Person-Centered Theraphy

• A major spokesperson for humanistic psychology. He showed a questioning stance, a deep openness to change, and the courage to forge into unknown territory both as a person and as a professional.

  Carl Rogers
• Four Periods of Development of the Approach:

  • First period: Nondirective counseling
  • Second period: Client-Centered Therapy
  • Third period: Significant publication as On Becoming a Person
  • Fourth period: Person-centered approach
• Which provided a powerful and revolutionary alternative to the directive and interpretive approaches to therapy then being practiced

  1st period: Nondirective counseling
• He focused more explicitly on the actualizing tendency as the basic motivational force that leads to client change.

  2nd period: Client-Centered Therapy
• Described the process of “becoming one’s experience, ” which is characterized by an openness to experience, a trust in one’s experience, an internal locus of evaluation, and the willingness to be in process.

  3rd period: Significant publication as On Becoming a Person
• The main source of successful psychotherapy is the client.

  4th period: Person-centered approach
• Maslow studied what he called “self-actualizing people” and found that they differed in important ways from so-called normal individual
• Maslow postulated a hierarchy of needs as a source of motivation, with the most basic needs being physiological needs.
• The person-centered approach rejects the role of the therapist as the authority who knows best and of the passive client who merely follows the beliefs of the therapist
• Person-centered theory holds that the therapist’s function is to be present and accessible to clients and to focus on their immediate experience.
• The person-centered approach aims toward the client achieving a greater degree of independence and integration.
• Rogers described people who are becoming increasingly actualized as having:

  1. an openness to experience,
  2. a trust in themselves,
  3. an internal source of evaluation, and
  4. a willingness to continue growing
• The therapy relationship provides a supportive structure within which clients’ self-healing capacities are activated.
• The world of the client and reflecting this understanding.

  Early Emphasis on Reflection of Feelings
• One of the main ways in which person-centered therapy has evolved is the diversity, innovation, and individualization in practice. This development encourages the use of a wider variety of methods and allows for considerable diversity in personal style among person-centered therapists.

  Evolution of Person-Centered Methods
• It may not be a question of whether to incorporate assessment into therapeutic practice but of how to involve clients as fully as possible in their assessment and treatment process

  The Role of Assessment
• The person-centered approach demands a great deal of the therapist. An effective person-centered therapist must be grounded, centered, genuine, respectful, caring, present, a focused and astute listener, patient, and accepting in a way that involves maturity.

  Application of the Philosophy of the Person- Centered Approach
• Application to Crisis Intervention Suggestions, guidance, and even direction may be called for if clients are not able to function effectively.
• Application to Group Counseling — The primary function of the facilitator is to create a safe and healing climate—a place where the group members can interact in honest and meaningful ways.
• Natalie Rogers expanded on her father, Carl Rogers’s, theory of creativity using the expressive arts to enhance personal growth for individuals and groups.
• Rogers’s approach, known as expressive arts therapy, extends the person-centered approach to spontaneous creative expression, which symbolizes deep and sometimes inaccessible feelings and emotional states.
• Person-centered expressive arts therapy utilizes the arts for spontaneous creative expression that symbolizes deep and sometimes inaccessible feelings and emotional states. The conditions that foster creativity require acceptance of the individual, a nonjudgmental setting, empathy, psychological freedom, and availability of stimulating and challenging experiences.
• Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a humanistic, client-centered, psychosocial, directive counseling approach that was developed by William R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick in the early 1980s.
• Motivational interviewing was initially designed as a brief intervention for problem drinking, but more recently this approach has been applied to a wide range of clinical problems including substance abuse, compulsive gambling, eating disorders, anxiety disorders, depression, suicidality, chronic disease management, and health behavior change practices.
• The Stages of Changes

  1. precontemplation stage
  2. contemplation stage
  3. preparation stage
  4. action stage
  5. maintenance stage
• In the precontemplation stage, there is no intention of changing a behavior pattern in the near future.
• In the contemplation stage, people are aware of a problem and are considering overcoming it, but they have not yet made a commitment to take action to bring about the change.
• In the preparation stage, individuals intend to take action immediately and report some small behavioral changes.
• In the action stage, individuals are taking steps to modify their behavior to solve their problems.
• During the maintenance stage, people work to consolidate their gains and prevent relapse.
• Person-centered therapy emphasizes the importance of therapist empathy in counseling, as it facilitates constructive change in clients
• Emotion-focused therapy (EFT), developed by Leslie Greenberg, is an integrative approach that combines Gestalt and existential therapy. It emphasizes the role of emotion in psychotherapeutic change, aiming to strengthen the self, regulate affect, and create new meaning