HUMANISTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY (CARL ROGERS)

Carl Rogers

• Pioneer in Humanistic psychology

• Academic Background: a quiet revolutionary

• A deep openness to change, courage to forge ahead into unknown territory, questioning stance, both as a person & as a professional

• Core theme: necessity for nonjudgmental listening & acceptance if clients are to change

Period 1 (1940-1950): Nondirective Psychotherapy

• Emphasized the therapist's creation of a permissive & non-interventive climate

• Main techniques: acceptance & clarification

• Therapist avoided interaction with the client & functioned as a clarifier but submerged in own personhood

• Therapy relied mainly on the innate growth urge of the client

Period 2 (1950-1957): Reflective Psychotherapy

• Reflected the feelings of the client & avoided threat in the relationship

• Client was able to develop a greater degree of congruence between self-concept & ideal self-concept

• Emphasis was on responding sensitively to the affective, rather than semantic, meaning of the client's expression

• Emphasize therapist's responsiveness to the client's feelings

• Mirrors the client's states; therapist's person not emphasized

Period 3 (1957-1970): Experiential Therapy

• Therapist's wide range of behavior to express basic attitudes characterizes this approach

• Focus-client's experiencing & the expression of the therapist's experiencing

• Client grows on a continuum by learning to use immediate experiencing

Present: Person- Centered Therapy

• Emphasized certain "necessary & sufficient" conditions for personality change to occur

• Introduced the crucial elements of the therapist's attitudes as prerequisites to effective therapy

• Focus— therapist's expression of own immediate feelings in relationship with the client

• Allows for a wider range & greater flexibility of therapist behavior, including expressions or opinions, feelings, & so forth

4th Phase: Holistic Therapy

• Emphasizes increased involvement of the therapist as a person with thoughts, values, & feelings who is willing to fully use them in the relationship

• Allows the therapist greater freedom to participate more actively in relationship

• Applied in: training of workers in organizations such as the Peace Corps, school systems, government, family therapy, hospitals, clinics, & foreign relations

Congruence/ Genuiness

• Most important that therapists are real, genuine, integrated, & authentic during the therapy session

• Facilitates honest communication; Exists in a continuum rather than on an all-or-nothing basis

accurate Empathic Understanding

• Understand sensitively & accurately

• Sense clients' feelings as if one's own without becoming lost in those feelings

• Help clients expand their awareness of feeling that are only partially recognized

• Sense of personal identification with the client

Unconditional Positive Regard

Deep & genuine caring for client as a person without placing stipulations on the acceptance

Immediacy

addressing what is going on between the client and therapist

Expressive Arts Therapy

extends the person-centered approach to spontaneous creative expression, which symbolizes deep and sometimes inaccessible feelings and emotional states

Motivational Interviewing

• a humanistic, client-centered, psychosocial, directive counseling approach that was developed by William R. Miller and Stephen

•  “a directive, client centered counseling style for eliciting behavior change by helping clients to explore and resolve ambivalence”

1. Precontemplation stage (nurturing parent)

there is no intention of changing a behavior pattern in the near future

2. Contemplation stage (Socratic teacher)

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

3. Preparation Stage (experienced coach)

individuals intend to take action immediately and report some small behavioral changes

4. Action stage (consultant)

individuals are taking steps to modify their behavior to solve their problems

5. Maintenance stage (consultant)

people work to consolidate their gains and prevent relapse

Gestalt Therapy

• Developed by Frederick (Fritz) and Laura Perls

• Aims at enhancing clients’ self awareness in order to free them to grow in their own consciously guided ways

• (a) Become aware of feelings they have disowned but that are a genuine part of them, and (b) Recognize feelings and values they think are a genuine part of themselves but in fact are borrowed from other people

• Much more active and dramatic

•  “Re-own” the genuine aspects of self that have been rejected and to reject the “phony” features that do not belong

Focus on the Here and Now

• Gestalt therapists believe that therapeutic progress is made by keeping clients in contact with their feelings as they occur in the here and now

  • now = experience = awareness = reality

Role- playing (Part-taking)

• clients explore inner conflicts and experience the symptoms, interpersonal games, and psychological defenses they have developed

• extended “conversations” between various parts of the client, including between the client’s superego (what Perls called “topdog”) and the part that is suppressed by “shoulds” and “oughts” (the “underdog”)

Empty chair technique

Therapists encourage clients to “talk” to someone they imagine to be seated in a nearby chair

Unmailed letter technique

They write—but do not send—a letter in which they express important but previously unspoken feelings

Role- played reversals

The client who conveys an image of cool self-sufficiency and denies feelings of tenderness toward others might be asked to play a warm, loving person

Use of nonverbal cues

• Often contradicts the client’s words

• Ex. If a client says that she is nervous and clasps her hands, the therapist might wonder what the clasped hands meant.

  • The therapist might ask her to repeat and exaggerate the hand clasp and to concentrate on the associated feelings

Frustrating the client (Hot seat)

• All attention was focused on the client and where his or her symptoms, games, and resistances were pointed out and explored

  • The therapist would continue to frustrate the client’s attempt to get the therapist to take responsibility for solving the client’s problems and, in the process, would help the client recognize how he avoids responsibility for improving

Existential psychotherapies

• Existential therapists help clients to explore fully what it means to be alive

• Rooted in existential philosophy, which stresses the immense freedom that human beings have to make sense of their lives

• Existential humanistic therapists try to understand the client’s inner world, frames of reference, and flow of experiences

• Therapists might comment on client’s body postures, tone of voice, use of language, assumptions, and the like 

• The method is eclectic or integrative and the focus is on the struggle for the meaning of existence, worked out one client at a time

Motivational interviewing

• Therapists use reflective listening techniques to call clients’ attention to their choices and values

• Often used in substance abuse counseling or in other situations where clients may be resistant to treatment or distrustful of authority

• Inclined to diverge from straight reflection, sometimes purposely overstating or siding with only one side of a client’s ambivalence

Emotion- focused therapy

• Emphasizes the role of emotion in human experience (ex. Process_ experiential emotion focused therapy)

• Views psychological difficulties as coming from emotional schemes—people’s organized patterns of emotional responses

•  Emotion regulation is also a focus of the therapy, and so therapists work with clients to become aware of, label, accept, reflect upon, and modify their emotions