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'''Client-centered therapy''' (also called person-centered therapy) is Carl | '''Client-centered therapy''' (also called person-centered therapy) is [[Carl Rogers]]' approach to psychotherapy in which the client’s lived, subjective experience (“the client’s phenomenal world”) is treated as the primary reference point for understanding and change. The therapist does not “fix,” diagnose, interpret, or direct the client from the outside; instead, the therapist provides a facilitative relationship—marked by congruence (i.e., [[alignment]]) of therapist, authentic listening ([[connection]])(genuineness), unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding—that supports the client’s own movement toward growth, integration, and self-responsibility | ||
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[[Client Centered Therapy]] > {{#ask:[[Is a syncretic term::Alignment]]}} | [[Client Centered Therapy]] > {{#ask:[[Is a syncretic term::Alignment]]}} | ||
== | == Client Centered Therapy == | ||
Client-centered therapy | === Therepeutic Climate or "Theory of the Three Therapeutic Conditions"<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 21.</ref> === | ||
Client-centered therapy is based on three tightly interconnected conditions. | |||
==== Therapist's Congruence (or genuineness) ==== | |||
In ''Dialogues,'' Rogers defined congruence as authenticity, as operating behind a facade. "We readily sense this quality of congruence in everyday life. We all know persons who always seem to operate from behind a front, who play a role, who tend to say things they do not feel. They are exhibiting incongruence."<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 11.</ref> "Genuineness in therapy means the therapist is his actual self during his encounter with his client. Without facade, he openly has the feelings and attitudes that are flowing in him [sic] at the moment. This involves self-awareness; that is, the therapist’s feelings are available to him — to his awareness — and he is able to live them, to experience them in the relationship, and to communicate them if they persist. The therapist encounters his client directly, meeting him person to person. He is being himself, not denying himself."<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 11-12.</ref> | |||
==== Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR) ==== | |||
"This means that the therapist communicates to his client a deep and genuine caring for him as a person with human otentialities, a caring uncontaminated by evaluations of the patient’s thoughts, feelings, or behavior. The therapist experiences a warm acceptance of the client's experience as a part of that person and places no conditions on his acceptance and warmth. He prizes the client in a total, rather than a conditional, way. He does not accept certain feelings in the client and disapprove of others. "<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 13.</ref> | |||
Note that Rogers felt UPR was effective only on individuals at a certain level of development. Rogers felt that individuals beneath a certain threshold should be provided '''Conditional Regard,''' a form of guidance aimed at identifying and reducing extremely toxic behaviours. "Very tentatively it appears to me at the present time that, in dealing with the extremely immature or regressed individual, a conditional regard may be more effective in getting a relationship under way, hence therapy under way...."<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 14.</ref> Here it is important to point out directly where individuals behaviours are toxic and [[Disjuncture|Disjunctive]]. | |||
== | ==== Accurate Empathic Understanding (AEU) ==== | ||
"Accurate empathic understanding means that the therapist is completely at home in the universe of the client. It is a moment to-moment sensitivity in the here and now, in the immediate present. It is a sensing of the client’s inner world of private personal meanings as if it were your own, while never forgetting that it is not yours."<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 15.</ref> | |||
=== Alignment === | === Therapists' Way of Functioning === | ||
=== Advancing the Theory - An LP Reframing === | |||
LP reframing sees the "therepeutic climate" as one that helps meet one or more of the [[Seven Essential Needs]] of the client, the humanistic assumption being that doing so will help shift the client from [[Deficit Mode]] and [[Defense Mode]] into [[Growth Mode]]. | |||
==== Safety ==== | |||
Meeting the client's need for a safe environment is extremely important. | |||
"...his deep caring is a necessary ingredient of the “safe” context in which the client can come to explore himself and share deeply with another human being."<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 14.</ref> | |||
* [[Congruence]], includes | |||
** [[alignment]] – Being real and transparent in all relationships, with [[Self]] and with others. Specifically therapist's congruence. This is built on the therapists' "belief in the worth and individual... " development of a "strong, accurate empathy.",<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 11.</ref> | |||
** empathy - | |||
** authenticity | |||
* [[Connection]] - With Self and others. A "deep sensitivity to the moment-to-moment 'being' of another person." | |||
* Safe Environment | |||
'''Interconnection''': "The order in which these therapeutic conditions are described has some significance because they are logically intertwined. In the first place, the therapist must achieve a strong, accurate empathy. But such deep sensitivity to the moment-to-moment “being” of another person requires that the therapist first accept, and to some degree prize, the other person. That is to say, a sufficiently strong empathy can scarcely exist without a considerable degree of unconditional positive regard. However, since neither of these conditions can possibly be meaningful in the relationship unless they are real, the therapist must be, both in these respects and in others, integrated and genuine within the therapeutic encounter. Therefore, it seems to me that genuineness or congruence is the most basic of the three conditions. I shall try to describe its meaning. "<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 11.</ref> | |||
Other elements in Client-centered therapy that Rogers did not overtly recognize. For example, importance of Alignment, in the LP sense was very important. | |||
==== Alignment ==== | |||
"I find it very satisfying when I can be real, when I can be close to whatever it is that is going on within me. I like it when I can listen to myself."<ref>Rogers, Carl. ''A Way of Being.'' Houghton Mifflin, 1980.</ref> | "I find it very satisfying when I can be real, when I can be close to whatever it is that is going on within me. I like it when I can listen to myself."<ref>Rogers, Carl. ''A Way of Being.'' Houghton Mifflin, 1980.</ref> | ||
=== Connection === | "One client describes the therapist as 'fostering my possession of my own experience and that I am actually having it; thinking what I think, feeling what I feel, wanting what I want, fearing what I fear; no ‘ifs,’ ‘buts,’ or ‘not reallys.’"<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 14.</ref> | ||
Meeting the essential needs for safety and alignment are critical in a therapeutic context. Unconditional positive regard is the delivery method. "Unconditional positive regard, when communicated by the therapist, serves to provide the nonthreatening context in which the client can explore and experience the most deeply shrouded elements of his inner self."<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 14.</ref> | |||
Accurate empathic undertstanding is a '''delivery method'''. Rather than orienting the client to themselves as an object, it pushes them inside. It helps put the client in touch with their inner world. <blockquote>An accurate empathic grasp of the client’s conflicts and problems perhaps contrasts most sharply with the more usualdiagnostic formulation of the client’s experiences. This diagnostic understanding, which is so different but so common, involves the implication, “I understand what is wrong with you,” or “I understand the dynamics that make you act this way.” Such evaluative understandings are external and sometimes even impersonal. Although they may at times be very useful in developing an understanding of the self as an object, they are in sharp contrast to an accurate and sensitive grasp of the personal meanings and perceptions that form the client’s private world. External and evaluative understanding tends to focus the client’s being on himself as object or upon intellectualizations that remove him from an ongoing contact with the experiencing going on within him. Empathic understanding, when it is accurately and sensitively communicated, seems crucially important in enabling the client more freely to experience his inward feelings, perceptions, and personal meanings. When he is thus in contact with his inward experiencing... <ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 16.</ref></blockquote>"We came to see the troubled or neurotic individual as one whose self-concept had become structured in ways incongruent with his organismic experience. (As one very brief example, a mother may be experiencing feelings of dislike and rejection toward her child, but her self-concept may contain only perceptions of herself as a good and loving mother.) Thus there may be a sharp discrepancy between the client’s organismic experiencing and his self-concept. Such a discrepancy between experience and the conceptualized self is the source of anxiety." <ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 24.</ref> | |||
"In therapy, with its climate of acceptance and safety and its freedom to explore one’s feelings whatever they may be, it becomes possible for the client to experience the feelings that have not been admitted into his concept of self. Once experienced in an accepting climate, they can gradually be incorporated into his self-picture, and he thereby achieves more unity and integration between the person he organismically is and the self he perceives himself as being."<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 24.</ref><blockquote>More recently we have moved toward a new theory of process that builds on two previous descriptions. Based on the study of a large number of recorded interviews, a fresh picture of the process of change has been developed that sees change occurring along a number of continua....It may be briefly delineated by presenting some of the closely related continua on which change occurs....For example, in regard to his feelings and personal meanings, he moves away from a state in which feelings are unrecognized, unowned, unexpressed. He moves toward becoming a flowing process in which ever changing feelings are experienced in the moment, knowingly and acceptingly, and may be accurately expressed. | |||
The process of therapy also involves a change in the manner of his experiencing. At the initial point on the continuum, he is remote from his experiencing. An example would be the intellectualizing client who talks only in abstractions, leaving one quite ignorant of what is actually going on within him. From such remoteness, he moves toward an immediacy of experiencing in which he lives openly in his feelings and knows that he can turn to his experiencing to discover its current meaning. | |||
... | |||
In general, the evidence from a number of research studies shows that the process moves away from fixity, remoteness from feelings and experience, rigidity of self-concept, remoteness from people, impersonality of functioning. It moves toward fluidity, changingness, immediacy of feelings and experience, acceptance of feelings and experience, tentativeness of constructs, discovery of a changing self in one’s changing experience, realness and closeness of relationships, a unity and integration of functioning | |||
<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 25.</ref> </blockquote>It's pretty clear from all this that bringing the client into ALIGNMENT is a critical goal of client-centered therapy. | |||
'''Source of disjuncture:''' "This theory of therapeutic change has been far more rigorously described in a formal statement of clientcentered theory, in which it is pointed out that the origin of the inaccuracies in the self-concept lies primarily with the individual’s attempt to retain love. In order to hold the love of a parent, the child introjects values and perceptions that he does not actually experience. He then denies to his awareness the organismic experiencings that contradict these introjections. Thus his self-concept contains false elements that are not based on what he is, in his experiencing. "<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 24-5.</ref> | |||
==== Psychological Needs ==== | |||
Freedom: "In therapy, with its climate of acceptance and safety and its freedom to explore one’s feelings whatever they may be, it becomes possible for the client to experience the feelings that have not been admitted into his concept of self. Once experienced in an accepting climate, they can gradually be incorporated into his self-picture, and he thereby achieves more unity and integration between the person he organismically is and the self he perceives himself as being."<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 24.</ref> | |||
==== Cognitive Needs (Truth and Understanding) ==== | |||
"He does not merely repeat his client’s words, concepts, or feelings. Rather, he seeks for the meaning implicit in the present inner experiencing toward which the client’s words or concepts point. " <ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 22.</ref> | |||
==== Connection ==== | |||
"When I truly hear a person and the meanings that are important to him at that moment, hearing not simply his words, but him, and when I let him know that I have heard his own private personal meanings, many things happen. There is first of all a grateful look. He feels released. He wants to tell me more about his world. He surges forth in a new sense of freedom. He becomes more open to the process of change."<ref>Rogers, Carl. ''A Way of Being.'' Houghton Mifflin, 1980.</ref> | "When I truly hear a person and the meanings that are important to him at that moment, hearing not simply his words, but him, and when I let him know that I have heard his own private personal meanings, many things happen. There is first of all a grateful look. He feels released. He wants to tell me more about his world. He surges forth in a new sense of freedom. He becomes more open to the process of change."<ref>Rogers, Carl. ''A Way of Being.'' Houghton Mifflin, 1980.</ref> | ||
"I like to be heard. A number of times in my life I have felt myself bursting with insoluble problems, or going round and round in tormented circles or, during one period, overcome by feelings of worthlessness and despair. I think I have been more fortunate than most in finding at these times individuals who have been able to hear me and thus to rescue me from the chaos of my feelings, individuals who have been able to hear my meanings a little more deeply than I have known them. These persons have heard me without judging me, diagnosing me, appraising me, evaluating me. They have just listened and clarified and responded to me at all the levels at which I was communicating. "<ref>Rogers, Carl. ''A Way of Being.'' Houghton Mifflin, 1980.</ref> | "I like to be heard. A number of times in my life I have felt myself bursting with insoluble problems, or going round and round in tormented circles or, during one period, overcome by feelings of worthlessness and despair. I think I have been more fortunate than most in finding at these times individuals who have been able to hear me and thus to rescue me from the chaos of my feelings, individuals who have been able to hear my meanings a little more deeply than I have known them. These persons have heard me without judging me, diagnosing me, appraising me, evaluating me. They have just listened and clarified and responded to me at all the levels at which I was communicating. "<ref>Rogers, Carl. ''A Way of Being.'' Houghton Mifflin, 1980.</ref> | ||
It's not just that the client and therapist should be connected, it's that the therapist should themselves be connected to thems''elves and'' that they should also help the client achieve inner connection. | |||
The whole thing works best when everybody is working towards better connection. "This new way of being with the client or patient requires of the therapist a heightened awareness of the shifting flow of felt experiencing within himself [sic]....Thus, the client-centered therapist aims to concentrate on the immediate phenomenal world of the client. For he believes that it is in confusions or contradictions within this world that the client’s difficulties lie. This exclusive focus in therapy on the present phenomenal experience of the client is the meaning of the term “client-centered."<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 16.</ref> | |||
=== Therapeutic Orientations === | === Therapeutic Orientations === | ||
| Line 46: | Line 97: | ||
If I keep from imposing on people, they become themselves." Lau Tzu | If I keep from imposing on people, they become themselves." Lau Tzu | ||
==== Emotional Needs ==== | |||
For expression "In the earliest description of client-centered therapy, I pictured the process as composed primarily of three steps. As it seemed to my colleagues and me at that time, a client-centered approach resulted, first, in the release of expression, the release of personal feelings in the interview. Following this emotional catharsis, insight tended to develop into the origin and nature of the difficulties being experienced by the client. "<ref>Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In ''Car Rogers: Dialogues'', edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 23.</ref> | |||
==Quotes== | ==Quotes== | ||
Latest revision as of 15:29, 15 December 2025
Client-Centered Therapy
Client-centered therapy (also called person-centered therapy) is Carl Rogers' approach to psychotherapy in which the client’s lived, subjective experience (“the client’s phenomenal world”) is treated as the primary reference point for understanding and change. The therapist does not “fix,” diagnose, interpret, or direct the client from the outside; instead, the therapist provides a facilitative relationship—marked by congruence (i.e., alignment) of therapist, authentic listening (connection)(genuineness), unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding—that supports the client’s own movement toward growth, integration, and self-responsibility
Concept Map
Carl Rogers Terms
Client-Centered Therapy, Congruence, Fully Functioning Person, Growth Hypothesis
Syncretic Terms
Client Centered Therapy > Asha, Brahmacharya, Client-Centered Therapy, Congruence, Conversion Experience, Divine Perfection, Ethical Perfection, Eudaimonia, Gonennoncwal, Heavenly Marriage, Holiness, Ka'nikonhrÌ:io, Ondinoc, Perfect Connection, Purification, Purity, Rectitude, Renunciation, Repentence, Righteousness, Samyaktva, Sane Living, Self-Actualization, Tahdhīb al-akhlāq, Taubah
Client Centered Therapy
Therepeutic Climate or "Theory of the Three Therapeutic Conditions"[1]
Client-centered therapy is based on three tightly interconnected conditions.
Therapist's Congruence (or genuineness)
In Dialogues, Rogers defined congruence as authenticity, as operating behind a facade. "We readily sense this quality of congruence in everyday life. We all know persons who always seem to operate from behind a front, who play a role, who tend to say things they do not feel. They are exhibiting incongruence."[2] "Genuineness in therapy means the therapist is his actual self during his encounter with his client. Without facade, he openly has the feelings and attitudes that are flowing in him [sic] at the moment. This involves self-awareness; that is, the therapist’s feelings are available to him — to his awareness — and he is able to live them, to experience them in the relationship, and to communicate them if they persist. The therapist encounters his client directly, meeting him person to person. He is being himself, not denying himself."[3]
Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR)
"This means that the therapist communicates to his client a deep and genuine caring for him as a person with human otentialities, a caring uncontaminated by evaluations of the patient’s thoughts, feelings, or behavior. The therapist experiences a warm acceptance of the client's experience as a part of that person and places no conditions on his acceptance and warmth. He prizes the client in a total, rather than a conditional, way. He does not accept certain feelings in the client and disapprove of others. "[4]
Note that Rogers felt UPR was effective only on individuals at a certain level of development. Rogers felt that individuals beneath a certain threshold should be provided Conditional Regard, a form of guidance aimed at identifying and reducing extremely toxic behaviours. "Very tentatively it appears to me at the present time that, in dealing with the extremely immature or regressed individual, a conditional regard may be more effective in getting a relationship under way, hence therapy under way...."[5] Here it is important to point out directly where individuals behaviours are toxic and Disjunctive.
Accurate Empathic Understanding (AEU)
"Accurate empathic understanding means that the therapist is completely at home in the universe of the client. It is a moment to-moment sensitivity in the here and now, in the immediate present. It is a sensing of the client’s inner world of private personal meanings as if it were your own, while never forgetting that it is not yours."[6]
Therapists' Way of Functioning
Advancing the Theory - An LP Reframing
LP reframing sees the "therepeutic climate" as one that helps meet one or more of the Seven Essential Needs of the client, the humanistic assumption being that doing so will help shift the client from Deficit Mode and Defense Mode into Growth Mode.
Safety
Meeting the client's need for a safe environment is extremely important.
"...his deep caring is a necessary ingredient of the “safe” context in which the client can come to explore himself and share deeply with another human being."[7]
- Congruence, includes
- Connection - With Self and others. A "deep sensitivity to the moment-to-moment 'being' of another person."
- Safe Environment
Interconnection: "The order in which these therapeutic conditions are described has some significance because they are logically intertwined. In the first place, the therapist must achieve a strong, accurate empathy. But such deep sensitivity to the moment-to-moment “being” of another person requires that the therapist first accept, and to some degree prize, the other person. That is to say, a sufficiently strong empathy can scarcely exist without a considerable degree of unconditional positive regard. However, since neither of these conditions can possibly be meaningful in the relationship unless they are real, the therapist must be, both in these respects and in others, integrated and genuine within the therapeutic encounter. Therefore, it seems to me that genuineness or congruence is the most basic of the three conditions. I shall try to describe its meaning. "[9]
Other elements in Client-centered therapy that Rogers did not overtly recognize. For example, importance of Alignment, in the LP sense was very important.
Alignment
"I find it very satisfying when I can be real, when I can be close to whatever it is that is going on within me. I like it when I can listen to myself."[10]
"One client describes the therapist as 'fostering my possession of my own experience and that I am actually having it; thinking what I think, feeling what I feel, wanting what I want, fearing what I fear; no ‘ifs,’ ‘buts,’ or ‘not reallys.’"[11]
Meeting the essential needs for safety and alignment are critical in a therapeutic context. Unconditional positive regard is the delivery method. "Unconditional positive regard, when communicated by the therapist, serves to provide the nonthreatening context in which the client can explore and experience the most deeply shrouded elements of his inner self."[12]
Accurate empathic undertstanding is a delivery method. Rather than orienting the client to themselves as an object, it pushes them inside. It helps put the client in touch with their inner world.
An accurate empathic grasp of the client’s conflicts and problems perhaps contrasts most sharply with the more usualdiagnostic formulation of the client’s experiences. This diagnostic understanding, which is so different but so common, involves the implication, “I understand what is wrong with you,” or “I understand the dynamics that make you act this way.” Such evaluative understandings are external and sometimes even impersonal. Although they may at times be very useful in developing an understanding of the self as an object, they are in sharp contrast to an accurate and sensitive grasp of the personal meanings and perceptions that form the client’s private world. External and evaluative understanding tends to focus the client’s being on himself as object or upon intellectualizations that remove him from an ongoing contact with the experiencing going on within him. Empathic understanding, when it is accurately and sensitively communicated, seems crucially important in enabling the client more freely to experience his inward feelings, perceptions, and personal meanings. When he is thus in contact with his inward experiencing... [13]
"We came to see the troubled or neurotic individual as one whose self-concept had become structured in ways incongruent with his organismic experience. (As one very brief example, a mother may be experiencing feelings of dislike and rejection toward her child, but her self-concept may contain only perceptions of herself as a good and loving mother.) Thus there may be a sharp discrepancy between the client’s organismic experiencing and his self-concept. Such a discrepancy between experience and the conceptualized self is the source of anxiety." [14] "In therapy, with its climate of acceptance and safety and its freedom to explore one’s feelings whatever they may be, it becomes possible for the client to experience the feelings that have not been admitted into his concept of self. Once experienced in an accepting climate, they can gradually be incorporated into his self-picture, and he thereby achieves more unity and integration between the person he organismically is and the self he perceives himself as being."[15]
More recently we have moved toward a new theory of process that builds on two previous descriptions. Based on the study of a large number of recorded interviews, a fresh picture of the process of change has been developed that sees change occurring along a number of continua....It may be briefly delineated by presenting some of the closely related continua on which change occurs....For example, in regard to his feelings and personal meanings, he moves away from a state in which feelings are unrecognized, unowned, unexpressed. He moves toward becoming a flowing process in which ever changing feelings are experienced in the moment, knowingly and acceptingly, and may be accurately expressed.
The process of therapy also involves a change in the manner of his experiencing. At the initial point on the continuum, he is remote from his experiencing. An example would be the intellectualizing client who talks only in abstractions, leaving one quite ignorant of what is actually going on within him. From such remoteness, he moves toward an immediacy of experiencing in which he lives openly in his feelings and knows that he can turn to his experiencing to discover its current meaning. ... In general, the evidence from a number of research studies shows that the process moves away from fixity, remoteness from feelings and experience, rigidity of self-concept, remoteness from people, impersonality of functioning. It moves toward fluidity, changingness, immediacy of feelings and experience, acceptance of feelings and experience, tentativeness of constructs, discovery of a changing self in one’s changing experience, realness and closeness of relationships, a unity and integration of functioning
It's pretty clear from all this that bringing the client into ALIGNMENT is a critical goal of client-centered therapy.
Source of disjuncture: "This theory of therapeutic change has been far more rigorously described in a formal statement of clientcentered theory, in which it is pointed out that the origin of the inaccuracies in the self-concept lies primarily with the individual’s attempt to retain love. In order to hold the love of a parent, the child introjects values and perceptions that he does not actually experience. He then denies to his awareness the organismic experiencings that contradict these introjections. Thus his self-concept contains false elements that are not based on what he is, in his experiencing. "[17]
Psychological Needs
Freedom: "In therapy, with its climate of acceptance and safety and its freedom to explore one’s feelings whatever they may be, it becomes possible for the client to experience the feelings that have not been admitted into his concept of self. Once experienced in an accepting climate, they can gradually be incorporated into his self-picture, and he thereby achieves more unity and integration between the person he organismically is and the self he perceives himself as being."[18]
Cognitive Needs (Truth and Understanding)
"He does not merely repeat his client’s words, concepts, or feelings. Rather, he seeks for the meaning implicit in the present inner experiencing toward which the client’s words or concepts point. " [19]
Connection
"When I truly hear a person and the meanings that are important to him at that moment, hearing not simply his words, but him, and when I let him know that I have heard his own private personal meanings, many things happen. There is first of all a grateful look. He feels released. He wants to tell me more about his world. He surges forth in a new sense of freedom. He becomes more open to the process of change."[20]
"I like to be heard. A number of times in my life I have felt myself bursting with insoluble problems, or going round and round in tormented circles or, during one period, overcome by feelings of worthlessness and despair. I think I have been more fortunate than most in finding at these times individuals who have been able to hear me and thus to rescue me from the chaos of my feelings, individuals who have been able to hear my meanings a little more deeply than I have known them. These persons have heard me without judging me, diagnosing me, appraising me, evaluating me. They have just listened and clarified and responded to me at all the levels at which I was communicating. "[21]
It's not just that the client and therapist should be connected, it's that the therapist should themselves be connected to themselves and that they should also help the client achieve inner connection.
The whole thing works best when everybody is working towards better connection. "This new way of being with the client or patient requires of the therapist a heightened awareness of the shifting flow of felt experiencing within himself [sic]....Thus, the client-centered therapist aims to concentrate on the immediate phenomenal world of the client. For he believes that it is in confusions or contradictions within this world that the client’s difficulties lie. This exclusive focus in therapy on the present phenomenal experience of the client is the meaning of the term “client-centered."[22]
Therapeutic Orientations
" To interfere with the life of things means to harm both them and oneself.... He who imposes himself has the small, manifest might; he who does not impose himself has the great, secret might.... The perfected man ... does not interfere in the life of beings, he does not impose himself on them, but he “helps all beings to their freedom (Lao-tse).” Through his unity, he leads them too, to unity, he liberates their nature and their destiny, he releases Tao in them (BUBER, 1957)."[23]
"If I keep from meddling with people, they take care of themselves, If I keep from commanding people, they behave themselves, If I keep from preaching at people, they improve themselves, If I keep from imposing on people, they become themselves." Lau Tzu
Emotional Needs
For expression "In the earliest description of client-centered therapy, I pictured the process as composed primarily of three steps. As it seemed to my colleagues and me at that time, a client-centered approach resulted, first, in the release of expression, the release of personal feelings in the interview. Following this emotional catharsis, insight tended to develop into the origin and nature of the difficulties being experienced by the client. "[24]
Quotes
"The client-centered point ofview has a number of distinguishing characteristics. These include the developing hypothesis that certain attitudes in the therapist constitute the necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic effectiveness; the developing concept of the therapist’s function as being immediately present to his client, relying on his moment-to-moment felt experience in the relationship; the continuing focus on the phenomenal world of the client; a developing theory that the therapeutic process is marked by a change in the client’s manner of experiencing and an ability to live more fully in the immediate moment; a continuing stress on the self-actualizing quality of the human organism as the motivating force in therapy; a concern with the process of personality change, rather than with the structure of personality; a stress on the necessity of research to discover the essential truths of psychotherapy; the hypothesis that the same principles of psychotherapy apply to the competently functioning business executive, the maladjusted and neurotic person who comes to a clinic, and the hospitalized psychotic on the back ward; a view of psychotherapy as one specialized example of all constructive interpersonal relationships, with the consequent generalized applicability of all our knowledge from the field of therapy; and, finally, a concern with the philosophical and value issues that grow out of the practice of therapy. Each of these distinguishing elements is ealt with in this chapter."[25]
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Footnotes
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 21.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 11.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 11-12.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 13.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 14.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 15.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 14.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 11.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 11.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. A Way of Being. Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 14.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 14.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 16.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 24.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 24.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 25.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 24-5.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 24.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 22.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. A Way of Being. Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. A Way of Being. Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 16.
- ↑ Buber quoted in Rogers, Carl. A Way of Being. Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. “Client-Centered Therapy.” In Car Rogers: Dialogues, edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 23.
- ↑ Kirschenbaum, Howard, and Valerie Land Henderson, eds. Car Rogers: Dialogues. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 10.