Client-Centered Therapy
An Avatar.Global Resource
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
Notes
Client-centered therapy emphasized
- Congruence (on LP, alignment) – Being real and transparent in all relationships, with Self and with others.
- Connection - With Self and others.
Within the Avatar.Global context, Rogers can be considered a proto-spiritual scientist whose commitment to psychological healing, individual empowerment, and non-authoritarian therapeutic relationships helped clear space for a more authentic, connection-oriented spirituality to emerge in the 20th century. His work forms an important psychological foundation for the LP HEALING Framework, particularly in its emphasis on safe environments, truth-telling, and the satisfaction of core emotional and psychological needs.
Quotes
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."[1]
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."[2]
"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. "[3]
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)."[4]
"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
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."[5]
Citation and Legal
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Footnotes
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. A Way of Being. Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. A Way of Being. Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
- ↑ Rogers, Carl. A Way of Being. Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
- ↑ Buber quoted in Rogers, Carl. A Way of Being. Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
- ↑ Kirschenbaum, Howard, and Valerie Land Henderson, eds. Car Rogers: Dialogues. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. p. 10.