An Explanation and Personal Reflection on Person-Centered Therapy

This is an APA format paper which was written in 2021 during my study of the Application of Positive Psychology.

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Abstract

In this paper I explore into the Person-Centered Therapy for deeper understanding and discussion. Part 1 provides the explanation of one key concept, a therapeutic goal and a particular technique. I also argue a particular strength and shortcoming of Person-Centered Therapy. In part 2 I take a deeper personal reflection to demonstrate how the Person-Centered therapeutic concepts and implication resonate with my own values and experiences.

            Keywords: Person-Centered, therapy, concept, therapeutic goal, technique, personal reflection, value, experiences.

Part 1 Exploration of Person-Centered Therapy

In Person-Centered Therapy, one of the key concepts is that mental health is the congruence of ideal-self and real-self. This concept is the basis of the therapeutic goal which is to provide a safe climate conductive to the clients’ self-exploration to be able to recognize barriers to change and growth, as well as to be able to experience aspects of self that were formally denied or distorted. An important technique of achieving this therapeutic goal is to demonstrate and communicate unconditional prostate regards towards the clients by the therapist. Person-Centered Therapy has been widely adopted and expanded into different specific therapeutic approaches, such as Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) approach. It certainly has its very unique strengths, and some shortcomings under specific contexts.

Concept:  Congruence of ideal self and real self as mental health

In the humanistic approach, the self is our inner personality for who we really are as a person (McLeod, 2014). The self-concept is unique to each individual person, and include three components.

(1)  Real-self

Real-self (also known as self-image) is our current view of oneself, as “who I am”. For example, someone may perceive himself / herself as someone who is good or bad, smart or stupid, rich or poor, beautiful or ugly. This perception of oneself affects how the person thinks, feels and behaves. However, this real self may not necessarily reflects the reality. If someone who has been imposed with negative conditions, in an overprotecting or dominating environment, he / she may develop negative self-image (AIPC, 2010).

(2)  Idea- self

Ideal-self is the person who we would like to be. It contains our goal, ambition and inspiration in life. It is dynamic and changing as we move into different stages in life, and shaped by observing the environments. It’s also influenced by the standards and expectations from the surroundings.

(3)  Self esteem

Self-esteem is also known as a person’s feeling of his / her self-worth or self-value. Rogers emphasized that someone has developed the feelings of self-esteem from the interaction with parents in early childhood and subsequently with significant ones when grow up (McLeod, 2014). When someone sees himself / herself not able to meet up the standards and expectation from the surroundings, he / she would develop low self-esteem, which may lead to self-doubt, self-denial and even self-harm, and be defensive and guarded with people. Low self-esteem is usually a result of a person in a state of incongruence of experiencing gaps between real-self and ideal-self. In contrast, someone with high self-esteem has higher confidence and positive feelings about himself / herself, with higher resilience to overcome challenges in difficult situations and open up with people.

In summary, when a person has alignment of his / her views of real-self to ideal-self, his / her feeling of self-esteem is relatively high and is able to think, feel and behave with confidence and positive energy. It’s a process for a person to continue the tendency of self-actualizing, and being a fully functioning person who has “ideal emotional health” (AIPC, 2010). A fully functioning person usually is a high achiever in society, who processes the five characteristics as indented by Rogers: open to experiences, existential living, trust feelings, creativity and fulfilled life (McLeod, 2014).

Therapeutic Goal: To provide a safe climate conductive to clients’ self-exploration so that they can recognize blocks to growth and can experience aspects of self that were formerly denied or distorted.

Rogers defined the purpose of Person-Centered Therapy is to reduce the incongruence between real-self and ideal-self, and hence improve the feeling of self-worth and hence help the person become more fully functioning (Miller, 2012). For a person to get into the core real-self, and match to the ideal-self, it requires a climate which is an atmosphere for the person to feel safe to bring out things they have never dared to even express to himself / herself, and to say things him / her has never dared to tell others. This safe climate created by the therapist for the client is a prerequisite to succeed in any Person-Centered Therapy. Only when the person feels safe, he / she can only start to open up himself / herself.

In particular, the safe climate is created in a therapeutic relationship, in which the focus is solely on the client for his / her needs. In the being time limited, the therapist has the intention to hold a safe space with full presence, be close with the client, and allow the clients for self-explorations. Indeed, a therapeutic relationship is different from any other kinds of personal or professional relationships that we have in our life, at work and social circles, in which we have needs on each other and want to do things together in that particular relationship (Miller, 2012). To establish a safe therapeutic relationship with the clients, it starts with the therapy’s view of human nature, core beliefs and values, and then apply the approaches and techniques used in the therapy session. The three conditions to create the safe climate are unconditional positive regard and acceptance, accurate empathetic understanding and congruence from the therapist.

Technique: Communicate Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR)

Iberg (2001) identified that the communicated UPR from significant others is one key driver for a person to move towards less defensive and healthier adjustment to decrease the conditions of worth and to increase unconditional self-regard. Therefore, to archive the therapeutic goal for providing a safe climate for the clients’ self-exploration, the therapist is required to communicate UPR to the client, and subsequently help the clients to carry the increased unconditional self-regard outside the therapy sessions, and hence continue their self-actualizing into the rest of their life. In the context of self-esteem, the therapist firstly comes with the mindset and intension to accept, respect, care and support the worth of the client and the choices of the clients make for their lives, even though the therapist may hold very different views from the clients, such as disagreement on the clients’ behavior, belief, value, lifestyle, etc.

As Rogers also highlighted that for effective therapist, UPR occurs at many moments and to varying degrees, and hence Iberg (2001) placed the emphasis on activities especially pertinent to the momentary enactment to UPR. He summarized the collective activities into four aspects to help the therapists to develop capacity to have UPR for clients:

(1)  Drop any attempt to control or change the client.

(2)  Use all the senses and sensations, as well as the conceptual grasp of all possibilities to understand the environment and the client at the moment.

(3)  Maintain a non-categorizing mentality, attending to the details of what the client expresses and experiences, without any thoughts to fitting things into categories.

(4)  Allow yourself to be moved by what you hear from the client.

In addition, Farber and Doolin (2011) emphasized that therapists cannot content with feeling good about their clients but instead should ensure that their UPR feelings and experiences are communicated verbally and non-verbally through reflection and questioning to the clients.

One strength and one shortcoming of Person-Centered Therapy

The optimistic humanistic view is that people have a vast potential for solving their own problems given the right therapeutic environment. Therefore, one strength of the Person-Centered Therapy is that clients are given the empowerment to take an active stance and assume responsibility for the direction and decision of the therapy (AIPC, 2010). As a result, the motivation to change and grow is rather intrinsic and self-driven, which in some ways align to the self-determination theory in my view. In addition, as the clients feel more trusted and empowered, they learn to be more expressive of the feelings, and then be more willing to listen and to hear, and then possibly sit on their own feelings, in their lives in general (Miller, 2012).

At the same time, the corresponding shortcoming of empowering the clients from Person-Centered Therapy for taking their own responsibility to make decision, is the lack of techniques to help clients solve problem (AIPC, 2010). In another words, many clients have been feeling so much of the burden from the problems, and they feel strong needs for greater direction and structure from the therapist who is expected to use some techniques to help the clients solve problems more efficiently. Especially when the clients who are in crisis, more directive approach would be required from the therapist. For example, there may be danger for a furious client to drift into self-indulgence and thinks that for him / her at the moments the most important thing is to work through his / her anger or pain. Therefore, this will require the therapists to apply some techniques and questioning to bring the client back from the deep emotion back to logical thinking and start exploring the problems within himself / herself and then define goal and solutions.

Part 2 Personal Reflections on Person-Centered Therapy

View of human nature

In Person-Centered Therapy, the way of thinking about clients is the optimistic view of human nature. In general, people have a vast potential for solving their own problems given the right therapeutic environment. This indeed aligns to my way of thinking about clients from my own core value and experiences.

I have left my hometown and came to Singapore alone for study since teenage. Now I have been in Singapore for more than 20 years. Throughout the decades, I have gone through a lot of good times as well as difficult times in my study, my work and various relationships in life. With the support of systems and people around me, I manage to overcome every obstacle, and keep on learning new skills outside my regular job at the corporate world. Since last year, I have started the journey in Positive Psychology study and Life Coaching. This has actually further reinforced my belief that each individual has the unlimited potential to solve his / her problem as long as the right support is sought and given.  Indeed, I was finding myself in the state of depression during the lock down period last year due COVID-19. I was staying alone at the house, while working from home for my full-time job to meet the project deadlines though virtually connection with my co-workers. I at the same time was still experiencing the loss from the breakup in my previous relationship then. I missed my family abroad very much with the anxiety about the uncertainty of the pandemic situation. As I have learnt the basics of application of psychology at the Positive Psychology course, I knew I needed to seek help and support, even though I could not physically contact anyone during the lock down. I called the hotline of our company’s Employees Assistance Program (EAP) and started a 4-month counselling journey with an experienced psychologist who helped me find back my way to a positive and bright outlook in life. Indeed, this experience was one of the drivers that motivated me to take up a scholarship offered in my company for training in coaching and then became a volunteered internal coach to help my other colleagues to maximize their potentials. Every coaching session is always an inspiration for me to see how a client put up a big smile at the end of the session. I have also broadened my perspectives of life through the clients’ new awareness they have created for themselves.

In short, the optimistic view of human nature allows myself to focus on possibilities in life and move forwards to what I believe work the best for myself. 

Conversations of Person-Centered Therapy

The conversation in Person-Centered Therapy is to communicate trust, warm, safety, acceptance, care, understanding, openness and for the client’s self-exploration. The therapist is authentic and congruent in his / her way of use non-directive communication, and also sharing of reflection to the clients. Indeed, I think this sort of conversations is needed not just in therapy, but in our every day’s conversation at home, at workplace and many other social set ups. It’s our intension to carry a conversation to archive a desired positive outcome and also enhance the relationship with the other person. Therefore, I always want to remind myself to apply what I have learned in coaching in my ways of communications to others.

However, I realized that in a therapeutic set up when I am a coach, I do not have many difficulties to carry the sorts of conversations with the client following the Person-Centered Therapy. I know clearly the therapeutic relationship I hold with the client and the only focus is on the client’s needs during the session. In my everyday life, I find that my own needs in other relationships with family, friends and co-workers, sometimes become the block in between my true intention and my ways of communication. I sometimes subconsciously communicate in unconstructive ways and not convey my real intension for trust and understanding. Upon reflections, I will want to keep on my regular daily practice of mindfulness.

In summary, I will continue to adopt the sorts of conversations in Person-Centered Therapy in my coaching sessions and will want to use them in my everyday life to communicate my very true and kind intentions with others.

Personality Fit

Among the 16 personalities, I am the “defender” (ISFJ-T) type. Indeed, I take responsibilities personally, consistently going above and beyond, doing everything I can to exceed expectations and delight others, at work and at home. Altruism is also one important part of me. These two strengths of my personalities are actually hold me naturally well with the humanistic view of human nature and the concepts of Person-Centered Therapy. In fact, at the very beginning of my coaching practice, I found myself able to easily hold a safe space for the client with my nature and presence.

In my personal life and at work, being a “defender” helps me archive a good status of what I am doing through my enthusiasm and handwork. However, as I take things too personally sometimes and become too sensitive and anxious about the future not meeting the expectation. This thinking and emotion sometimes overrule my way of being and make me behave in opposite direction to my true self. This realization has now helped me once again understand myself better. I also often learnt about the similar realization in my clients in the coaching sessions. Nevertheless, my altruism gets me to believe in accepting myself and move on from now instead of the past. I believe that being kind and caring to others and myself is the fundamental for myself to be able to take the lesson leant and move forward for a better future. 

References

Australian Institute of Professional Counselors (AIPC). (2010). A Guide to Counselling Therapies (DVD) Person-Centered Therapy.  Retrieved from https://www.aipc.net.au/articles/person-centred-therapy/ 

Farber, B. A., & Doolin, E. M. (2011). Positive regard and affirmation. In J. C. Norcross (Ed.), Psychotherapy relationships that work: Evidence-based responsiveness (p. 168–186). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199737208.003.0008

Iberg, J.R. (2001). Unconditional Positive Regards: Constituent Activities. In J. D. Bozarth & P. Wilkins (Eds.), Rogers’ therapeutic conditions: Evolution, theory and practice. Vol 3: Unconditional positive regard (pp. 109–125). Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.

            http://previous.focusing.org/upr_iberg.pdf

McLeod, S.A. (2014). Carl Rogers. www.simplypsychology.org/carl-rogers.html 

Miller, A.MFT. (2012). Instructor’s Manual for Carl Rogers on Person-Centered Therapy with Carl R Rogers, PHD, and Natalie Rogers, PHD, REAT. Psychotherapy.net. https://www.academia.edu/35717924/Instructors_Manual_for_CARL_ROGERS_ON_PERSON_CENTERED_THERAPY_with