Person-Centered Psychotherapy
Person-Centered Psychotherapy
Person-Centered Psychotherapy
Carl Rogers
Rationale
• Human beings have a powerful, innate capacity for growth that is constantly striving
for expression. Everyone is capable of being fully human. Just like a plant will grow
to its full potential if provided with the appropriate combination of sunlight, water,
soil, and nutrients, our human potential will manifest itself under the right
interpersonal circumstances.
• What prevents us from becoming the person we are capable of being are the
expectations of significant people in our lives to be the kind of person that is
incongruent with who we truly are. In our efforts to feel good about ourselves we tend
to try to incorporate other’s expectations resulting in feelings of disorganization and
emotional pain.
• If we experience genuineness, nonjudgmental caring, and empathy in our
relationships with others, then we can achieve our potential as persons. When we
experience relationships where these qualities are present, we grow toward being fully
functioning persons– open to experience and our feelings, able to live a meaningful
and creative life.
Person-Centered Psychotherapy
Carl Rogers
Person-Centered Goals
• According to the person-centered, humanistic worldview, we all have the capacity to
become a fully functioning person, and achieving such a state should be our goal in
therapy.
• Being fully functioning is not an end state, however. It is, rather, a process state in
which we are open to new growth experiences and feelings, trust our own feelings and
thoughts as guides to our choices and actions, and have positive self-regard. When we
are fully functioning we are then able to make healthy decisions and set goals for
ourselves that are congruent with our personal possibilities.
• The therapist, therefore, does not set goals for the client of solving or managing
problems. Rather, clients who are able to become more fully functioning will decide
for themselves how best to cope with problems and participate in a satisfying life.
Person-Centered Psychotherapy
Carl Rogers
Person-Centered Change Processes
• In person-centered therapy, change occurs by shedding the self one is not and becoming one’s true
self.
• This change process begins with self-disclosure; that is, clients disclose, or reveal, themselves,
including their negative thoughts, feelings, problems, failures, inadequacies, and so forth.
• Freed from the need to please the therapist, clients can work with the disclosed material and
explore strange, unknown, and dangerous aspects of their self-experience. Feeling heard and
understood changes the client’s experience to one that is more self-accepting.
• Efforts to gain acceptance from others that lock us into ingenuine roles can be relaxed, and we can
consider our true thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Phoniness and self-concealment can be gradually
relinquished, and the false self can be gradually discarded. This genuine self-exploration leads to
self-discovery– an awareness of what one is really like. Clients become aware of failures to
actualize themselves and their potential.
• As more aspects of self are experienced fully and incorporated into their sense of self, clients gain
a stronger, more complete, and more authentic self-understanding. Self-understanding results in
an increase in self-regard that is independent of pressures to conform to the expectations and
standards of others.
• Where previously clients experienced a state of incongruence between their sense of who they
really were and what others valued or devalued about them, they can now feel congruence
between their experienced self and ideal self.
Person-Centered Psychotherapy
Carl Rogers
Person-Centered Change Tasks
• Person-centered therapy can be characterized as an anti-intervention. Like existential psychotherapy,
person-centered therapy proceeds primarily through dialogue. Unlike existential therapy, however, the
client is assumed to be motivated to tell the therapist what troubling problem in living has prompted
him or her to seek assistance. The client, therefore, is given the opportunity and responsibility for
directing the content of the therapeutic dialogue.
• The therapist accepts the responsibility for striving to communicate in a way that establishes an optimal
therapeutic relationship. An optimal therapeutic relationship particularly involves avoiding giving
advice or providing interpretations of what the client “really” thinks. Instead, the therapist tries to
communicate what the client has actually said or has tried to say- at a deep, personal level.
• Paraphrasing of verbal and nonverbal messages, reflection of feelings directly and indirectly
experienced, open-ended questioning, and self-disclosure- in the service of the client feeling
understood- are used as genuine efforts to convey an empathic understanding of the client’s
experiencing.
• Although this may sound simple, it is not easy. To truly understand another person involves more than
comprehending the literal meaning of what the client has said. It is a deep sharing of the client’s
subjective world. Thus therapists must be willing and able to listen without prejudice, judgment, or
agenda if the client is to have any chance of feeling truly understood and accepted. Positive feelings,
negative feelings, and silence must be acceptable to the therapist. The therapist strives to communicate
to the client at every level, “I accept you as you are.”
• Techniques or interventions cannot induce a state of feeling genuinely appreciated. Only the here-and-
now participation of the therapist striving to understand the client’s moment-by-moment experience will
suffice. This is why person-centered therapy is often described as a relationship-focused approach.
Person-Centered Psychotherapy
Carl Rogers
Therapeutic Relationship
• The therapist has a unique role in person-centered therapy. To be able to reflect the client’s
subjective experience, the person of the therapist is central. Because person-centered therapy is, at
its heart, a highly collaborative approach, three qualities of the therapist must be evident in
relationship with the client
• The first quality is genuineness, realness, or congruence. Genuineness can be understood as a form
of self-empathy – paying close attention to one’s experience, being aware of all that is going on side
one’s self, and accepting it. It means being open to one’s own experience. Genuineness requires a
significant depth of self-knowledge. It is only a fully functioning person who can be totally genuine.
The more the therapist is himself or herself in the relationship – putting up no professional front or
personal façade – the greater the opportunity for the client to change and grow in a constructive
manner.
• This means that the therapist is openly experiencing the feelings and attitudes that are present in the
moment. The term transparent catches the quality of this condition: The therapist strives to be
transparent to the client. In this way the client can experience who the therapist is in the relationship;
the client experiences no holding back on the part of the therapist. What the therapist is experiencing
is available to awareness, can be lived in the relationship, and can be communicated. Thus, there is a
close matching (or congruence) between what is being experienced at the feeling level, what is
present in awareness, and what is expressed to the client. The focus on genuineness, authenticity, and
awareness requires the therapist to be emotionally present and available. One’s external presentation
must match one’s internal experience. The therapist must be able to openly express feelings and
attitudes that are present in the relationship with the client. In many respects the therapist serves as a
model of a human being struggling toward authenticity, which is not an easy task.
Person-Centered Psychotherapy
Carl Rogers
• The second quality is an unconditional positive regard. It means that the client feels understood in a
nonjudgmental way. In such an atmosphere the client can develop trust in the therapist and feel able to accept
his or her own experience and feelings. When the therapist is experiencing a positive, accepting attitude
toward whatever the client is at that moment, therapeutic movement or change is made possible. The therapist
is accepting of whatever immediate feeling the client is experiencing – for example, confusion, resentment,
fear, anger, courage, love, pride. Such caring on the part of the therapist prizes the client in a total rather than
a conditional way.
• Unconditional positive regard is sometimes misunderstood as behaving in an overtly and unreservedly
positive manner toward the client – as expressing nothing but praise in response to whatever the client says or
does. Such behavior on part of the therapist, however, is a form of conditional positive regard, which says to
the client, “I value what you have done, and if you want me to continue to value you, you must continue such
behavior.” Thus, conditional positive regard places clients in a position of having to question their own
values, rather than fully experiencing their own self-worth. It may well be that something the clients had done
that was praised by the therapist was not congruent with their true self, placing them in a growth-inhibiting
circumstance.
• The third quality of the therapist is empathic understanding. Many people believe that empathic
understanding is the single quality that is most important in all forms of therapeutic listening. It means fully
comprehending the subjective world of the client so that the client feels understood. This means that the
therapist senses accurately the feelings and personal meanings that the client is experiencing and
communicates this understanding to the client. Two things that are important about this: (a) the empathy be
accurate and (b) the empathy be made known to the client. Both are learnable skills, and they do make a huge
difference to the relationship between client and therapist. When functioning best, therapists are in tune with
the private world of the other that they can clarify not only the meanings of which the clients are aware but
even those meanings just beyond a client’s awareness. This kind of sensitive, active listening is exceedingly
rare in our lives. We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding – with true empathy.