Person Centered Therapy

What is Person Centered Therapy?

Person centered therapy focuses on the person not the problem. The goal of person centered therapy is to provide an environment amical for growth. Accordingly, the person is then responsible for improving their life. The therapist gives the client the independence to rationally decide for themselves what is wrong and right for their lives and how to act on those beliefs. Accordingly, the therapist plays a role of friend and counselor who listens and encourages.

“If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.”
~Carl Rogers

The Client is In Charge

Person-centered therapy uses a non-authoritative approach, allowing clients to lead discussions so they can discover their own solutions. Most importantly, the therapist is a compassionate facilitator of this process, listening without judgment and acknowledging the client’s experience without directing the conversation. Consequently, the therapy environment engenders the type of relationship that facilitates growth.

History of Person Centered Therapy

Carl Rodgers believed that everyone’s view of his or her own world was different. Therefore, we should trust them to manage that world. Rogers’ unique style of therapy began to take root in the 1940’s and 50’s.

Many of todays therapy styles evolved from Carl Roger’s person-centered therapy.

Three Necessary Conditions

The success of person-centered therapy relies on three conditions:

Unconditional Positive Regard. Therapists must be empathetic and non-judgmental, establishing trust to help the client feel secure enough to make their own decisions and choices.
Empathetic Understanding. Therapists must understand and accept their clients’ thoughts and feelings.
Congruence. Therapists must present an accessible self that clients can see is honest and transparent. Accordingly, therapist should not present themselves as a powerful authoritarian that must be appeased.

Person Centered Therapy and Self Actualization

Rogers expressed that this self actualization is the essence of the client becoming a person. He describes this state of being as, “thus to an increasing degree he becomes himself—not a façade of conformity to others, not a cynical denial of all feeling, nor a front of intellectual rationality, but a living, breathing, feeling, fluctuating process—in short, he becomes a person” (1995, location 1922). Rogers believed that people have a natural proclivity toward growth and fulfillment. The three conditions of acceptance (unconditional positive regard), therapist congruence (genuineness), and empathic understanding creates the environment necessary to open a path to self actualization.

Six Conditions for Therapeutic Change

Therapist–Client Psychological Contact. The relationship between client and therapist must be a relationship in which each person’s perception of the other is important.
Client Incongruence. There must be incongruence between the client’s experience and awareness.
Therapist Congruence or Genuineness. the therapist must be congruent within the therapeutic relationship, deeply involved with their genuine self, capable of drawing on their own experiences to facilitate the relationship.
Therapist Unconditional Positive Regard. The therapist accepts the client unconditionally, without judgment, disapproval or approval. The therapists facilitates increased self-regard by the client. As the client begins to become aware of experiences in which their view of self-worth was distorted or denied, they move towards congruence and increased self-regard.
Therapist Empathic Understanding. The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client’s subjective frame of reference. Accurate empathy expressed by the therapist builds trust in the client that the therapist genuinely possesses unconditional positive regard for them.
Client Perception. The client recognizes that the therapist has unconditional positive regard and empathic understanding.

Seven Stages of Transformation in Person Centered Therapy

Rogers explained the clients transform on a “significant continuum is from fixity to changingness, from rigid structure to flow, from stasis to process” (location 2182). He breaks down this process into seven stages. Markedly, therapists don’t push clients through the stages. Rather, they hold their hand as the client progresses through the stages at their own pace.

Stage I

In this stage, the client is steeped in neurotic behaviors and thoughts.

Lack of internal communication
Thoughts, feelings, and narratives conflict
Focused on external triggers, not internal feelings of experience
Feelings and personal meanings are not recognized or owned
Personal constructs are rigid
Close relationships are threatening
Personal problems not recognized
No desire to change
No recognition of the ebb and flow of feelings
Experience interpreted rigidly through the past
- Reacting to experience by associating it to the past, and then reacting with emotions tied to the past

Stage II

The client begins to make minor shifts during the second stage.

A slight loosening and flowing of symbolic expression occurs, which tends to be characterized by the following:
- Expression begins to flow in regard to non-self topics
- They percieve problems as external to self
No sense of personal responsibility for problems
They describe feelings as unowned, or sometimes as past objects
They view experiencing through the structure of the past
Personal constructs are rigid, and treated as facts
Differentiation of personal meanings and feelings is very limited and global
Contradictions may be expressed, but with little recognition of the contradictions

Stage III

By the third stage, the client is able to open up in expressions about the self.

A freer flow of expression about the self as an object
Expression about self-related experiences as objects
Expression about the self as a reflected object, existing primarily in others
Expression about or description of feelings and personal meanings from the past
Still little acceptance of feelings. Exhibiting feelings thoughts as shameful or unacceptable
They exhibit Feelings, and occasionally recognize them
They describe experiencing as somewhat remote from the self
Their personal constructs are rigid, but they recognize them as constructs
Differentiation of feelings and meanings begins to appear
Recognition of contradictions in experience
lastly, personal choices are recognized and often seen as ineffective

Stage IV

A gradual perceptiveness of experienced emotions begins to emerge in stage IV.

Ability to describes more intense feelings of the “not-now-present” variety
Feelings are described as objects in the present
Occasionally present feelings are uncomfortably expressed
Movement towards experiencing feelings in the immediate present, still experiencing fear
Limited open acceptance of feelings
Experiencing is less bound by past structures
A loosening of the way experience is construed.
Some discoveries of personal constructs; there is definite recognition of these constructs; and a beginning of questioning their validity
An increased differentiation of feelings, constructs, personal meanings
A concern about contradictions and incongruences between experience and self
A vacillating feeling of self responsibility in problems
Close relationships still feel dangerous, the client now takes small risks

Stage V

The client begins to be in to express mindful awareness of emotions in the present.

Clients now express feelings freely as they exist in the present
The client moves closer to fully experiencing feelings
Surprise and fright when feelings are felt
An increasing ownership of feelings
Experiencing is loosened, no longer remote, and occurs frequently
The construe experience with more freedom.
Fresh discoveries of personal constructs as constructs, and a critical examination of their validity and effectiveness
Strong movement towards exactness in differentiation of feelings and meanings.
Increasing willingness to face contradictions and incongruences in experience
Increasing quality of acceptance of self-responsibility for problems, and a concern about personal contributions.
Increasingly freer dialogues within the self

Stage VI

The clients relationship with emotions deepens.

The client begins to experience feelings previously “stuck” with immediacy now.
A feeling flows to its full result.
The client directly experiences present moment feelings with immediacy and richness.
Living subjectively in the experience, not feeling about it
Self as an object disappears
Experiencing has a real process quality
Internal communication is free and relatively unblocked
The client vividly acknowledges the incongruence between experience and awareness. Consequently, the awareness gently creates congruence.
Relevant personal construct dissolves in the experiencing moment
The moment of full experiencing becomes a clear and definite referent
Differentiation of experiencing is sharp and basic

Stage VII

The final stage is an approaching of self-actualization and an appreciation for the richness of life.

The client experiences new feelings with immediacy and richness
Consciously endeavors in order to clearly understand the self, personal wants, weaknesses and attitudes.
Growing and continuing sense of acceptance and ownership of changing feelings
Experiencing has almost completely lost its structure-bound aspects and becomes process experiencing
The self becomes increasingly the subjective and reflexive awareness of experiencing
The client tentatively reformulates personal constructs, validating them against further experience. However, after updating the personal constructs, they loosely hold new constructs.
Internal communication is clear, with feelings and symbols well matched, and fresh terms for new feelings
There is the experiencing of effective choice of new ways of being (Rogers, 1995).

Person Centered Therapy’s Influence

As I went through Roger’s stages of change, I recognized the profound influence his work has on present positive psychology treatments. His work laid groundwork for mindfulness, acceptance, and growth mindsets. Undoubtedly, Carl Rogers and the humanism movement was revolutionary in contrast to previous forms of therapy. He brough humanity back to the client. Perhaps, many of those seeking help just needed compassionate, unconditional positive regard.

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References:

Rogers, C. (1995). On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Mariner Books; 2nd ed. edition.