Understanding Person-Centred Counselling

A Personal Journey

Christine Brown

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473911475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Consulenza psicoterapeutica

This book provides a key introduction to the theory, concepts and practice of the person-centred approach, through the lens of the practitioner's experience and personal development.

Writing as someone who has been through real life challenges and has developed and learned as a result, the author's strikingly personal style not only helps to contextualise complex and nuanced theory, but makes this a truly unique book about real person-centred practice and experience. From Roger's early philosophy through to the current developments and controversies in the field, the author uses personal testimonies, exercises and reflection points to make challenging concepts and practice issues accessible for the novice reader. What results is an informative and fascinating read for all those training and interested in the person-centred approach.

Part I

The Evolution of Rogers’ Philosophy

One

The Evolution of Rogers’ Philosophy: Rogers’ Life and the Development of His Attitudes and Ideas

Carl Ransom Rogers was born on 8 January 1902 in Oak Park, an upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago, Illinois. Ethnically and politically diverse, the city is situated on the edge of America’s ‘Bible Belt’ – an area of the United States in which conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant social force and Christian church attendance is high. His mother a devout Christian and his father a successful civil engineer, Rogers’ parents were religious, wealthy and disciplinarian.

When Rogers was twelve years old his parents moved the family to a farm some thirty miles west of Chicago in order to remove their children from ‘urban temptation’. Subsequently, with early-twentieth-century America in the grip of Prohibition and with the city in the grip of mobsters, downtown Chicago became brutal, criminally driven, politically fraudulent, fraught with danger and indeed full of ‘temptation’. The city developed worldwide notoriety for its gangland murders and domestic homicides (Kobler, 1971). However, ‘kept down on the farm’ and away from alcohol, dancing, cards, the theatre and with very little social life, Carl became a rather ‘solitary boy’ (Rogers, 1961), yet encouraged by his father and with many chores to perform, Carl developed self-discipline and the ambition to self-educate.

Rogers learned to read before he started school and during his formative years developed a great respect for scientific and practical endeavour. This ‘fundamental feeling for science’ (Rogers, 1961) persisted throughout his life and he became the first therapist to publish research evidence on how and why psychotherapy appears to work effectively (Rogers, 1951).

After high school, during which Carl tells us he had only two dates (Rogers, 1961), he attended college at Wisconsin, studying agriculture. One of the things he remembered best about this time was the passionate plea of his professor:

‘Don’t be a dammed ammunition wagon; be a rifle!’

This lecturer was stressing the ineffectiveness of citing encyclopaedic fact for its own sake and encouraging inventive thinking (Rogers, 1961), a concept that, it seems, resonated with Rogers, for all that he expounded and wrote holds the inherent invitation for us to discover more, learn more and enhance existing accumulated knowledge.

Carl’s professional goals changed during his first two years at college and he switched to majoring in History, believing that this would better prepare him for a life’s work in the Christian ministry, which he had emotionally decided to pursue. However, in 1922 he was chosen as one of twelve students to go to China to attend an international World Student Christian Federation Conference. This experience intensely affected his thinking. He witnessed how profoundly the French and Germans still hated each other, four years after the end of the bitter and bloody, disease-ridden, trench-fought conflict of World War I. Carl also came to realise that whilst people might hold divergent religious beliefs, they could still be honest, sincere and likeable individuals. He wrote:

In major ways I for the first time emancipated myself from the religious thinking of my parents, and realised that I could not go along with them. This independence of thought caused great pain and stress in our relationship, but looking back on it I believe that here, more than at any other time, I became an independent person. (Rogers, 1961: 7)

Marrying with his parents’ reluctant consent before he went to university, Rogers entered the Union Theological Seminary – the most liberal in America at the time (1924). He came in contact with many scholars and teachers who earnestly believed in freedom of inquiry. Supported by this and in conjunction with others, Carl joined a student discussion group to explore his own ideas, questions and doubts. He found this experience acutely ‘satisfying and clarifying’ (Rogers, 1961). He wrote:

I feel that it [the discussion group] moved me a long way toward a philosophy of life that was my own. The majority of members of that group, in thinking their way through the questions they had raised, thought themselves right out of religious work. I was one. (Rogers, 1961: 8)

Rogers discovered he could no longer be chained to an inflexible religious doctrine.

He began to attend lectures at Teachers’ College, Columbia University on psychology and psychiatry, which had long attracted his interest, and he shifted into child guidance work. Gradually he started to think of himself as a child psychologist. During his internship at the then new Institute for Child Guidance, Carl immersed himself in the vibrant Freudian ideas of the staff, which he found greatly conflicted with the objective, cold, statistical point of view he was experiencing at Teachers’ College. Freud (1856–1939) is seen as having had enormous influence on American psychology; in 1909 he had delivered a series of lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University. Freud had not been impressed with America, its thoughts or culture (Gay, 1998), however, Rogers’ elementary clinical practice was rooted in Freudian philosophy.

At the end of his internship Rogers accepted a post in the Child Study Department of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Rochester, New York. Employed as a psychologist, he worked in this institution for twelve years, gaining broad knowledge in the field. A series of experiences with clients gradually drew him away from being focused on interpreting or analysing a client’s behaviour to the realisation:

that it is the client who knows what hurts, what direction to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried. It began to occur to me that unless I had a need to demonstrate my own cleverness and learning, I would do better to rely upon the client for the direction of movement in the process. (Rogers, 1961: 11–12)

Working in progressively deeper psychotherapeutic relationship with a wide range of clients, Rogers found that this demanded a commitment to his continuing personal growth – which was sometimes highly challenging and painful but ultimately rewarding. He battled for years with the psychiatric profession, stubbornly following his own ideas, which caused consternation and unfavourable reaction (Rogers, 1961).

What draws me to the Person-Centred Approach

The particular commitment to on-going personal development that Rogers discovered was demanded in the application of his approach, is reflected in the similar personal discoveries made by others who practise the Person-Centred Approach today:

Ultimately, the Person-Centred Approach has become an irresistible force that simply leaves me no choice other than to make the process of self-awareness and personal growth a lifetime pursuit. Helen Strutt – 2nd year Diploma student

As I struggled as a trainee to extend person-centredness in my work with clients, I was called to challenge myself, which took my acceptance of self and others to a whole new and more profound level. Robert Moonasar – substance misuse and offenders counsellor

However, there were others who had discovered that the therapeutic relationship between client and counsellor was a significant element, vital to the clients’ healing process. In 1933 Jessie Taft (1882–1960), Rogers’ mentor, wrote:

The reason why these experiences in relationships which I call therapeutic, work healingly for the individual, is that there is present always in every human being underneath the fear, a more powerful, more or less denied, unsatisfied impulse to abandon the ego defences and let the too solid organization of the self break up and melt away in a sense of organic union, with a personality strong enough to bear it, and willing to play the part of the supporting whole. (Taft, 1933)

It is worth mentioning that current research has demonstrated that regardless of the model practised by a therapist, it is the quality of the relationship between client and therapist that is the most important factor in determining a successful psychotherapeutic outcome for the client (Norcross, 2002).

What draws me to the Person-Centred Approach

The central importance and healing value of the person-centred relationship that develops between client and counsellor is tenderly expressed here by one therapist as she recalls her psychotherapeutic experience as a teenager:

I am drawn to practise the Person-Centred Approach because of my amazing experience with a person-centred counsellor at the age of 17; as I revealed my painful story the kindness in his eyes was indescribable. Also in his eyes I saw myself and it enabled me to cry and then to heal. Qualified person-centred counsellor

In 1939 Otto Rank’s (1884–1939) theoretical work on what he termed as Will Therapy (Rank, 1939) was published in America. Rank, once the most beloved student of Freud, broke away from orthodox psychoanalysis and coined the phrase ‘here and now therapy’ (Rank, 1939), which fully encompasses the humanistic concept that all emotional experience is grounded in the present not in the past. Rather than working with the Freudian idea of the repression of prior experiences Rank used the idea of denial, which focuses on how an individual is emotionally negotiating the present. Rank theorised that the neurotic lives too much in the past to the detriment of experiencing the ‘here and now’; clinging to the past in order to protect him/herself from emotionally surrendering to and experiencing the present (Rank, 1939).

In presenting his theory on the Hierarchy of Needs (Maslow, 1943), Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) introduced psychology to the idea of actualisation; once all our basic human physiological, psychological and emotional needs are met we can rise to be self-defining/directive and self-fulfilling:

What a man can be, he must be. (Maslow, 1954: 91).

Maslow also believed that ‘the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy’ (1954: 234).

Maslow’s concept of actualisation differed from that of Rogers, who supposed an organism’s movement to actualise-self is an ever-present tendency and not a hierarchical process.

However, the shift away from the therapist being the expert in the psychotherapeutic alliance to the client being the self-expert capable of being self-directive and self-transcending, was gathering momentum, albeit expressed in singular theoretical ways.

What draws me to the Person-Centred Approach

The person-centred/humanistic shift in psychotherapeutic theoretical perception, outlined above, has proven to be of central experiential importance to many clients and therapists, as is encapsulated in the views expressed below:

Having experienced as a teenager what was, for me, the questionable and sometimes abusive modality of both the psychodynamic approaches and the psychiatric services, I was deeply suspicious and antipathetic towards interpretive therapies. I was also extremely doubtful that many of the therapeutic models could offer any kind of equality within the therapeutic space. I felt drawn to the promise of alliance and mutuality that seemed to characterise the Person-Centred Approach and my notion of it that relationship is something built rather than implied or assumed. Qualified person-centred counsellor and supervisor

During my own healing process my experience of experts was one of feeling misunderstood, whilst what I needed most was empathic support to help myself. What initially grabbed me about the Person-Centred Approach was that the therapist does not claim expertise over the client. Believing in an individual’s ability to self-heal with the help of the counselling relationship is of central importance to my own experience and philosophy. 2nd year Diploma student

In 1940 Rogers was offered and accepted his first full professorship at Ohio State University. Whilst teaching his graduate students what he had learned from personal and practitioner experience about treatment and counselling, Rogers realised that he had developed a distinctive psychotherapeutic philosophy of his own (Rogers, 1961). By 1951 he had crystallised his ideas on non-directive counselling, and Client-Centred Therapy (Rogers, 1951) was published for the first time.

Rogers felt he always presented his ideas tentatively with the intention of allowing recipients the choice to reject or accept his views, but uproar raged around him; the furious, contemptuous and disapproving engaged in principled battle with a number of unquestioning Rogerian ‘disciples’. In 1961 Rogers wrote of this furore: ‘I have found it difficult to know, at times, whether I have been hurt more by my friends or my enemies’ (Rogers, 1961).

The underlying tenets of his non-directive philosophy were based on Rogers’ own significant learning experiences; a philosophy of life and being which he never anticipated as being fixed or complete, but rather fluid and changing (Rogers, 1961).

Central to Rogers’ psychotherapeutic helping perspective and indeed his life view, are the concepts of:

• Transparency – acting and being without facade; acceptance of the self and personal experience (the psychotherapist’s and/or the individual’s congruence).

• Acceptance of others and their personal experiences (the psychotherapist’s and/or the individual’s unconditional positive regard – regarding the client without judgement).

• Seeking to understand others in their perceptual worlds and finding ways to effectively communicate this understanding (the psychotherapist’s or the individual’s ability to experience and demonstrate empathy with the client’s experiences, thoughts and feelings).

When extended in unison within a counselling alliance, these attributes are known as the three core conditions in Rogerian clinical theory and are central to the healing relationship. Rogers further hypothesised that we are hindered in attaining these qualities by the conditions of worth placed on us by significant others and society. The threat of or the actual withdrawal of love and approval causes us to introject (integrate as personalised truths) the values and beliefs of those around us, which results in incongruence; psychological tension manifests between our unique self-experience and the introjected (integrated) idea of who we believe we ‘should’ be (Rogers, 1951).

What draws me to the Person-Centred Approach

Singularly described here from a person-centred practitioner’s perspective is how the movement from incongruence to congruence occurs and subsequently leads to the dismissal of many of our introjected conditions of worth:

I am drawn to the Person-Centred Approach because it values me as a person with a natural tendency to actualise. It recognises that, in every moment I am co-creating my world with others and when I am congruent, empathic and unconditionally loving of myself, I am able to break free from externally attributed conditions ...