Rogers Client-Centred Therapy

12 Key excerpts on "Rogers Client-Centred Therapy"

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  Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology

  Volume III

  • Michael Wertheimer, Gregory A. Kimble(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  knowledgeable expert in more traditional talk therapies. The client-centered therapist neither instructs nor interprets, but encourages the help seeker to identify areas of exploration, choose personal goals, and set the pace of the therapy.

  A central component of Rogers’ conception of therapy is that clients can solve their personal psychological problems through self-exploration, which leads them to better self-understanding, provided that the therapist establishes and maintains the essential conditions of therapy. Proper therapeutic technique requires the therapist to be sensitive, accurate, empathie, and personally involved, and to frequently express comprehension of the person’s utterances and emotional substrate. The responses of the therapist must remain congruent with the feelings expressions of the client. These matchings of the therapist’s reactions to those of the client facilitate self-discovery and recovery and permit resumption of the tendencies toward personal growth that are associated with mental health. Successful therapy means recovering self-understanding and a sense of inner self. Acting in accord with the demands of that true self is to act in ways that are self-realizing (i.e., in ways that are productive and self satisfying because they represent correspondence between the person’s real self and its behavioral expressions).

  Guiding Values

  Although the emphases in Rogers’ programs shifted during the more than 50 years of his professional activity, all of them were guided by an enduring set of values. In his public addresses and in his writings, Carl Rogers was always an outspoken advocate of personal freedom and self-determination. He believed that being true to oneself requires the development of personal standards and the ability to behave in ways that are based on inner impulse and conviction rather than on the wishes of others. He detected these developments in his own life and explained them (Rogers, 1980) as at least in part reactions to the proscriptions and prescriptions implicit in his family’s fundamentalist Protestant religion. Whatever their sources, however, the theme of personal freedom was dominant in Rogers’ therapy, which emphasized the processes of discovering or recovering one’s true inner self.

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  Personality Theories

  Critical Perspectives

  • Albert Ellis, Mike Abrams, Lidia Abrams(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Rogers drew on his personal experience in stating his conviction that offering unconditional positive regard leads to a reciprocal feeling of affinity between therapist and client. Moreover, the more distress that clients had been feeling in the form of shame, rebuke, alienation, or anger, the more relief they experienced during client-centered therapy. They would increasingly come to reject the values imposed on them by others and trust their own organismic valuing process. Unconditional positive regard would create a climate in the consulting room that would release their natural tendency toward productiveness, trustworthiness, and creativity—all the qualities that Rogers believed to be the default characteristics of humans. Once freed from external impositions, clients could begin to discern, evaluate, and ultimately solve their own problems. Empathy. Rogers’ expression empathic understanding is central to his third necessary condition for effective psychotherapy. Empathy as Rogers uses it refers to the suspension of the therapist’s own values and perspectives in order to enter as fully as possible into the client’s emotions, biases, needs, and cognitions. An empathically understanding therapist cannot disagree with or judge the client because the two share a common perspective. Rogers viewed diagnoses, evaluations, or judgments to be barriers to the therapeutic process; empathic understanding is a fundamental facilitator

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  Person-Centred Therapy

  The Focusing-Oriented Approach

  • Campbell Purton(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  1

  Rogers and the Development of Person-Centred Therapy

  Rogers’ work

  In his book Counselling and Psychotherapy : Newer Concepts in Practice , published in 1942, Carl Rogers presents what he sees as a new method of therapy ‘in which warmth of acceptance and absence of any form of coercion or personal pressure on the part of the counsellor permits the maximum expression of feelings, attitudes, and problems by the counsellee . . . In this unique experience of complete emotional freedom within a well-defined framework the client is free to recognise and understand his impulses and patterns, positive and negative, as in no other relationship’ (Rogers, 1942, p. 113). The book contains the first complete recorded transcript of a series of therapy sessions, with a commentary by Rogers on how the therapist’s responses in the session embodied the non-directive principles which Rogers was advocating.

  During the following few years, while Rogers was based at Ohio State University, he and other therapists applied the principles of non-directive responding in a variety of contexts, including work with the adjustment problems of servicemen returning from wartime activities. It was in his next book (co-authored with John Wallen) Counselling with Returned Servicemen (1946) that Rogers first used the term ‘client-centred’, along with ‘non-directive’, as characterising his approach. It is the client’s frame of reference which is emphasised, while ‘[i]t is the counsellor’s function to provide an atmosphere in which the client, through the exploration of his situation, comes to see himself and his reactions more clearly and to accept his attitudes more fully’ (Rogers and Wallen, 1946, p. 5). What the counsellor actually did

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  Theories of Counselling and Psychotherapy

  An Introduction to the Different Approaches

  • Stephen Joseph(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  People seeking help from psychotherapists can be divided into two groups: those who wish to confront their difficulties and shortcomings and change their lives by changing themselves; and those who wish to avoid the inevitable consequences of their life strategies through the magical or tactical intervention of the therapist in their lives. Those in the former group may derive great benefit from therapy in a few weeks or months; those in the latter may stand still, or sink ever deeper into their self-created life morass, after meeting with psychotherapists for years, and even decades. (Szasz, 1974, pp. 108–9)

  The most well-known name associated with humanistic psychology is that of Carl Rogers (1902–1987) and it is his work we will first consider.

  Carl Rogers and the person-centred approach

  Carl Rogers was a psychologist by training. One of his earliest achievements was to pioneer the recording of therapeutic sessions which he then used for research (Rogers, 1942). Throughout his life Rogers was a prolific writer, publishing numerous academic papers and books, many of which are still widely read today. In his book Client-centred Therapy , Rogers began to outline his approach to therapy (Rogers, 1951). He went on to describe his ideas in more detail in later papers as he elaborated on his theory of personality and therapy (Rogers, 1957, 1959). Over the years, Rogers began to apply his ideas derived from therapy in wider contexts, such as education, conflict resolution, and encounter groups (see Thorne, 1992). In order to recognize the broader applicability of his model the term person-centred came to replace the term client-centred

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  Human Behavior Theory and Social Work Practice

  • Roberta R. Greene(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Rogers, in reaction to the directive nature of traditional approaches to psychotherapy, began calling his therapeutic method “nondirective counseling.” This label was based on the idea that the client, not the counselor, should always take the lead in the helping process. From the beginning, Rogers (1959, 1942) emphasized that the client’s inherent potential for growth could be tapped if the helping person focused on the positive side of human nature.

  During the 1950s, Rogers (1951) began to develop a theory of personality and its application in counseling. With this change in emphasis, he renamed his therapeutic approach “client-centered therapy.” During this phase in Rogers’s (1957) work, he redefined his therapeutic goals. He suggested that entering a client’s “internal frame of reference” to help the client examine his or her feelings was the central purpose of the helping process. Rogers thought that the client’s understanding of his or her feelings led to positive behavioral change within the client’s environment.

  From the late 1950s to the early 1960s, Rogers and his associates conducted extensive research to test the major assumptions of the client-centered theory. Some researchers concluded that the client-centered method was most helpful for intelligent young people with “no more than mild anxiety complications” (White & Watt, 1981, p. 257). They also suggested that Rogers was valued most for his work in training counselors and psychotherapists in the conditions that facilitate the therapeutic relationship, and that many of Roger’s axioms, such as respect for the client, self-determination, and the need for empathic understanding, had become the “common sense” of therapeutic relationships (White and Watt, 1981, p. 257).

  The Rogerian approach is based on an optimistic, positive view of human nature.

  Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rogers’s (1970, 1972, 1977) interest and influence broadened. What first seemed to be a simple model became increasingly complex (Raskin, 1985). Among Rogers’s widening interests were the development of personal-growth groups and work with couples and families. Rogers also applied his ideas to administration, minority groups, interracial and intercultural groups, as well as to international relations. As a result of Rogers’s growing interest in how people obtain and share power and control, his method became known as the “person-centered approach.”

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  The Paradox of Countertransference

  You and Me, Here and Now

  • Carol Holmes(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  CLIENT-CENTERED PSYCHOTHERAPY 123 Historically, I think the first term that Rogers used was ‘client-centered’. What he meant by that was (which is hard to believe now but at the time was a revolutionary theory) that each of us has within ourselves the ability to grow and to understand as opposed to an expert coming in from the outside to do it for us – and that’s the basic premise. If I can create that atmosphere of trust and understanding, then the client will find their own direction. ‘Person-centered’ versus ‘client-centered’ has to do with the idea of separating out the idea of a client from a patient (which means someone who is ill) from a person who is my equal and the idea that we are exploring and making a journey together. ‘Client-centered’ and ‘person-centered’ both come under the heading of humanism; but there are also other branches of that. Gestalt is one branch that I am interested in. Something that I have discovered since I have been here from the States is that an Existential approach is also one of the branches that comes under the heading of humanism. Existentialism certainly informs my work with clients in a humanistic way, whereas in this country it is seen as separate field, unlike in America where it is seen as a facet of the humanistic approach. My next question was concerned with whether client-centered therapy had a concept that could be viewed as in any way comparable with the notion of countertransference. Harris explained that although Rogers did not incorporate the term into his model, he did talk a lot about knowing oneself and of the need for the therapist to be genuine and congruent. She said she understood this to mean that the therapist needed to have ongoing therapy and supervision in order to remain aware of their own issues as these arose in the clinical situation. The thing about actualizing and growing is that it is never completed.

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  Four Approaches to Counselling and Psychotherapy

  • Windy Dryden, Jill Mytton(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Defence mechanisms protect the person from distress. They also maintain the psychological disturbance because they preserve the person's alienation from their organismic self and their actualising process. Some individuals do this so successfully that they are totally unaware of their psychological disturbance and are unlikely to enter a psychotherapist's room. They often come across as self-assured and confident but the person-centred approach would still classify them as disturbed because they have usually completely lost touch with their inner selves. Sometimes others close to them will complain of their lack of 'real' feelings. These individuals are often those who suffer most following a traumatic incident such as the Kings Cross fire in London, or the Oklahoma bombing. Under such conditions the carefully constructed edifice comes tumbling down. They had seen themselves as someone who is always in control, not emotional but stable, calm human beings. Suddenly they are forced into contact with their inner selves and feel fear, confusion, anger and helplessness for the first time perhaps since they were little children. Their world literally falls apart and they disintegrate.

  The Therapy

  In his seminal speech at the University of Minnesota in 1940 Rogers said:

  Therapy is not a matter of doing something to the individual or inducing him to do something about himself. It is instead a matter of freeing him for normal growth and development so that he can again move forward.

  Rogers, 1942: 29

  Both Edmund Gosse and Carl Rogers achieved this freedom by moving away from the atmosphere at home that restricted them. The person-centred approach states that liberation from blockages of the actualising tendency can also be achieved through the therapeutic relationship. As individuals recover from deprivation and restriction they once again are able to listen to their own inner voice (the organismic valuing process) and reject the conditions of worth imposed by others. Discrepancies between their real self and the self-concept can then be resolved. Rogers believed that in the therapeutic relationship, clients experience, perhaps for the first time, acceptance and understanding rather than evaluation. They are then freed to recognise and acknowledge their real self.

  Distinctive features

  The person-centred approach challenges the notion of professionalism and claims that the personal qualities of the therapist are more important than degrees or qualifications. Regarding the therapist as an expert with special knowledge implies a power imbalance in the relationship with the therapist as an authority figure. The person-centred approach regards it as essential that individuals realise they can trust their own experiencing and the validity of their own perceptions. This could not happen if the client perceives the counsellor or psychotherapist as all knowing, the expert with all the answers.

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  Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories in Context and Practice

  Skills, Strategies, and Techniques

  • John Sommers-Flanagan, Rita Sommers-Flanagan(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 5 Person-Centered Theory and Therapy LEARNER OBJECTIVES ■ Define person-centered theory and therapy ■ Identify key figures and historical trends in the development, evolution, and application of person-centered theory and therapy ■ Describe core person-centered theoretical principles ■ Describe and apply person-centered therapy principles, strategies, and techniques ■ Analyze cases that employ person-centered approaches ■ Evaluate the empirical, cultural, gender, and spiritual validity of person-centered therapy ■ Summarize core content and define key terms associated with person-centered theory and therapy If Freud was a pessimist and Adler and Jung were opti-mists, then Carl Rogers—the primary force behind person-centered counseling—was a super-optimist. He was a staunch believer in the capacity for persons, when unfettered by social and familial obstacles, to develop into positive, creative, flexible, and altruistic beings. Beginning in the 1940s and through the 1960 s, Rogers developed his distinct approach to psychotherapy. His foundational, groundbreaking idea was to trust the client’s own sense of what was wrong and what to work on. He wrote: [I]t is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go in, what problems are crucial. (Rogers, 1961, pp. 11–12) Initially, Rogers named his approach “nondirective counseling.” Later, he renamed it “client-centered therapy.” In the 1960s, he renamed it “person-centered therapy.” INTRODUCTION Rogers developed a radical new approach to therapy; he advocated respectful listening and an authentic counselor– client connection. Additionally, in all aspects of his life, he strove to be a genuine and open person; he strove to be himself. As he engaged with clients, he put himself so deeply into their worlds that he could sometimes feel their feelings right along with them. What Is Person-Centered Therapy? Person-centered therapy is a humanistic or existential-humanistic approach.

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  Modern Psychotherapies

  A Comprehensive Christian Appraisal

  • Stanton L. Jones, Richard E. Butman(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • IVP Academic

    (Publisher)

  As Van Belle (1985a) has observed, Rogers had a profound respect for the client’s perception of reality since this inner reality was ultimately the means for promoting development and growth in the individual. Indeed, Rogers is dogmatic in asserting that experience is the ultimate authority in life: “It is to experience that I must return again and again; to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets, neither Freud nor research, neither the revelations of God nor man, can take precedence over my own direct experience” (Rogers, 1961, pp. 23-24). Person-centered therapy boldly asserts that the client, not the therapist, should be at the heart of psychotherapy (and hence, it is person centered) since only the client has the resources by which to become more aware of and remove his or her obstacles to personal growth.

  Rogers’s philosophical assumptions were influenced by his historical and cultural milieu. North American values of individualism versus conformity, equality of all persons and rejection of the class system, aversion to authoritarianism, and the primacy of the individual and her freedom in society are all clearly reflected in Rogers’s model of personality and health.

  Model of Personality

  Consistent with Rogers’s pragmatic and phenomenological method of therapy, he developed his theory of therapy first, and then a theory of personality emerged from his clinical work.

  Perhaps the core assertion of this personality theory is that there is but one motivational force for all humanity: the tendency toward self-actualization. All persons have an inherent tendency to develop their capacities to the fullest, in ways that will maintain or enhance their own well-being. Rogers believes this motivational force is present at birth. Inherent to all living things, Rogers suggests, is the tendency toward growth without any conscious effort. This growth is toward autonomy, away from dependence or control by external forces.

  Detractors of person-centered therapy often equate self-actualization with selfishness, but this is not strictly true. Actualization is the realization of our potential, and our potential certainly includes the capacity to love. Thus, Rogers would believe that out of the fully actualized, fully functioning individual would come acts of charity and kindness that would be a free and loving expression of the person’s true inner state. Profound narcissism would actually be one mark of a failure to actualize one’s potential. Contemporary person-centered therapists view this self-actualizing tendency not as an indication that humans are basically “good,” rather they suggest that we all possess an inherent capacity for growth and the ability to change, or a “self-righting tendency” (Bohart, 2003).

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  Person-Centred Counselling in a Nutshell

  • Roger Casemore(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  These words, or something very similar, are the way that I usually start to develop a working relationship with any new client, helping both them and me to settle down and relax and begin to relate to each other. It sounds fairly simple and even rather like common sense, yet I know that to do it well requires considerable knowledge and the expertise that comes from a lot of practice. These words also outline what I believe are the basic principles of the person-centred approach to counselling.

   

  A brief history of the development of theperson-centred approach

  One of the criticisms of the person-centred approach to counselling is that it is based on very little theory and at times has even been described as ‘theory thin’. However, in this book I aim to show that the approach is underpinned by a richness and depth of philosophy and theory, which it is important to understand in order to effectively practise in this way.

  Carl Rogers, who was the originator of the person-centred approach to counselling, was born in 1902 in Chicago and died in California in 1987, leaving behind the legacy of what has been called the ‘Third Force’ in American psychology, namely, humanistic psychology. Rogers was the founder of what he originally called ‘non-directive therapy’ (Rogers, 1942), which later he changed to calling ‘client-centred therapy’. Today it is more popularly known as the person-centred approach. In the late 1940s, at the time that he began to develop his theories, the other two forces prevalent in American psychology were Psychoanalysis and Behaviourism, whose views on human nature were strongly challenged by Rogers.

  The development of the person-centred approach stemmed from Rogers’ experience of being a client and his experience of working as a counsellor, which gave rise to the views he developed about the Behaviourist and Psychoanalytic approaches to counselling. Rogers felt that, in general terms, the Behaviourists seemed to take the view that human beings are organisms that only react to stimuli, developing habits learned from experience; that individuals are helpless and are not responsible for their own behaviour. The Behaviourists seemed to be saying that individuals have been taught to think and behave in ways that are unhelpful or maladaptive and that it was the counsellor’s job to teach them to be different. Rogers also felt that the Psychoanalysts, particularly Freud, appeared to take the view that human beings are never free from the primitive passions originating in their childhood fixations and are solely the product of powerful biological drives. The Psychoanalysts emphasised the dark side of human nature, with its destructive impulses, over which human beings seemed to have no control.

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  Core Approaches in Counselling and Psychotherapy

  • Fay Short, Phil Thomas(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  • describe how the therapist uses genuineness, transparency and self-disclosure to demonstrate the core condition of congruence

  • describe how the therapist uses a non-judgemental approach and sensitive cultural awareness to demonstrate the core condition of unconditional positive regard

  • describe how the therapist enters the client’s frame of reference by using primary and advanced empathy to demonstrate the core condition of empathic understanding

  Absence of techniques

  Successful therapy is not dependent on techniques

  Successful therapy is dependent purely on the nature of the therapeutic relationship Constructive personality change requires only that the client and therapist engage in a positive therapeutic relationship Person-centred therapy involves simply being with the client No use of games, exercises, activities, homework, etc. Various methods can be taught and utilised to improve skills in communicating the core conditions of congruence, unconditional positive regard and empathy But these are simply interpersonal skills, rather than specific therapeutic techniques to be followed according to the instructions

  As noted by Thorne (1996), Rogers was horrified to find that the focus on the responses of the therapist became a list of techniques – the whole purpose of person-centred therapy is to be genuine in that moment, rather than to follow a set of protocols according to the book

  Therapeutic relationship is more important than therapeutic techniques

  Research exploring common factors across multiple types of therapy has often focused on the core conditions of person-centred therapy (Lambert & Barley, 2001)

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  Current Psychotherapies

  • Danny Wedding, Raymond Corsini(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Person- Centered Review, 5 , 77–88. Reprinted in Cain, D. J. (Ed). (2002). Classics in the person-centered approach (pp. 371–377). Ross-on-Wye, UK: PCCS Books. Greenberg, L. S. (2002). Emotion-focused therapy: Coaching clients to work through their feelings. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Greenberg, L. S., & Watson, J. (1998). Experiential therapy of depression: Differential effects of client-centered rela-tionship conditions and process experiential interventions. Psychotherapy Research , 8 (2), 210–224. Haugh, S., & Merry T. (Eds.). (2001). Rogers’ therapeutic con-ditions: Evolution, theory and practice. Volume 2: Empathy. Ross-on-Wye, UK: PCCS Books. Held, B. S. (2002). The tyranny of the positive attitude in America: Observation and speculation. Journal of Clinical Psychology , 58 (9), 965–992. Held, B. S. (2005). The “virtues of positive psychology.” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology , 25 (1), 1–34. Holdstock, T. L., & Rogers, C. R. (1983). Person-centered theory. In R. J. Corsini & A. J. Marsella (Eds.), Personality theories, research, and assessment. Itasca, IL: F.E. Peacock. Joseph, S. (Ed.), (2017). The handbook of person-centred therapy and mental health . Ross-on-Wye, UK: PCCS Books. Joseph, S., & Linley, P.A. (2006). Positive psychology versus the medical model?: Comment. American Psychologist, 61 (4), 332–333. doi: 10.1037/0003-066x.60.4.332. Joseph, S., & Murphy, D. (2013). Person-centered theory encoun-tering mainstream psychology: Building bridges and looking to the future. In J. H. D. Cornelius-White, R. Motschnig-Pitrik, and M. Lux (Eds.). Interdisciplinary Handbook of the Person-Centered Approach . New York: Springer. Kirschenbaum, H. (2007). The life and work of Carl Rogers . Ross-on-Wye, UK: PCCS Books. Kirschenbaum, H., & Henderson, V. L. (Eds.). (1989). The Carl Rogers reader . Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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