Student Name: Fridah Kathure

Student Registration Number:

Name of Institution: Amani Counseling Centre

And Training Institute

Campus Location:

Title of the Study: Person-Centered

Theory of Counseling and Psychotherapy.

Unit Name: Theories of Counseling

Unit Code: ADC 413A

Date of Submission:
The Person-centered theory of counselling and psychotherapy is a humanistic approach to

therapy. This theory focuses on the way the individual perceives themselves rather than how the

therapist can objectively interpret their unconscious thoughts or ideas or observe and define their

maladjusted habits. It was one of the first original theories to come from the United States,

developed by Carl Rogers around the 1940s to 1950s.

This theoretical approach to individual theory also called Rogerian therapy is a continuous

process in which the client is continually striving to integrate his/her own organismic experience

of the world with his/her self-structure. The therapist's responsibility in this process is to provide

the necessary climate that will enable the client to go through this process successfully. This

organismic experience can also be described as our five internal senses and from our internal

feelings or our visceral experiences.

Our organismic experience includes our 5 senses: see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Our self-

structure is a combination of our beliefs and our values concerning ourselves or others. As we

learn to name and organize our experiences and symbolize them in our awareness, our self-

structure grows.

This theory assumes that humans possess an innate ability or tendency to develop towards their

full potential. This is called in psycholinguistics the Actualizing Tendency. It is a drive within

every individual towards accepting important external experiences into their self-structure and

therefore into their awareness. This ability can be impeded or distorted by certain life

experiences that affect the client's self-esteem and self-worth, particularly those that are

considered traumatic.
Taken together, says Rogers (1979, p. 98) the actualizing and formative tendencies constitute the

'foundation blocks of the person-centred approach. That is to say, they are, at the level of

philosophical belief, assumptions without which the approach does not make sense, and the basis

for everything a therapist does or says while he/she is at work. Roger goes ahead to describe the

formative tendency as a universal and evolutionary force that tends towards inter-relatedness,

complexity and greater universal order. The actualizing tendency is a localized manifestation of

the formative tendency and its objective is to ensure the health and well-being of the individual

or the experiencing organism.

The actualizing tendency comes about as a result of a harmonic balance between the self-

structure and the organismic experience of the client. Rogers (1959b, p.196) further describes the

actualizing tendency as its inherent capacity of the client to develop all its capacities to maintain

or enhance itself. He later (1979, p.98) pinpoints it as an essential trait of organic life. He argues

that the tendency of the client to self-actualize can be depended upon by the therapist. That his or

her only role is to facilitate that tendency by providing the right conditions that are most

conducive to it.

Historically, the idea of an actualizing tendency is neither new nor unique to Rogers,

philosophers and writers have pondered about it before: "The production of nature" says

Aristotle (1955 p.44) "has an innate tendency in the direction of the best condition of which they

are capable." In another example, "No one writes Spinoza (1677/1993, p.154) "unless he is

overcome by external causes and those contrary to his nature

The Rogerian theory assumes that the client acquires problems in their work and personal life

when their external and internal experiences are at odds with their self-structure and this
incongruence is unavailable to their awareness. These types of problems require a Professional

form of intervention from a counsellor or a psychotherapist.

The self-structure is one half of the total personality of a human, the other half is their

accumulated experience. It is first formed in line with the values and injunctions that our parents

and other caregivers teach us throughout our early and late childhood. During this period, we

start building ideas about ourselves and the world which we perceive as absolute truths rather

than opinions or points of view. These ideas are generally known in this theory as Introjected

Values. While crafting his definition of the self, Rogers drew on the works of Angyal (1941),

Remy (1943, 1948), Lecky (1945), and Standal (1954).

A dialogue he had with Evans (1975/81, p. 16) acknowledges that Rogers was among the first

psychologists to debate about the self. He says that it includes all of the client's perceptions of his

organism, of his experience and of how those perceptions are related to other perceptions and

objects in his environment and the whole exterior world. The self therefore according to his 1951

proposition is a fluid gestalt concept; constantly changing in the light of new experiences and it

is consistent. There is no sharp limit between the experiences of the self and the outside world

(Rogers, 1951: 497)

One of the purposes of the self-structure is to keep out of awareness experiences that don't have a

bearing to function well in our society (Tolan, 2002). Since we possess an innate need to be

valued and loved by our workmates, friends and family or our 'in group' these experiences that

conflict with our self-structure are distorted or denied. We cannot make flexible choices based on

balancing our own and others' needs if we are not aware of important experiences in our lives,

experiences that may have been denied or distorted by our self-structure.

Self-structure can also be rigid and resistant to change. As a result, the client is more likely to

experience unpleasant feelings and emotions during the self-actualization process. These

emotions occur to alert the client to a discrepancy between the self and new experiences, and that

this issue requires their attention. The more someone is accepted for their whole self and not just

for adapting to the ideas of the 'in-group' of what is appropriate the less threatened their often

rigid self-structure will be. The less threatened the self-structure is the more likely it is for the

client to be more self-accepting and also have the capacity to understand and accept others. So

the task of the person-centred therapist is to provide the environment necessary for the client to

set their self-structure and experiences incongruence and to hopefully actualize.

According to Carl Rodgers (1959), there are necessary and sufficient conditions that increase the

likelihood of therapeutic change. These conditions are:

That the therapist and the client come into psychological contact.

That the client being vulnerable and anxious is in a state of incongruence

That the therapist is the congruent and integrated individual in the relationship

The therapist is experiencing unconditional positive regard for the client

The therapist is experiencing a genuine empathetic understanding of the client's frame of

reference and endeavours to communicate this experience to the client

To a limited extent, the therapist's empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard are

communicated to the client. This means that the client has to perceive the above-mentioned

conditions at least to a minimal degree (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved) PsycINFO Database

Record
These conditions whether they are necessary or sufficient, or not it is evident that they are central

to much person-centred literature and remain responsible for the process of effective therapy.

Psychological contact is the first condition which has been termed as a sin qua non or an

absolutely necessary precondition has been described by others such as Rogers (1957, p. 100) as

a binary phenomenon by which he means that two people are in psychological contact or they are

not. He goes on to suggest that the other conditions are dependent upon psychological contact.

That it is more of an assumption or pre-condition.

Some however say that psychological contact exists and occurs in degrees. Mearns (1997, p.17)

for example asserts that the reality is research shows that both clients and therapists report that

they experience degrees of contact. They argue that although many clients experience change

within the constructs of a relationship there seems to be no evidence that this change should

occur only in a relationship. To make their argument clearer I will use the example of an

electrical analogy: some tasks require electricity and some that can operate more effectively or

efficiently with electricity. It is not the only source of energy because tasks like cooking can

operate with gas.

The second necessary and sufficient condition is empathy. At its most basic, it involves

rephrasing the client's words intentionally to show that you have heard and understood them. But

at its richest, it is a process that the therapist learns as they go. It involves exploring the client's

world together with them, sensing their unspoken meaning and recognizing and being

compassionate of their pain. It involves the perception and communication of the therapist's

understanding of the client's presenting problems. As a psychotherapist, I seek to improve my

empathic understanding by developing my perception. I do this by listening more attentively to

the client's narrative and emotions.

Unconditional Positive Regard is one of the core conditions but it is hard to describe and

achieve. Theoretically, Unconditional Positive Regard develops from the congruent area of the

therapist's personality. In this ideal situation, the therapist is neither denying nor distorting her

organismic experience of his/her client nor filtering her experience of her client through her

value system that might be out of her awareness. For example, a client might come to me to help

solve a domestic issue. She will likely imply that she is in a lesbian relationship rather than

explicitly stating so assuming that she was raised knowing that lesbian relationships are dubious.

I as a therapist should be at ease with the idea of a lesbian relationship so as not to put the client

in a situation where they may be offended or affronted by my feedback.

Congruence is the aspect of our personality that is visible to us. It is the Conscious awareness of

our natural reactions and motivations. It is an open and flexible aspect of ourselves that, unlike

the self-structure, is not prone to distortion or denial. As a person-centred counsellor, our goal is

for the client to have successfully replaced other people's ideas, values, and ways of

understanding the world with their own by the end of the therapeutic sessions. It is not

uncommon to hear a client say in a therapy session, "It's not me, I'm not sure who I am any

longer, or I want to be true to myself."

This occurs because the client's locus of evaluation is external rather than internal. As a result,

when they find themselves in an unaccepting, judgmental environment, they gravitate toward

familiar values, behaviours, and ways of relating, or they put on a show to gain the acceptance of

others. Congruence on the part of the therapist enables the client to have a genuine experience of

them and their emotions and reactions. They, therefore, learn to trust their perceptions of the

therapist. When the therapist can be congruent, they are aware of their internal responses but
they do not distort or censor these responses because they may be inconsistent with the generally

accepted idea of how a counsellor should be.

In technical words, incongruence is a misalignment between the self as perceived and the

organism's real experience. According to Rogers (1959: 203), such a disparity causes tension and

internal perplexity since behavior is governed in some ways by the actualizing tendency.

Discordant or confusing behaviors result from a state of incongruence. Because there is a

discrepancy between the client’s feelings and behavior and what they consciously "desire,"

incongruent people experience at least some perplexity. Incongruence can be manifested as one

of three process factors, according to Tudor and Merry (2002: 72): ‘a general and generalized

vulnerability, a faintly experienced tension or worry, and a vivid awareness of incongruence.'

Every person-centered student or therapist has to answer the question of whether the above

conditions that Rogers has put forth are necessary and sufficient. For a condition to be necessary,

it means it has to be present for therapeutic personality change to occur. Some recent research

papers have disagreed with this, showing evidence that therapeutic personality change or

development can occur through a variety of mechanisms where there is much of a relationship

between the client and the therapist. For example, James Pennebaker argues that writing about

emotional experiences, as with keeping a diary or journaling can be profoundly therapeutic.

There is also a large body of evidence that shows that online therapies can be as helpful as face

to face therapy sessions with minimal interpersonal contact involved. When it comes to

sufficiency, latest research findings show that all of Rogers’s core conditions are associated with

positive therapeutic change. There is also good quantitative and qualitative evidence available

showing that some clients report that they benefitted more from non-relational therapeutic

interventions like Cognitive behavioral therapy than from person-centered counseling style.
Some also say that Rogerian theory does not take into account valid individual differences and so

it erroneously assumes that every client will respond the same way if taken through the therapy

sessions with all the conditions present.

As a person-centred oriented counsellor, I would incorporate my personality traits or my

psychological type into my work to create a synergistic effect. For example, research shows that

both practising therapists and trainees chose a counselling orientation based on their

personalities. Those whose psychological type fell under the SJ type (Sensing-Judging) were

more likely to choose Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Those who were in the NFJ type (Intuition-

Feeling-Judging) chose the Psychodynamic model and those who fell under the NFP type chose

the person-centred model.

In my Kenyan sociocultural context, the efficacy of person-centered counseling methods has to

be fully emphasized. This is because demographically Kenya is comprised of more teenagers and

young adults than adults in the middle and late stages of life. This cohort is more likely to be

vulnerable to emotional instability and problems of low self-worth because they are constantly

being exposed to ideas and values of celebrity figures and other peers on the internet. This

happens more frequently on social media sites. For example someone might publish a post online

bashing the gay community which might make the young adults who sexually identify

themselves as gay to question their Sexuality. It is my responsibility as a therapist to help this

clientele to attain a state of congruence and to live in line with their own values , rather than the

values of others. I will incorporate person-centered skills because it insists on building a healthy

relationship between the client and the therapist

In our current sociopolitical global setting, person-centered counseling seems to be a timely

approach to effective counseling compared to such theoretical approaches as gestalt or

psychoanalysis. However, according to Wressle & Samuelsson (2004), the biggest barrier to

person-centered counseling is a counselor with an incomplete set of skills. This weakness is

magnified when the therapist is conducting cross-cultural counseling. The therapist may not be

accustomed to the norms and traditions of other cultures therefore interfering with her ability to

be congruent. Issues involving new social contexts such as going to a refugee center for example

to counsel a population largely consisting of citizens from different ethnic groups could escape

the understanding of even the very culturally educated counselor (Dyche & Zayas, 2001);

therefore the therapist should proactively participate in continuing education to ensure a more

empathic and ethical service for the culturally different client (Lee, 2008; Sigelman, Rider, 2012)

I would incorporate most of Roger's ideas and theoretical direction in my practice especially

because I work in the African context. I would have to develop a cross-cultural counselling

strategy putting into account my county's socio-cultural context and that of the continent in

general. For example, we have so much diversity ethnically here in Kenya. This diversity can

present the unique challenges of different cultural practices and values. It can also bring the

problem of language barrier between the client and me; the therapist. Person-centred

psychotherapy comes around as a good solution for these challenges because it is non-directive;

the therapist's prejudices and biases will not, therefore, be hindering factors to the client's

development. I would also have to incorporate a pluralistic perspective into my therapy style. By

this I mean that I will put particular emphasis in understanding the client as a unique and

‘nonstandardizable’ being whose therapeutic needs are likely to be heterogeneous and

unpredictable in advance. I will orientate my work with the client towards their goals. To fully
understand the client’s goals for therapy, I need to increase my level of dialogue and meta-

communication with the client. Other perspectives and practices within the PCE community, as

well as non-PCE therapies, are valued highly in this pluralistic approach to person-centered

therapy; nonetheless, it challenges "dogmatic person-centeredness" and urges PCE practitioners

to be mindful of their work's limitations. It also provides a consistent, "client-centered"

framework for PCE therapists to incorporate a diverse set of techniques, research findings, and

ideas into their practice.

REFERENCES

Tudor, K., & Worrall, M. (2006). Person-centred therapy: A clinical philosophy. Routledge.

Tolan, J., & Cameron, R. (2016). Skills in person-centred counselling & psychotherapy. Sage.
Evi Varlami & Professor Rowan Bayne (2007) Psychological type and counselling psychology

trainees' choice of counselling orientation, Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 20:4, 361-373,

DOI: 10.1080/09515070701633283

Spangenberg, J. J. (2003). The Cross‐Cultural Relevance of Person‐Centered Counseling in

Postapartheid South Africa. Journal of Counseling & Development, 81(1), 48-54.

Dyche, L., & Zayas, L. H. (2001). Cross-cultural empathy and training the contemporary
psychotherapist.Clinical Social Work Journal. 29(3), 245-258. Retrieved from
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1010407728614?LI=true