to be invisible at the same time.”
While Friesen continues to be busy writing, he still finds time for substitute teaching when he can. “A student of mine came up to me, and said right from the beginning, ‘I’m the bad kid and the worst kid in this class.’ This was a kid who was kicked out of the classroom regularly,” he explained.
“And then the whole day he tried to live out that prophecy. At the end of the day, we were all sitting on the floor. He came, and he put his leg right up to my leg, and he put his head on my shoulder. He let somebody else in. Now that would not be seen by some people as a big step.
“But to me, what we did, what we accomplished, was heroic.”
