Unconditional positive regard

Miss a couple of payments and see.

Accepting patients without judgment or evaluation, and presenting this attitude in an empathic manner to someone.

This is not, however, a laissez faire or passive attitude on the part of the therapist.

Another easy definition is that unconditional positive regard is an accurate expression of empathy.


Unconditional positive regard is a component of client-centered therapy, which was developed by Carl Rogers. Here's more information regarding the approach of the therapist in this style of counseling:


Here is Carl Rogers practicing the approach in a counseling session. This isn't the best video quality as it is from 1965, but in the beginning he talks to you about his approach, prior to meeting with the patient. I like this because its an example of the guy himself who developed the term and theory. Recommended watching for everyone



Here is a lecture by Carl Rogers talking to a group of counseling students about his approach and the role of empathy in therapy:

I see it more as the fight between Luke (me) and Darth Vader (therapist) or possibly this from Monty Python

(I am John Cleese and therapist is Michael Palin)

Sometimes it is quite similar to Dueling Banjoes

I don't know what to answer, honestly. My T is a DBT T. While DBT encourages non-judgmental stance it doesn't mean there aren't ever judgments, it just means that we work to be mindful of our judgments and/or try to reserve our judgments once we've checked the facts.

I don't think my T gives me unconditional regard in the sense that I can do no wrong nor do I think he behaves in a way that is disingenuous. He's forthright. So. I don't know if that fits the definition. It doesn't sound like it.

But that doesn't tell me if it's possible or not. Just that my T doesn't do it. Maybe?

In my understanding, unconditional positive regard is "meeting the client where they are at" and moving from there. It's not that the client can do no wrong, but that the client is doing the best they can with what they have in the moment. The job of the T at this point is to hear the client & help them get to the next step.

I said my current T does this (as have some previous T's), b/c she takes what I bring to therapy and doesn't judge me for it. She may be frustrated with some of my "stuckness", but doesn't make me feel like crap about it. She is good about taking any frustrations she may have and using them as guides to help direct her approaches. She's incredibly even most of the time. She knows how to balance things in her own life/space in a way that allows her to be an even support in the therapy room with her clients that are often in crisis (she's a trauma T. She has at least 6 trauma clients on her current caseload b/c there are that many of us in the group she runs)... I'm sure she has wanted to strangle me a few times when I return to the "I know I'm making this all up, so can we figure out why?" line of thinking, but in her interactions with me, she's still very patient and indulgent. We go through evrything again, and she lets me land on whatever side of the belief I end up. She doesn't yell at me or tell me I'm SO worng (or that she's glad I finally gave up the lie). She doesn't admonish me for wasting her time, she just goes with it... When I tell her I'm self-harming, instead of telling me how stupid it is, she tries to remind me of my other options, and to minimize the potential damage...

of course, all that is working with the defenition of "unconditional positive regard" being that the therapist is "meeting the client where they're at".

I put none of the above cuz I think my t shows that unconditional acceptance like atat said. she accepts me without judgement or criticism which is something i never had growing up.

What an interesting discussion on the definition of unconditional positive regard. I like what's already been said about seeing the client not as perfect, but as meeting him/her where he/she's at and/or accepting the client with all of his/her imperfections.

The way I think about the unconditional positive regard my T shows me is that T can have a negative feeling about me, but it doesn't touch my core identity. That is, I can annoy T, offend T, frustrate T, but I don't therefore become annoying, offensive, or frustrating. In this way T can be frustrated by a specific action or offended by a specific word, but not frustrated or offended by who I am as a person.

Thus T has unconditional positive regard for ME, but not necessarily for my actions or words.

That makes more sense in my head. In writing it looks like a logical fallacy, (Isn't an annoying person just a person whose actions annoy you? Does it make sense to separate actions from identity?)

This sort of falls along the lines of what my T said to me today. I was trying to convince her that i am in fact, an extremely boring person. She said she has yet to meet a boring person, but she has met people who are a bore--people that go on and on about their life ceaselessly, but in a fruitless sort of way. I am paraphrasing what she said, because I can't actually remember her words...but anyway, she said even then she knows that there is a wound underneath that is making that person act that way, so even then she sees past the "annoying" tendency or whatever it is.

Nice. Thanks for this. Maybe the point really is just as simple as not judging another person. I know I'm guilty of the kind of judgement where I see X in someone's actions/words and therefore conclude that they ARE X. I think we've all done it...meet someone at a party, whatever they're saying is boring, therefore they themselves are boring. Your mother-in-law did something mean, therefore she is herself a mean person. That politician said something stupid and therefore is a stupid person.

Heck, we do it to ourselves, don't we? I said something selfish therefore I am a selfish person.

It takes effort and grace not to think that way, but it's possible.

My therapist used that term after a few months of therapy, and I had no idea what it meant, and still don't. I told her I had no use for it, and not to say it. I didn't want to hear 'therapy-speak'.