Finals L4: Carl Rogers - Client Centered Therapy

Formative Tendency

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

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

Actualizing Tendency

Tendency within humans (and other animals and plants) to move toward completion or fulfillment of potentials.

Because each person operates as one complete organism, actualization involves the whole person.

Maintenance and Enhancement

Tendencies to _____ and to _____ the organism are subsumed within the actualizing tendency.

1. Congruent or Authentic

2. Empathy

3. Unconditional Positive Regard

The three conditions that are both necessary and sufficient for becoming a fully functioning or self-actualizing person.

• Self-concept

• Ideal Self

What are the two self sub-systems?

Self-concept

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

Ideal Self

One’s view of self as one wishes to be.

Contains all those attributes, usually positive, that people aspire to possess.

Incongruence

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

1. Ignored or Denied

2. Accurately Symbolized

3. Distorted

What are the levels of awareness according to Carl Rogers?

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 one’s self

• Conditions of worth

• Incongruence

• Defensiveness

• Disorganization

What are the barriers to Psychological Health?

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 organismic experiences into awareness because they appear inconsistent with the emerging self- concept.

Ex: Vulnerability, Anxiety and Threat

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.

• Counselor Congruence

• Unconditional Positive Regard

• Empathetic Listening / Empathy

What are the necessary conditions for therapeutic growth?

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 façade, 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.

• Therapists do not evaluate clients, nor do they accept one action and reject another.

Empathetic Listening

• Therapist accurately sense the feelings of their clients.

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

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

• Understanding of what it means to be the client at the particular moment.

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".