Carl Rogers

Person-Centered Theory

• client-centered

• Rogerian personality theory

Rogers postulated two broad assumptions

• formative tendency and the actualizing tendency

Formative Tendency

• believed that there is a tendency for all matter, both organic and inorganic, to evolve from simpler to more complex forms

Actualizing tendency

• tendency within all humans (and other animals and plants) to move toward completion or fulfillment of potentials

• This tendency is the only motive people possess.

• maintenance and enhance

Maintenance

• basic needs as food, air, and safety; but it also includes the tendency to resist change and to seek the status quo.

• expressed in people’s desire to protect their comfortable self-concept

Enhancement

• to become more, to develop, and to achieve growth

• people’s willingness to learn things that are not immediately rewarding

• expressed in curiosity, playfulness, self-exploration, friendship, and confidence that one can achieve psychological growth.

congruent/authentic, empathy, and unconditional positive regard

• does not cause people to move toward constructive personal change

• necessary and sufficient for becoming self-actualizing person

Actualization tendency

• organismic experiences of individual, it refers to person—conscious and unconscious, physiological and cognitive

Self-actualization

• a subset of the actualization tendency

• tendency to actualize the self as

  perceived in awareness.

Self subsystem

• self concept and ideal self

Self-concept

• all aspects of one’s being and one’s experiences

• inconsistent ____________either denied or accepted only in distorted forms

Ideal self

• one’s view of self as one wishes to be

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

incongruence

• wide gap between the ideal self and the self-concept

• unhealthy personality

Awareness

• the symbolic representation of some portion of our experience

Levels of awareness

• some experiences are ignored or denied

• some experiences are accurately symbolized —nonthreatening

• some experiences perceives in distorted form—threatened

Denial of Positive Experiences

• many people have difficulty accepting genuine compliments and positive feedback, even when deserved.

Becoming a Person

• make contact—positive or negative—with another person

Positive regard

• person develops a need to be loved, liked, or accepted by another person

• prerequisite for positive self-regard

positive self-regard

• the experience of prizing or valuing one’s self

Barriers to Psychological Health

• conditions of worth

• incongruence

• defensiveness

• disorganization.

conditions of worth

• they perceive that their parents, peers, or partners love and accept them only if they meet those people’s expectations and approval

External evaluations

• Our perceptions of other people’s view of us

Incongruence

• organism and self may not be congruent

Vulnerability

• greater incongruence of self-concept and organismic experience, the more ______we are

• unaware of discrepancy between two

Anxiety and threat

• As we become more aware of the

  incongruence between our organismic experience and our perception of self, our

  ________begins

Defensiveness

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

• to prevent this inconsistency between our organismic experience and self-concept

• The two chief defenses are distortion and denial

Distortion

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

Denial

• we refuse to perceive an experience in awareness

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 __________

Client-centered therapy

• counselor congruence

• unconditional

• positive regard

• emphatic listening