Person-centred therapy

Hi all

Firstly, apologies for the length of this post, I hadn't intended it to be, I just had so much to say!

I have been chatting in a couple of forums and have mentioned a form of therapy (and in fact an entire philosophy on life, health, education, society and politics) that I have received over the last twenty years and that I am currently studying. It is called person-centred therapy and was originally developed by an American psychologist called Carl Rogers. He believed that we are all born with a innate drive to grow, develop and reach our full potential. He called this 'the actualising tendency'.

Rogers theorised that in an ideal environment a child's actualising tendency will work positively for the child's development and enable them to develop their personality in healthy and fulfilling ways. However, many of us do not receive such childhoods and instead we are subjected to our parents' (or caregivers) 'conditional regard' - we only receive love, attention, nurture, acceptance etc. if we do or say the things our parents want us to (e.g. 'Be a good boy and stop crying', 'Good girls don't get angry'). Our behaviour, thoughts and feelings become determined by these 'conditions of worth' and we grow into adulthood losing touch with who we truly are, living our lives for others, with a growing sense of dis-ease or discomfort which Rogers called 'incongruence' (a mis-match between what we think and believe about ourselves and the reality of the way we act or behave). Incongruence exhibits in any number of psychological imbalances such as anxiety and depression.
[Note. person-centred theory is based on a 'growthful model' of mental health and well-being i.e. that in the right conditions people will grow and develop towards their true potential, not on the 'medical model' based on a person's 'deficiency'.]

The good news is, he developed a form of therapy to redress this lack of 'congruence' between who we truly are and what we present to the outside world, in which the therapist aims to provide these missing early childhood conditions, in a therapeutic environment where the person is accepted without judgement and with genuineness and empathy. Person-centred therapists and practitioners aspire to embody these conditions as part of their 'way of being', rather than as a set of skills that are manipulated or used. Having one's own therapy is therefore an integral part of person-centred training and considered beneficial for the therapist's own self-care and personal development.

I have had such an incredible experience of this therapy over the last two decades that a couple of years I decided to start training as a person-centred therapist. It has been a very long, hard but immensely rewarding journey and I'm not quite there yet, but this is something I feel passionately about and want to share with the world. After interest was expressed in this I decided I would share it here.

Obviously I am sharing my own personal experiences here and want to be careful not to suggest that this is a panacea for all people and all mental health problems.

Anyway, here are a few links, over and above searching for Carl Rogers and 'person-centred therapy' (also sometimes know as 'client-centred therapy' because it places the client (us!) at the centre of our therapy and as being the expert in our own process and experience!):

• Center for Studies of the Person - Center for Studies of the Person
• The Association for the Development of the Person Centred Approach (ADPCA) - Welcome to ADPCA | ADPCA
• La Jolla Program / La Jolla UK - La Jolla Program /
  La Jolla Programme UK

Therapy, events and conferences obviously all cost money, but often due to the inclusive nature of the approach, therapists and organisers often offer fees on a sliding scale, bursaries to those who could not afford to pay full cost and payment plans to help spread the costs. Anyway, at least visiting the websites is free!

Wishing you all well on your journeys,

Phx

Thanks; I love Carl Rogers, especially after seeing him in a training video while in school. Unfortunately, in this day and age of "Evidence Based Practice", Humanistic, person centered therapy has fallen out of favor, but I think it's something that all therapists should have in their toolbox. I had a grad instructor tell my class, "When all else fails, be Carl Rogers."

That's great. I agree about the demands of an 'evidence base', but how ironic when Carl Rogers pioneered the original psychological research and the person-centred evidence Base has been growing steadily for over four decades. I notice a recent trend in 'new' psychological therapies such as DBT and MBT which seem to have extracted elements of Carl Rogers' six 'necessary and sufficient conditions' to create seemingly 'new' treatments.

I hope the person-centred approach continues to grow in strength and recognition but, sadly, taking a humane approach to treating individuals as trustworthy human beings seems to be at odds with capitalism and consumerism, where money is everything...

The underlying philosophy of the approach is sound, but often misunderstood by those not knowledgeable about it - it's sometimes mistakenly viewed as overly simplistic and little more than 'being nice', whilst doing nothing more than smiling and nodding! How far from the truth could this be? But what's so wrong with people being treated 'nicely', with respect and integrity, anyway?

Were/are you training as a therapist? I'm just finishing my training but still identify very much as the 'client' I also am...

Phx

I'm pretty sure my therapist is person-centered. I remember reading about it in an Abnormal Psychology class and thinking that it sounded just like him. Plus, I read his LinkedIn profile before I started seeing him and it said that his "work is client-centered".

The whole accepting without judgment, unconditional regard, etc. etc. is what I have distrusted the most about my therapy experience with him (obviously from growing up with a father who could turn on you and tear you to pieces with words in seconds). But it is also what has also helped me grow the most and has provided at least a little balm to my anxiety problems. As I've grown to trust him, therapy has become a place where I can literally discuss anything or what has been eating me alive all week and has also become a place where I can practice vulnerability and trust and hopefully move that to my other relationships in life.

I did a few sessions with a CBT therapist several years ago, but I 100% prefer what I am in now to that. I need the relationship and the person to prove me wrong time and time again when I keep expecting him to turn on me or get fed up. Seeing my insecurities I have with people play out between us but feeling completely free to talk about it and analyze it with him is where a ton of my learning is coming from. I've been in it for a couple of years, and I'm not sure when I'll get to the place where I can stop, but it has been a worthwhile investment for me.

thanks for the information. my T has books from ROgers and does person-centered therapy as well as many other modalities.

My T is also person-centered.

So was ex-T who abandoned me...

Can I ask a silly question? What's the opposite of "person-centered"? I've been looking for a new T, and so many of them use this phrase, and it honestly sounds a little meaningless. What else would they be centered on? Hopefully they're not going to be a "self-centered" therapist, or a "puppy centered therapist" (hmm that might not be so awful), or whatever.

I understand that the term was used to describe Carl Rogers way of working, and that he must have been doing something different than previous therapists, but I guess I'm missing something?

I think this is what my old T practiced and it worked really well for me. I hope my new T (who I have my first session with on Monday) is also person-centered.

Guilloche - I think person-centered focuses more on exploration of issues through the use of your whole life experience rather than something like CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) which focus on a specific behavior or type of thought you have and reframing those thoughts/changing those behaviors. I could be wrong, but this is my interpretation.

I absolutely agree. When I started seeing him I quickly became obsessed with my therapist abandoning me if /when I got too needy. This is still a concern for me. Your words have really helped me to frame my experiences.

Again, thank you for sharing this, it sounds like there is real depth of honesty in your relationship with your therapist. I realise reading this that I still keep my more negative feelings towards my therapist to myself - for fear that he will 'abandon' me. I never realised that until now... I cannot imagine my life at all without my therapist, I don't know when I would feel ready to stop. But I do hope that in the future I will feel stronger in relationships 'in the outside world' to be more truthfully myself without hiding aspects of myself due to shame or fear of rejection.

Phx

Hi guillotine,

Not a silly question at all! I've been eating, sleeping and breathing 'person-centred therapy' for the last three years which is why I feel so passionately about it. From my understanding the crux of what Rogers originally called 'client-centred' therapy, and what seems to separate it from the other big therapeutic approaches (like CBT and psychodynamic), is the belief that the 'client' is the 'expert' of their own subjective experiences and process, not the doctor/therapist. So a PC therapist won't necessarily 'diagnose' a mental health problem and then offer a 'treatment'. They don't claim to have the answers (at least, not in my experience) and generally won't offer advice or interpretation of their client's thoughts and feelings.

Instead the PC therapist should be aiming to provide the optimal conditions (an empathic and accepting environment) for the client to work through things and grow themselves. The analogy that I love is of the PC therapist as a gardener providing the best conditions for plants to grow in. A gardener cannot make a flower grow by pulling it out the ground, but it can provide a rich soil for it to take root and patiently nurture it while it develops to maturity. The hope a PC therapist has for their client reminds me of the Maya Angelou quote, 'The nature of this flower is to blossom'. Rogers believed people to be motivated to make sense of their world and to always be striving to grow and develop. Through the experience of the therapist's (hopefully) unconditional acceptance, the client can learn greater self-acceptance, that they are valuable and trustworthy beings, therefore learning to trust themselves and listen to their own instincts and inner voice, to be open and accepting of new experiences, to move, flow, create... The PC therapist should aim to see the whole person and their experiences, framed in the context of the client's own subjective world, including their childhood.

The idea of focusing on the client's experience may seem somewhat obvious today, but that's in large part because Rogers work helped shape a new generation of thinking in psychology and psychotherapy. In the 1940s and 50s the very idea was totally radical and went against the grain of Rogers' own psychodynamic training.

The term 'person-centred' is used more in a general sense in mental health and social care services these days to denote a service which claims to welcome and value the views and wishes of the 'service user' (I hate that expression but it's commonly used here in the UK).

Because of this new and often confusing use of the term 'person-centred', some PC therapists are suggesting a return to the use of the term 'client-centred'...

Not sure if that helps at all, but I hope so!

Phx

I'm sorry to hear you were abandoned by your therapist. Your experience shows that as in every aspect of life there is good, bad and downright appalling practice. I have seen many PC therapists and they weren't all brilliantly therapeutic experiences. It is so true that any therapist, no matter what approach, is only as good as their training, integrity and commitment to safe and ethical practice.

I hope you can work well with your new therapist

Phx

Yeah, I think the fear of abandonment will always be at least a little bit there. Like you, I quickly became afraid of that and being too needy/getting too close/etc.

There is a real depth of honesty in our relationship. It honestly didn't develop until the past few months though after 2 years of seeing him. I of course trusted him enough to help work on things before, but something shifted back in the fall and it was a whole new level of trust. I don't know what changed--and it might have been just part of my personality because I take forever to let people in and get to know me and can never pinpoint the moment when I finally do--but the work I've done recently has been the most meaningful work I think I've done so far. And it has involved my least favorite thing in life: Vulnerability . And vulnerability involves being honest (i.e. something you said rubbed me the wrong way, I'm afraid of getting too close, I'm afraid of you getting fed up with me, on and on and on).

It's good that you've realized that you keep your negative feelings to yourself because now you can test out being honest about them with your therapist (if you want to, of course). It'll probably surprise you.

My undergraduate and graduate school programs covered aspects of person-centered psychotherapy. I have always agreed with Rogers' principles and approach and have been considering going into person-centered therapy training myself. It's nice to hear you've had such a great experience with it.

I really enjoyed this post, thank you for sharing it. It does go on to show that we can fill in the gap of those missing years. Most therapy over looks the child that never developed and this therapy allows it to happen without being manipulated and allows the person to become who they were meant to. Thank you so much for posting it. tc

Training has been the hardest and most challenging thing I have ever done in my life - more from the personal development it demands - but also the most rewarding. I would not and could not go back to my life pre-training. Thank you for your reply, your words mean a lot to me, just being heard, accepted and responded to is so invaluable to me...

Phx

I've been feeling quite paranoid since posting this, as I felt I'd perhaps been 'too much' in what I shared and perhaps it was being too critical about other approaches to psychotherapy. So hearing that my post has been helpful to you is really nice. For me a lot of the therapeutic work I'm doing these days is focused on that child that never got to develop, but hid herself (from others and ultimately from herself) in order to survive. That someone cares enough to try and offer me a nurturing place to grow myself in, is an amazing experience.

But I've realised over the last few days, this nurturing place has become such a safe place for me though that I'm actually still hiding parts of me - the parts that are worried about doing or saying the 'wrong' thing, being critical of my therapist or in fact just being very honest about all my feelings, including the 'negative' ones towards my therapist. There aren't many, but I realise that I'm doing this because deep down I still fear that if/when I am too honest and show too much of my craziness, my therapist will reject me and I'll lose the safest place I've ever had in the world.

The challenge for me in this therapy is to be brave enough now to share these feelings and aspects of myself that are still hiding. Coming here and posting has shown me this and for that I am very grateful.

Phx

Other modalities that aren't necessarily person-centered:
Solution Focused
Narrative
Rational-Emotive/Cognitive Behavioral
Behavioral
Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytical
EMDR/TFT/SE
Interpersonal.
I'm sure you can get more details by doing searches or going to Wikipedia.

Probably most therapists consider themselves "client-centered" in the sense of being focused on the client. As a term of art, though, client-centered or person-centered refer specifically to the non-directive methods first used by Carl Rogers.

Person-centered therapy - children, people, used, personality, theory, Definition, Purpose, Description, Normal results