stages of therapeutic change

• Stages of Therapeutic Change The process of constructive personality change can be placed on a continuum from most defensive to most integrated. Rogers (1961) arbitrarily divided this continuum into seven stages.
• Stage 1 is characterized by an unwillingness to communicate anything about oneself. People at this stage ordinarily do not seek help, but if for some reason they come to therapy, they are extremely rigid and resistant to change. They do not recog nize any problems and refuse to own any personal feelings or emotions.
• Stage 2, clients become slightly less rigid. They discuss external events and other people, but they still disown or fail to recognize their own feelings. However, they may talk about personal feelings as if such feelings were objective phenomena.
• Stage 3, they more freely talk about self, although still as an object. “I’m doing the best I can at work, but my boss still doesn’t like me.” Clients talk about feelings and emotions in the past or future tense and avoid present feelings. They refuse to accept their emotions, keep personal feelings at a distance from the here-and-now situation, only vaguely perceive that they can make personal choices, and deny individual responsibility for most of their decisions.
• Stage 4 begin to talk of deep feelings but not ones presently felt. “I was really burned up when my teacher accused me of cheating.” When clients do express pres ent feelings, they are usually surprised by this expression. They deny or distort experiences, although they may have some dim recognition that they are capable of feeling emotions in the present. They begin to question some values that have been introjected from others, and they start to see the incongruence between their perceived self and their organismic experi ence.
• Stage 5, they have begun to undergo significant change and growth. They can express feelings in the present, although they have not yet accu rately symbolized those feelings. They are beginning to rely on an internal locus of evaluation for their feelings and to make fresh and new discoveries about themselves. They also experience a greater differentiation of feelings and develop more apprecia tion for nuances among them.
• Stage 6 experience dramatic growth and an irreversible movement toward becoming fully functioning or self-actualizing. They freely allow into aware ness those experiences that they had previously denied or distorted. They become more congruent and are able to match their present experiences with awareness and with open expression.
• When persons come to experience themselves as prized and unconditionally accepted, they realize, perhaps for the first time, that they are lovable. As clients perceive that they are empathically understood, they are freed to listen to themselves more accurately, to have empathy for their own feelings. As a consequence, when these persons come to prize themselves and to accurately understand themselves, their perceived self becomes more congruent with their organismic experiences.
• process of therapeutic change is set in motion, then certain observable out comes can be expected. The most basic outcome of successful client-centered therapy is a congruent client who is less defensive and more open to experience. Each of the remaining outcomes is a logical extension of this basic one.
• Because their ideal self and their real self are more congruent, clients experi ence less physiological and psychological tension, are less vulnerable to threat, and have less anxiety. They are less likely to look to others for direction and less likely to use others’ opinions and values as the criteria for evaluating their own experiences.
• The interest shown by Rogers in the psychologically healthy individual is rivaled only by that of Maslow (see Chapter 9). Whereas Maslow was primarily a researcher, Rogers was first of all a psychotherapist whose concern with psychologically healthy people grew out of his general theory of therapy.
• Rogers first briefly put forward his “characteristics of the altered personality”; then he enlarged on the concept of the fully functioning person in an unpublished paper
• In 1959, his theory of the healthy personality was expounded in the Koch series, and he returned to this topic frequently during the early 1960s (Rogers, 1961, 1962, 1963). Somewhat later, he described both the world of tomorrow and the person of tomorrow