Positive Therapy

Building bridges between positive psychology and person-centred psychotherapy

Stephen Joseph

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415723411
• eBook ISBN: 9781317587514
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

The applications of positive psychology are different from traditional interventions in therapy in that they are focused on building strength, resilience and well-being rather than being restricted to simply treating disorder. Since the publication of the first edition of Positive Therapy, there is now a comprehensive body of applied positive psychology research to which practitioners may turn in order to inform their own practice, and that sees its purpose as the facilitation of human flourishing and optimal functioning.

However, much of this research and its implications are only now becoming more widely understood in counselling and psychotherapy. This new and expanded edition of Positive Therapy shows how the latest thinking in positive psychology can be applied to psychotherapeutic practice, and specifically to person-centred therapy. Making the links between positive psychology and psychotherapy explicit, Stephen Joseph describes the new tools that practitioners can draw upon to help and facilitate positive functioning in their clients. New material includes:

• An update of the latest positive psychology research
• A new preface, explaining how positive psychology principles can now be applied to therapeutic practice
• Focus on positive psychology measurement tools

Positive Therapy will be essential reading for all psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers, coaches, psychologists and trainees interested in exploring how they engage with clients, and the implications of this engagement in practice.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315742908-1

Positive therapy is about helping people become more fully functioning. Put another way, if the traditional goal of therapy is to help the patient move from −5 to 0 the positive therapist is interested in how to help them move from −5 to +5. Changing the terms of therapy in this way has significant implications. It alters how we think about what we are doing. We begin to have different conversations with our clients. We listen to our clients in new ways. We begin to think about the nature of their suffering differently. In this chapter I will set the scene for the book by very briefly introducing positive psychology, the humanistic approach of Carl Rogers and the idea of positive therapy.

Positive psychology

Most readers will have heard the term positive psychology and may already know something about it, but may not appreciate that it is a serious branch of applied psychology with a growing tradition of scholarly research behind it. Positive psychology was an idea that developed at the turn of the new century when it was formally launched by Martin Seligman in his Presidential Address to the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1998. Seligman's argument was that for too long psychologists had looked only at the negative and destructive side of human experience. Surely it was as important, perhaps even more so, to understand what is positive and constructive. Thus there followed scholars and practitioners interested in finding out about human flourishing, happiness and how people can achieve the best in themselves.

Since these beginnings positive psychology has developed into an area of sophisticated scholarship that seeks to understand and promote the study of what is good about life. Attention has also focused on how research findings may be applied in practical settings. Areas of application span clinical, educational, forensic, health and organizational domains. The applications of positive psychology are different from traditional interventions in that they are focused on building strengths, well-being and resilience, rather than simply treating disorder and dysfunction. In this sense, it might be said that whereas traditional psychology was concerned with −5 to 0 the new positive psychology was concerned with 0 to +5.

The ideas of positive psychology are now also entering the consciousness of the therapeutic counselling and psychotherapy community. For many in therapeutic counselling and psychotherapy these are brand new ideas that challenge them to rethink their approach to therapy. For others, these ideas sound familiar. Indeed, as I will go on to show, it is now recognized that humanistic psychology was a forerunner of positive psychology (Taylor, 2001; Resnick, Warmoth, & Serlin, 2001; Robbins, 2015). One of the pioneers of humanistic psychology and humanistic therapy was Carl Rogers. It is to him and his work that we now turn.

The humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers

Rogers was originally a psychologist by training. In 1947 he served as the President of the American Psychological Association, the position held by Seligman 50 years later when he founded the positive psychology movement. Rogers had many scholarly achievements in his life. One of his earliest achievements was to pioneer psychotherapy research. Using the cutting edge technology of the 1940s, Rogers was the first psychologist to use recordings of therapeutic sessions for research. By recording his interviews on 78 rpm records, which were then transcribed, and publishing the verbatim transcripts for research, Rogers and his colleagues put the spotlight on what actually went on during therapy. It is hard to imagine from the perspective of today when we take such research for granted just how radical it was to subject the intricacies and secrets of the psychotherapy session to rigorous scientific examination. A complete issue of the Journal of Consulting Psychology was devoted to the research in 1948 (see Farber, Brink, & Raskin, 1996). It was through his observations of therapy and subsequent research that Rogers developed his own approach to practice which was based on the notion that clients have the solutions to their difficulties within themselves. Nowadays this idea is taken for granted in many ways but back then to question the idea of the therapist as expert over the other person in terms of knowing what hurts and what is needed was truly a radical idea.

In 1942 Rogers published his first major work entitled Counseling and Psychotherapy: Newer concepts in practice, in which he presented his approach which he referred to as non-directive therapy. He described it as non-directive therapy because it was the therapist's task to follow the client's lead, thus challenging the then dominant therapist-directed approaches of psychoanalysis and behaviourism. Rather than the therapist directing the course of therapy by using interpretative methods or reinforcement schedules to derive solutions for the patient, Rogers turned the notion of the therapist as the expert upside down. His focus was on reflection of feelings in such a way as to shift the direction of sessions so that the therapist followed the client, helping them to uncover their own solutions. In this way, therapists were able to help clients understand for themselves what they needed and how to move forward in life. In the cultural context of the time, in which it was assumed that the therapist had the expertise on the client's mental world, it represented a challenge to the establishment of the day to consider that people might be their own best experts.

Rogers used the terms counselling and psychotherapy interchangeably, only introducing the term counselling early in his career because of objections raised by the profession of psychiatry to his use of the term psychotherapy. At the time, psychotherapy was seen as the province of psychiatry and was heavily influenced by the ideas of psychoanalysis. Rogers, as a psychologist, was therefore not seen to be offering psychotherapy in the approach that he was developing. For this reason he called it non-directive counselling. Because of this terminological heritage, some still view counselling and psychotherapy as different. However, consistent with Rogers’ approach I use the terms counselling and psychotherapy interchangeably in this book with the term therapy.

Almost a decade after his 1942 book on counselling and psychotherapy, Rogers published Client-Centered Therapy, in which he presented his more refined ideas (Rogers, 1951). Most notably, Rogers had replaced the term non-directive with the term client-centred. Essentially, the terms non-directive and client-centred refer to opposite sides of the same coin. Whereas non-directive refers to what it is the therapist aspires not to do, that is to challenge the client's agency over their own feelings and perceptions, the term client-centred refers to what the therapist aspires to do, which is to support the agency of the client and go with their direction in terms of understanding what hurts and what is needed.

Throughout his life Rogers was a prolific researcher and writer, publishing numerous academic papers and books, many of which are still widely read today, such as his 1961 book On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy published in 1961. He continued researching and writing up to his death on 4 February 1987 in San Diego, California. But the 1950s were a golden age of person-centred therapy when Carl Rogers published his most influential theoretical works (Rogers, 1957; 1959). In these 1957 and 1959 papers he outlined his ideas about human relationships and their effects on development and functioning.

The core set of ideas, presented as testable hypotheses in the positivist tradition, that he published in the 1950s remain the bedrock of the approach and what is referred to as the classic form of the therapy (Merry, 2004). From the classic viewpoint, what constitutes the core of the person-centred approach are three founding theoretical formulations: (1) the tendency towards actualization as the unitary motivation for human beings; (2) the developmental process of conditions of worth as the cause of psychopathology; and (3) the non-directive therapeutic relationship as the vehicle for releasing this tendency. These are topics that we shall meet in more detail in subsequent chapters as this book tends to be built around these three founding formulations.

Over the subsequent years, Rogers began to apply his ideas derived from client-centred therapy in other contexts, such as education, conflict resolution and encounter groups (see Kirschenbaum, 2007, for his most extensive biography). In order to recognize the broader applicability of his approach the term person-centred came to replace the term client-centred. When one reads the writings of Rogers on the broader applicability of person-centred theory it is clear that his was not only a vision for the practice of therapy but more generally for applied psychology, education and social policy, in which he envisaged a society in which relationships mattered. In this sense alone he was ahead of his time, but where person-centred therapy might be said to have always been a positive psychology is in the sense that it was never only concerned with alleviating distress and dysfunction but with helping people become more fully functioning. In this sense, Rogers was always concerned with −5 to +5.

Fully functioning was the term Rogers used to describe what it was that therapy freed people to move towards. It was not a description of the absence of negative qualities but a description of positive qualities. For example, one of the characteristics of the fully functioning person is that he or she lives in harmony with others and experiences the rewards of mutual positive regard. Another is that he or she is open to experience. I will return to the description of the fully functioning person later, but the point for now is that seen in contemporary terms, fully functioning seems synonymous with the notions of human flourishing now advocated by positive psychologists.

Over subsequent decades counselling and psychotherapy became swamped by the illness ideology in such a way that this original focus on fully functioning behaviour and experience was overshadowed by questions about its effectiveness for diagnostic categories.

Although the approach to person-centred therapy practised today remains very much influenced by Rogers and his key writings from this period around the middle of the last century, person-centred therapy is not an approach stranded in the 1950s and 1960s. There has been much theoretical and practical development in the world of person-centred therapy since. Rogers was not rigid in his own writings, often offering his ideas in a tentative way, and encouraging others to develop their own views.

Many other scholars have been involved in the discipline in subsequent years and the literature on the person-centred approach is much richer than it is possible to convey or appropriate to do so in this short book (see Cooper, O'Hara, Schmid, & Bohart, 2013 for contemporary developments). Although some of the notable scholars in the person-centred approach will be mentioned along the way, this book is focused on the interface of positive psychology and the person-centred approach and is not intended as a comprehensive overview of subsequent developments and offshoots of practice and theory. For example, other approaches include the experiential focusing approach (Gendlin, 1996), the process-experiential approach (Greenberg et al., 1993) and motivational interviewing (Miller & Rollnick, 2002). These approaches hold that the process of therapy can be helped along with the use of more directive methods than are associated with more traditional client-centred psychotherapy. Of practical interest have been the attempts to find ways of working within the person-centred framework with people whose psychological contact is at a very minimum level. Prouty (1990) developed an approach called pre-therapy that involves reflecting back to the client the counsellor's awareness of the client's external world and communication with others. Pre-therapy aims to help the client develop psychological contact in order that they can then enter more conventional therapy. Pre-therapy approaches have been used with some success in helping people suffering from problems of psychosis (Van Werde, 2005). These, and other offshoot approaches, together form a family of person-centred and experiential therapies (Sanders, 2013).

Bringing all those interested in the approach together is the World Association for Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy and Counseling (WAPCEPC) which was founded in 1997. WAPCEPC is an association for the Science and Practice of Client-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies and Counseling. The aim is to provide a world-wide forum for those professionals who have a commitment to the primary importance in therapy of the relationship between therapist and client and who also have a belief in the efficacy of the conditions and attitudes conducive to therapeutic movement first postulated by Carl Rogers, and a commitment to their active implementation within the therapeutic relationship.

One view from the family of person-centred and experiential therapies that I will elaborate on, however, is that of the process-directed approach in which the therapist may introduce various experiences for the client into the sessions, as discussed by Richard Worsley (2009).

Remarkably, over 50 years later the view that it is the client and not the therapist who knows best what direction to go in remains a powerful and revolutionary idea (see also, Duncan & Miller, 2000; Hubble & Miller, 2004) and still represents a stance which is in opposition to much of contemporary psychology, with its emphasis on expert diagnosis, formulation, treatment and interventions. As Brazier said:

When people read about Rogers’ ideas, it is not uncommon for them to think initially that there is nothing very remarkable about them. Do we not all believe in the importance of people being empathic to one another? What is so remarkable about that? What is remarkable is that Rogers actually meant it. And in carrying through what are essentially a very simple set of ideas whose rightness seems self-evident, he offers a challenge to the foundations of most of what modern life consists of. (1993, p. 8)

In summary, person-centred therapy is both a humanistic therapy in its historical context and a positive therapy in the contemporary sense of it being an example of positive psychology applied to therapy.

Positive therapy

As already noted, in the therapeutic culture of the last few decades it has been difficult for therapists to embrace the concept of fully functioning, so pervasive has the language of disorder and deficit been. The various editions of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) have for several decades now provided psychologists with the language with which to describe the ways in which people suffer. Diagnostic categories of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and so on are commonly used. As a result of the pervasive influence of the psychiatric terminology the profession of therapy has become overly focused on disorder and deficit at the expense of its understandings of what leads to positive functioning (Vossler, Steffen & Joseph, 2015).

Thus, although the idea of fully functioning has been at the core of the person-centred approach for over half a century, it has only been with the advent of the contemporary positive psychology movement that ps...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures and tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Positive psychology
• 3 The actualizing tendency
• 4 Developmental and personality theory
• 5 The therapeutic relationship
• 6 Process direction and person-activity fit
• 7 Person-centred psychopathology
• 8 Post-traumatic growth
• 9 Theoretically consistent measurement
• 10 Conclusion: Reflections, challenges and the future
• References
• Index