Client-Centered Theory

It'd do you better to read... This includes blocks of description without terms :/

Carl Rogers

Founded this theory.

Person-Centered theory

Rogerian personality theory.

Formative Tendency

The tendency for all matter to evolve from simpler to more complex forms.

Actualizing Tendency

The tendency within all humans to move toward completion or fulfillment of potentials. The only motive people possess.

Maintenance

Similar to the lower steps on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Includes basic needs. Conservative in nature.

Enhancement

The need to become more, to develop, and to achieve growth. Seen in people’s willingness to learn things that are not immediately rewarding.

Not.

Actualization tendency (is / is not) limited to humans.

Actualization Tendency

Refers to the organismic experiences of the individual.

Self-Actualization

Tendency to actualize the self as perceived in awareness. Refers to the whole person.

Self-Concept

Includes all those aspects of one’s being and one’s experiences that are perceived in awareness by the individual.

Organismic self

Proportions of this may be beyond a person’s awareness or simply not owned by that person. Such as the stomach.

Ideal Self

One’s view of self as one wishes to be. Contains all those attributes, usually positive, that people aspire to possess.

Incongruence

A wide gap between the ideal self and the self-concept indicate ___ and an unhealthy personality.

Awareness

The symbiotic representation of some portion of our experience.

Ignored or Denied

Levels of Awareness: Below the threshold of awareness. Ignoring many potential stimuli.

Accurately symbolized

Levels of Awareness: Freely admitted to the self-structure. Nonthreatening and consistent with the existing self-concept.

Distorted form

When our experience is not consistent with our view of self, we reshape it so that it can be assimilated into our existing self-concept. This results in it having ___.

Making contact with another person

The minimum experience necessary for becoming a person.

Positive regard

The need to be loved, liked, or accepted by another person.

Positive self-regard

Experience of prizing or valuing one’s self.

Conditions of Worth

Perception that others accept them only of they meet those people’s expectations and approval. Criterion by which we accept or reject our experiences.

External Evaluation

Our perceptions of other people’s view of us.

Incongruence

Or psychological disequilibrium. When we fail to recognize our organismic experiences as self-experiences.

Vulnerability

When people are unaware of the discrepancy between their organismic self and their significant experience.

Anxiety

State of uneasiness or tension whose cause is unknown.

Threat

Anxiety evolves into this. Awareness that our self is no longer whole or congruent.

Defensiveness

Protection of the self-concept against anxiety and threat by the denial or distortion of experiences inconsistent with it.

Distortion

When we misinterpret an experience in order to fit into some aspect of our self-concept.

Denial

We refuse to perceive an experience in awareness, or at least we keep some aspect of it from reaching symbolization.

Disorganization

When defenses fail to function. Behavior is still consistent with the self-concept but the self-concept has been broken and thus the behavior appears bizarre and confusing.

a) Client must come to contact with a congruent therapist who possesses empathy.

b) Client must perceive these characteristics in the therapist.

c) Contact between client and therapist must be of some duration.

Conditions for therapeutic growth to take place.

Congruence

When a person’s organismic experiences are matched by an awareness of them and by an ability and willingness to openly express these feelings.

Unconditional Positive Regard

Occurs when the need to be accepted exists without any conditions or qualifications.

Empathic Listening

Exists when therapists accurately sense the feelings of their clients and are able to communicate these perceptions. Without prejudice, projection, or evaluation.

Stage 6

Stage of therapeutic change where people experience dramatic growth and an irreversible movement toward becoming fully functioning or self-actualizing.

The Person of Tomorrow

Rogers’s idea of a fully functioning person that lives in the world of tomorrow. More adaptable, open, trustful to their organismic self, and capable of existential living.