Client-Centered, Experiential, and Existential Psychotherapies

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering client-centered, experiential, and existential psychotherapies, including key historical figures, theoretical principles, techniques, and psychopathology concepts.

Client-Centered Therapy

A foundational, largely nondirective psychotherapy developed by Carl Rogers that seeks to facilitate a client's self-actualizing tendency through unconditional positive regard, congruence (genuineness), and empathic understanding.

Self-Actualizing Tendency

An inbuilt, biological proclivity toward psychological growth, development, and fulfillment present in all individuals.

Organismic Valuing Process

An inborn capacity present from childhood to viscerally sense and experience what choices and conditions are intrinsically good for oneself.

Conditions of Worth

External standards imposed by parents and authority figures that teach individuals their worth is conditional, causing them to distrust or deny their organismic valuing process.

Multiple Realities

Carl Rogers' premise that reality is relative to each individual's perspective, meaning no person or therapist is in a position to judge another's reality as incorrect or distorted.

Acceptance

Acknowledging a client's subjective perception and reality nonjudgmentally and with respect, which is distinct from approving of destructive behaviors.

Personal Constructs

The conceptual frameworks and cognitive schemas individuals develop to organize and make sense of people, events, and reality.

Values

A subset of personal constructs that carry an evaluative positive or negative component regarding oneself, others, or society.

Process Orientation

A characteristic of fully functioning individuals that views life as a continuous process of becoming, directing focus onto the immediate 'doing' of activities rather than obsessing over outcomes or self-evaluation.

Experiencing

The visceral, bodily 'felt' way of knowing at a gut level, contrasted with intellectual, verbal, or conceptual understanding.

Nonpossessive Warmth

A core therapist condition consisting of unconditional positive regard, prizing, and respect that accepts the client as an autonomous individual without attempting to control them or impose will.

Empathic Understanding

The therapist's ability to enter the client's private subjective world, grasp their frame of reference, and understand their feelings without imposing external judgment.

Decentering

The therapist's skill of stepping outside their personal worldview to imagine and understand life from the specific perspective of the client.

Genuineness

A state of congruence, authenticity, and openness where the therapist's internal experience aligns with their outer expression, using self-disclosure only when therapeutically relevant.

Experiential Therapy

An umbrella term for therapeutic modalities that emphasize emotional activation, focus on how clients immediately experience their lives, activate imagination, and use structured experiential exercises.

Activity Wheel

A four-stage experiential framework used to process therapeutic exercises: Step 1: Experience (collect data), Step 2: Reflect ('What?'), Step 3: Generalize ('So What?'), and Step 4: Apply & Transfer ('Now What?').

Gestalt Therapy

An experiential approach founded by Fritz Perl in the late 1960s asserting that behavior must be understood through the total configuration of interrelationships, defining the self as an ever-shifting part of an ongoing field of experience.

Gestalt Psychopathology

Psychological distress that develops when individuals become disconnected from genuine experiences, disown parts of themselves due to external rules, or experience a rift between self-concept and actual experiencing.

Empty Chair Technique

A Gestalt exercise where a client interacts with an empty chair or alternates seats to dialogue with an unresolved person or conflicting internal parts to resolve unfinished business.

The Two Sides of Me Exercise

A Gestalt awareness experiment where a client identifies two competing internal desires, writes a dialogue clarifying their respective wants, fears, and needs, and examines the dynamics of the conflict.

Focusing-Oriented Therapy

An experiential approach derived from client-centered therapy where the therapist directs the client to silently suspend intellectual analysis and listen inward to their bodily felt sense; commonly applied in art therapy.

Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT)

An experiential approach often used in family therapy where the therapist serves as a 'surrogate information processor' who responds to specific therapeutic markers with tailored emotional interventions.

Therapeutic Markers

Observable client cues in Emotion-Focused Therapy (such as problematic reaction points, splits, unfinished business, and meaning protests) that signal to the therapist which intervention to apply.

Mahrer’s Experiential Therapy

A non-traditional experiential approach where both client and therapist recline with eyes closed to help the client disengage from their surface 'operating personality' and access deep inner experiencing potential in sessions without a fixed time limit.

Operating Personality

In Alvin Mahrer’s experiential model, the surface-level personality constructs that an individual develops that can block access to deeper creative potentials and emotions.

Existential Therapy

A philosophical therapeutic approach originating from Scandinavian thought focusing on human freedom, personal responsibility, self-awareness, and confronting the essential anxieties of existence.

Four Givens of Existential Therapy

The ultimate concerns identified by Irvin Yalom that create internal conflict: death (mortality), meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom/responsibility.

Logotherapy

A form of existential therapy founded by Viktor Frankl postulating that the primary human drive is the search for meaning, which can be found through purposeful deeds, experiences, or one's attitude toward unavoidable suffering.