Carl Rogers

Carl Rogers

• The founder of Client-Centered Therapy

• He was more concerned with helping people than with why they behaved as they did.

• His preference was to be a helper of people and not a constructor of theories.

• he emphasized the importance of the growth within the patient.

Formative Tendency

• Tendency for all matter, both organic and inorganic, to evolve from simpler to more complex forms.

• Example: human consciousness evolves from a primitive unconsciousness to a highly organized awareness.

Actualizing Tendency

• Tendency with humans (and other animals and plants) to move forward completion or fulfillment of potentials.

• It is not limited to humans. Just as plants need conditions to grow, a human’s actualization tendency is realized only under certain conditions as well.

• Specifically, people must be involved in a relationship with a partner who is congruent, or authentic, and who demonstrates empathy and unconditional positive regard.

Self-Actualization

• a subset of the actualization tendency and is therefore not synonymous with it.

• the tendency to actualize the self as perceived in awareness.

Self-Concept

• All those aspects of one’s being and one’s experience that are perceived in awareness by the individual.

• Not identical with organismic self.

Ideal Self

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

• Psychologically healthy individuals perceive little discrepancy between their self-concept and what they ideally would like to be.

Incongruence

• An unhealthy personality marked by a wide gap between the ideal self and self-concept.

Levels of Awareness

• “the symbolic representation of some portion of our experience”

• He used the term synonymously with both consciousness and symbolization.

Ignored or Denied

Some events that are experienced below the threshold of awareness.

Accurately Symbolized

Experiences that are freely admitted to the self-structure and consistent with the existing self-concept.

Distorted

Reshaping of experiences that are not consistent with our view of self.

Contact

The minimum experience necessary for becoming a person.

Positive Regard

Need to be loved, liked, or accepted by another person.

Positive Self-Regard

Experience of prizing or valuing oneself.

Barriers to Psychological Health

• Conditions of Worth

• Incongruence

• Defensiveness

• Disorganization

Conditions of Worth

Perception that parents, peers, or partners love and accept them ONLY if they meet those people’s expectations and approval.

Incongruence

• Failure to recognize our organismic experiences as self-experiences.

• Happens when people do not accurately symbolize, they appear inconsistent with the emerging self-concept.

Defensiveness

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

Disorganization

When the incongruence between people’s perceived self and their organismic experience is either too obvious or occurs too suddenly to be denied or distorted, their behavior becomes disorganized.

Psychotherapy

• Necessary conditions for therapeutic growth.

• The basic outcomes of client-centered counseling are congruent clients.

Counselor Congruence

• To be real or genuine, to be whole or integrated, to be what one truly is.

• Therapists wear no masks, do not attempt to fake a pleasant facade, and avoid any pretense of friendliness and affections when these emotions are not truly felt.

• Involves feelings, awareness, and expression.

Unconditional Positive Regard

• Experiencing a warm, positive and accepting attitude toward what is the client.

• Therapists accept and prize their clients without any restrictions or reservations.

• How a non-possessive warmth and acceptance, not an effusive, effervescent persona.

Empathic Listening/Empathy

• Therapist accurately sense the feelings of their clients.

• Temporary living in the other’s life, moving about in it delicately without making judgments.

• Therapists sees things from the client’s point of view.

Stage 1

unwillingness to communicate anything about oneself.

Stage 2

clients become slightly less rigid.

Stage 3

clients freely talk about oneself, although still as an object.

Stage 4

clients begin to talk of deep feelings but not ones presently felt.

Stage 5

clients can express feelings in the present, although not yet accurately symbolized.

Stage 6

experience dramatic growth as they freely allow into awareness those experiences that they had previously denied or distorted.

Stage 7

can occur outside the therapeutic encounter where the clients become fully functioning persons of tomorrow.

Rogerian Concept of Humanity

• Free Choice

• Optimistic

• Teleology

• Uniqueness

• More emphasis on conscious processes

• Social influences