CHAPTER III

Person-Centered Therapy

Person-centered therapy founded by Carl Rogers went through certain periods

before it became how it is called now. First, it was called the non-directive counseling

where emphasis was given to the counselor’s creation of a permissive and nondirective

climate. Counselors avoided sharing a great deal about themselves with clients and

instead focused mainly on reflecting and clarifying the clients’ verbal and nonverbal

communications with the aim of helping clients become aware of and gain insight into

their feelings. The second development was called the client-centered therapy where

there was a shift from clarification of feelings to a focus on the phenomenological world

of the client. During this time the best vantage point to understand how people behave

was from their own internal frame of reference. This refers to how the person perceives

his/ her world or reality. On becoming one’s self was the third developmental stage

which gave focus on the nature 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. It focused explicitly on the actualizing

tendency as the basic motivational force that leads to change. The catalyst leading to

personality change in this development is the quality of client-therapist relationship. In

the present it is now called the person-centered therapy which is marked by

considerable expansion to education, industry, groups, conflict resolution, and the

search for world peace. This therapy is applied mainly to individual and group

counseling and its areas of further application include education, family life, leadership
and administration, organizational development, health care, cross-cultural and

interracial activity, and international relations, world peace and politics.

The connections between the terms existentialism and humanism have tended to

be confusing for students and theorists alike. The two viewpoints have much in

common, yet there are also significant philosophical differences between them.

Both humanism and existentialism share a respect for the client’s subjective experience,

the uniqueness and individuality of each client, and a trust in the capacity of the client to

make positive and constructive conscious choices. Both have common emphasis on

concepts such as freedom, choice, values, personal responsibility, autonomy, purpose,

and meaning. Both approaches place little value on the role of techniques in the

therapeutic process, and emphasize instead the importance of genuine encounter.

Despite these Humanism takes the somewhat less anxiety-evoking position that each of

us has a natural potential that we can actualize and through which we can find meaning.

While, existentialism takes the position that we are faced with the anxiety of choosing to

create an identity in a world that lacks intrinsic meaning.

Rogers view humans as trustworthy, resourceful, capable of self-understanding

and self-direction, able to make constructive changes, and able to live effective and

productive lives. All of these characterizes man’s actualization tendency which means

that people are motivated by an innate tendency to actualize, maintain and enhance the

self. And that change occurs, only if the person decides to change.

Person-centered therapy aims toward the client achieving a greater degree of

independence and integration. To achieve this therapists assist clients in their growth
process so clients could better cope with their current and future problems. This can be

done in a climate conducive to helping the individual become a fully functioning person,

where clients feel safe and secure from discrimination and judgment. Hopefully, after

the therapy, people become 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. As Rogers would say, “It is that the individual has within

himself or herself vast resources for self-understanding, for altering his or her self-

concept, attitudes and self-directed behavior - and that these resources can be tapped if

only a definable climate of facilitative psychological attitudes can be provided" (1980,

p.115-117).

In the therapeutic process, the person-centered therapists’ role is rooted in their

ways of being and attitudes, rather than on the techniques to get the client do

something. According to the person-centered therapy, therapists in themselves are the

instrument of change and that their role is to be without roles. Therapists don’t get to tell

the clients what to do for they are not the experts in the therapy, rather their presence

is mainly for facilitating the clients. This follows the notion of the Rogerian therapy that

people who come in therapy are referred as 'clients', not 'patients'. This is because

therapists see themselves and client as equal partners rather than as an expert treating

a patient. As clients engage in the therapeutic process with a facilitating therapist they

will have the capacity to define and clarify their own goals.

A person enters person-centered therapy in a state of incongruence. This means

that the person has an existing discrepancy in his/her self-perception and their

experience of reality. It is the role of the therapists to reverse this situation. The therapy
allows the clients to express their fears, anxiety, guilt, shame, hatred, anger, and other

emotions that they had deemed too negative to accept and incorporate into their self-

structure. Clients become less defensive and become more open to their experience.

With the help of the therapist eventually the client consciously and rationally decides for

themselves what is wrong and what should be done about it. The therapist is more of a

friend or counselor who listens and encourages on an equal level. Given a conducive

environment and a warm relationship with the therapist, clients become more realistic

as they focus in the here and now; perceive others with greater accuracy as they

already established their own self-concept; then become better able to understand and

accept others as they accept themselves. This can only be done though, if and only if

clients take the responsibility to create their own self-growth, they are the primary

agents of change and therapeutic relationship provides a supportive structure within

which clients’ self-healing capacities are activated.

Client-centered therapy operates according to three basic principles that reflect

the attitude of the therapist to the client:

1. The therapist is congruent with the client. The therapist does not have a façade

that is, the therapist's internal and external experiences are one in the same. In short,

the therapist is authentic. As clients experience the therapist listening in an accepting

way to them, they gradually learn how to listen acceptingly to themselves.

2. The therapist provides the client with unconditional positive regard and

acceptance. Rogers believed that for people to grow and fulfill their potential it is

important that they are valued as themselves. The therapist shows an attitude of "I'll
accept you as you are." Therapists communicate through their behavior that they value

their clients as they are and that clients are free to have feelings and experiences

without risking the loss of their therapists’ acceptance.

3. The therapist shows empathetic understanding to the client. This refers to the

therapist's ability to understand sensitively and accurately the client's experience and

feelings in the here-and-now. This is to perceive the internal frame of reference of

another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain

thereto as if one were the person, but without ever losing or drowning the self into it.

There is an almost total absence of techniques in Rogerian psychotherapy due to

the unique character of each counseling relationship. Emphasis, however, is given to

the quality of the relationship between client and therapist. Therapeutic relationship is

considered the critical variable, not what the therapist says or does. The Rogerian

person-centered approach puts emphasis on the person coming to form an appropriate

understanding of their world and themselves. Rogers regarded everyone as a

“potentially competent individual” who could benefit greatly from his form of therapy.

What matters, is the client’s resources, participation, evaluation of the alliance, and

perceptions of the problem and its resolution. The techniques, it turns out, are only

helpful if the client sees them as relevant and credible.

Person-centered therapy is applied to individuals, groups, and families in a wide

range of problems including anxiety disorders, alcoholism, psychosomatic problems,

agoraphobia, interpersonal difficulties, depression, cancer, and personality disorders. Its

philosophy has applications to education—from elementary school to graduate school.

This can be seen in the transition in teacher’s role from controlling managers to

facilitators of learning.

In the context of crisis intervention, the first step in employing a person-centered

therapy is to give the clients an opportunity to fully express themselves. This entails that

clients should feel being heard and understood for it helps to calm them in the midst of

turmoil, and enables them to think more clearly and make better decisions. When

applied to group counseling, it gives focus on the primary function of the counselor that

is to create a safe and healing climate—a place where the group members can interact

in honest and meaningful ways. This allows for a genuine and trusting environment

where clients feel heard, safe and secured which is the primary goal of the therapy

leading to a positive change.

Person-Centered Expressive Arts Therapy

Following her father’s footsteps, Natalie Rogers, expanded her father’s therapy through

her Expressive Arts Therapy. Her therapy adheres to the following principles:

1. All people have an innate ability to be creative.

2. The creative process is transformative and healing.

3. Personal growth and higher states of consciousness are achieved through self-

awareness, self-understanding, and insight.

4. Self-awareness, understanding, and insight are achieved by delving into our

feelings of grief, anger, pain, fear, joy, and ecstasy.

5. Our feelings and emotions are an energy source that can be channeled into the

expressive arts to be released and transformed.

6. The expressive arts lead us into the unconscious, thereby enabling us to express

previously unknown facets of ourselves and bring to light new information and

awareness.

7. One art form stimulates and nurtures the other, bringing us to an inner core or

essence that is our life energy.

8. A connection exists between our life force—our inner core, or soul—and the

essence of all beings.

9. As we journey inward to discover our essence or wholeness, we discover our

relatedness to the outer world, and the inner and outer become one.

Basically, Rogers’ therapy is based on a person-centered theory of individual

and group process where art is used as a medium for clients to express their deep

and inaccessible feelings. Primary element to this therapy is facilitative client–

counselor relationship to support creativity. This is in connection to the view of the

therapy that personal growth takes place in a safe, supportive environment created

by counselors or facilitators who are genuine, warm, empathic, open, honest,

congruent, and caring. Deep faith in the individual’s innate drive to become fully

oneself is basic to the work in person-centered expressive arts therapy. Therapists

view individuals to have a tremendous capacity for self-healing through creativity if

given the proper environment.

Besides a supportive environment, certain external conditions also foster and

nurture the foregoing internal conditions for creativity. Included are : (1)

psychological safety consisting of accepting the individual as of unconditional worth,

providing a climate, in which external evaluation is absent, and understanding

empathically, (2) psychological freedom, and (3) offering stimulating and challenging

experiences. Natalie Rogers added the last condition to her therapy because she

believes that the creativity of an individual can only be awaken if they are given

activities that are interesting and exciting to do.