Person Centered Counseling

Hello, this is Dr. Diane gayhart and this is my lecture on

person

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centered

therapy and

counseling

that accompanies my textbooks, case documentation and

counseling

and psychotherapy, as well as theory and treatment planning in psychotherapy counseling, and I hope this lecture helps you to use turbine plans in case conceptualization templates. and to help you use these theories with the clients you work with,

person

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centered

therapy is probably the best-known humanistic existential counseling approach. It was developed by Carl Rogers, who many would consider one of the most important figures in the history of psychotherapy and I think I know some people who would even say they are more important than Sigmund Freud in many ways, so you could say that he was the most influential of all the humanistic existentialist Extension therapists, although there are many important and some commonalities between these.

The approaches include and this is one of the things that Carl Rogers was so influential and changed the view of the field in terms of focusing on the subjective reality of the client and what that means is that all of these humanistic approaches differ in many ways. from, say, psychodynamics or less traditional psychodynamics and traditional cognitive to psychotherapy in terms of focusing on what the client's lived inner reality is and valuing that reality and trying to work from within it, so you know, psychodynamics would try analyze it. and CBT would look at, you know, maybe irrational thought patterns that are happening or are ineffective.

The behaviorist is looking purely at behavior, but instead at the human being as a whole. All of these humanistic and existential approaches really look at living subjective reality and work from within. It's more about respecting it in terms of the realm in which the therapy takes place, rather than trying to get clients to move towards perhaps more logical or more analytical ways. You know you know the therapist's interpretation. Instead of the therapist entering into that subjective world, another really unique thing that Rogers introduced to the field of psychotherapy is that the therapist must have warmth and empathy, especially when it first came on the scene, compared to psychodynamics. traditional, as well as the traditional warmth and empathy of CBT really wasn't his thing.

I mean, you know we're talking sitting on a couch, don't look at the therapist, you know the therapist is a blank slate, you know they would use, you know almost, you often know that The behaviors and CBT that you know had largely the presence of someone you know in a laboratory type of scientific approach, so it was really different to have warmth and empathy and I would say that most clients expect that warmth and empathy in the 21st century. and that way of connecting not all, but in general, I would say more and more and I would say that most contemporary approaches, you know, CBT and psychodynamics have a lot more warmth than empathy and I think Carl Rogers is really the leader and introduce that and that's one of the reasons why I think it's so influential in the field.

Another unique thing that all of these approaches focus on is what they call the counselor's self, so who are you as a therapist and as a counselor in the room and who you are matters, you are not a blank slate and your way Being, the presence that you bring to the room is crucial to facilitating the process of change in this particular in these humanistic and existential approaches and you will notice it everywhere. All of the different approaches that the therapist's self with a counselor are really central to promoting the process of change and there is also the ultimate goal of all of these approaches: self-actualization and often also Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

So the concept of all of these, the big picture behind all of these humanistic and existential approaches is that you're trying to help the person actualize themselves to become fully who they are and we'll talk more about that in the conference. These are some of the common themes we see in humanistic existentialist approaches. Simply put, the least you need to know about person-centered therapy. Carl Rogers spent his entire career focusing on what he called the core conditions that he laid out. and he spent his entire career researching this and exploring this hypothesis that these three core conditions were all that were necessary and they were also sufficient for change and the first of them is the congruence or authenticity of the counselor and this means that the counselor must be genuine. and who they are in the therapeutic relationship of the counseling relationship, this concept of congruence is used and also in other humanistic approaches and often refers to the non-verbal and the verbal being congruent, everything you say and do is real.

It is authentic that you are a complete person in that relationship and that is one of the first complete elements. The second is that you need to have and be able to reflect to the client an accurate and empathetic understanding of their live subjective reality. Remember the The human being focuses on the objective, living reality of the client and therefore this ability to tune into that and reflect it accurately is one of the second core conditions and then the final core condition is what they call consideration. unconditionally positive and by this Carl Rogers meant that you hold the client in high regard and value who they are as a person and this does not mean that you necessarily agree or approve of all of their behavior for working with a perpetrator of sexual abuse.

This doesn't mean that you approve of his or her behavior, but what it does mean is that you still have positive regard for them as human beings instead of seeing them as a monster and Carl's Rogers really was radical, you know, everything we see is very nice. You know, gentle soul, but he was a radical thinker and his hypothesis is quite radical in the sense that these three basic elements are sufficient for therapeutic change and that is the focus of his approach and I think you know what I want to add here. Also, some people think that's it. has a way of conceptualizing change and looking at various stages of change, so it's more complex than I think a lot of people realize because most people think this is all there is to the approach and Next I want to talk about some of the myths of person-centered therapy.

Person-centered therapy is one of the approaches where there is a lot of misunderstanding and oversimplification because it is one of the approaches where when you ask the therapist what approach they work from, many people will say cognitive behavioral and many others will say person-centered humanist referring to this approach because most therapeutic training and counseling programs will initially teach therapists these core conditions and how to represent the relationship that Carl Rogers described and that is where I would say the vast majority of programs start and yet a lot of people think they have these introductory skills courses on reflection and empathy and yes, that makes me a person-centered therapist and there's actually a lot more.

Loren, if you are interested in working from this approach, you are really strong, we encourage you to read and attend the trainings. There is real depth to this approach that is often overlooked and overlooked, so one of the common myths here is that and those people. and the therapists, the counselors are always kind and they always work to make the clients feel good and that you are in a job if the client feels good and that you are kind to them, that this is a good humanistic approach and a good person-centered therapy and That's not true, I mean, Carl Rogers is certainly not as confrontational as, for example, even a humanist like Fritz Perls, a gestalt approach, but they confront inaccuracies and hold people accountable and make people that you know reflect on their inconsistencies, that's part of what they do, they don't necessarily do it in a harsh way, but it is done and it's not always kind or polite and clients don't always feel good when you have to explore some of these more difficult topics that are just part of being human, the client's persona, another myth here is that person-centered counselors always validate their clients' feelings and always take it, that means taking the client's side, so There is a very important distinction to make, especially when working. with a client who is complaining about their partner, child or parent, it is very important to be able to do it with a very subtle skill to be able to validate the experience of that person, let's say their partner, without saying taking the client's side, especially when you are talking.

In relationships, there are always two sides to every story and it is extremely counterproductive to take your client's side against their partner or their parents or their acquaintances, a child or whatever, and without realizing it, therapists do this and become feels really good. having someone else by your side when you're angry at your partner or your parents or you meet whoever, your boss or whatever, it feels good and clients like it and will say it was a big help to me, but doing it without really recognize that there is another subjective reality that they are in contact with and that there is another reality that needs to be understood to fully understand any type of conflict, so it is very important that when you validate their reality that you still make space and have a client keep in mind.

Keep in mind this isn't the whole story it's just your experience finally here and this is one of the ones they make fun of in the movies it's one of the most useful techniques in person centered therapy it's how that makes you feel and I Lo I've seen, you'll see it made fun of in a lot of television and movies because often people, when they first learn to focus on the person and the emotions, they think this is a really useful question again if you educate yourself well on Por This approach is generally strongly discouraged. Instead, you work.

Do you know how that makes you feel? It indicates that you don't have any empathy because you can't understand their emotional terrain and their emotional experience while they talk that way. In many ways this question is counterproductive or you know, it can't express some empathy for the client, it's curiosity about their emotions, but that's not empathy, which is different and most clients find this question very annoying and I think that The fact that she is made fun of on TV is a lot. It is also an indicator that many people find this annoying and even the ghosts on TV make it very difficult to have this question and you can ask it at certain times if you have a good relationship with the client and the particular context in which it is found. to be able to ask that question, make it fruitful and useful, but in general, the goal here in this particular approach is to put a period at the end of this sentence and say wow, you really felt betrayed, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Blah, so I know a supervisor who trains in this approach and you know the only thing you can't do is ask a question, he will take points off you and that's what he knows, he wants students to complete a session. without asking a question and usually how does it make you feel? It's not a really good person-centered question, but it's often a place where many people will start, especially when they're doing role-playing in their initial training. The significant contributions of Jews to the field. and so in the case of person-centered practice, the contributions are quite extensive and in many ways have transformed the field, yes, from when you started to the current practice is very influenced and shaped by the original work of Carl Rogers, so the most influential part is that, as I mentioned earlier, these core conditions of congruence are unconditional positive regard and accurate empathy, so this first concept here is, as I mentioned earlier, genuineness or congruence, which refers to the fact that the The counselor's external expressions are congruent with his internal experience and this is interesting when you start to look through the approach, a monistic approach for its pearls does this in a much younger heart, for lack of a better word, I would say in a harsh way in the gestalt approach where they were typically person-centered therapists, I would even do so. expressing disappointment or other similar thoughts generally in a kinder way and I think you know that, but there's certainly a mix there, so authenticity and congruence can be very, very different between clients and between counselors and therapists, but again, it's that your internal and external expressions are, quote, congruent and therefore you are being completely genuine and completely human and a lot of this is much more subtle than that.

There's been research done on therapist presence and they call this therapeutic presence and that's just your way of being in the room and I've looked at some research that correlates the ability to be aware of being in the moment and how that relates to creation of this sense of therapeutic presence and that means that the client typically experiences you as very you, all yourthoughts, emotions and focus are in the moment in the objective reality of the client and there is also this feeling of I don't know, I would call it calm, but there is a quality that is brought there and that is very palpable in the room the work done by Dan Siegel at UCLA about integrated neural states and talks about how when therapists are in this optimal state of functioning, the different parts of the brain work together, there is intuition, there is empathy.

There is compassion, there is an ability to concentrate and so they are beginning to do even more brain research studies on this state and the quality of being when all of you are like you're firing on all cylinders, you're completely present, you're emotionally present, you're cognitively present, obviously physically present. I guess with Skype there are a few different issues, but you know, that's what the customer feels and as I was joking about Skype, I realized that's what a lot of people are worried about. in terms of trying to bring this online, it's harder to communicate and so this is the state of being and that your state of being as a counselor as a therapist in the room is very influential and very central and central to facilitating the process of change, so going a little deeper here with this concept of unconditional positive regard, this is more than just being kind and polite, it comes down to being very sincere and I guess some people would even say a spiritual appraisal of your client as being human in a very deep way and also recognizes that we are all human and that we all suffer and that we are very complex with mixed feelings, we have dark feelings, we have dark sides, all of this is part of being human and therefore very Pollyanna.

I love everyone, it doesn't quite capture the spirit here, it's so much more, it's very difficult and for me I would say and for a lot of people I would say it's a very spiritual process and a commitment to looking at the darker side of the self. human and how do we find a way to have compassion and embrace that, you don't know it yet, tolerate that and work to reduce that dark side, how do we do that? It is a very complex process again. I'll give you an example. child, someone who has suffered child abuse, is a child molester, or a parent who you know has severely maimed or even killed their child, how do you address that with unconditional positive regard?

That's complex, it takes a lot of work, and I think a lot of personal development in the therapist's part is learning not to demonize our clients and turn them into monsters because they've made really horrible decisions in their lives. How can we find their humanity and help them reconnect with their humanity? So this concept of unconditional positive regard. It can be very, very challenging and yet it is raised and postulated by the therapist as necessary in order to help the client change and facilitate the change and again, it is not something that should be taken lightly or, as it seems , really simple and that's when you work with someone who is very similar to you, but when you start working with people with very different values ​​who have made very different life decisions, even cross-culturally, this can be a very, very challenging part of the approach. for the therapist or counselor, again, this concept of precise empathy is another place that sometimes gets oversimplified if you can just name and label their emotions or if you know to develop it a little bit more and know that you've got it, but precise empathy is a process in which you are trying to literally map the internal emotional terrain as I think of the client and it is important to know that often our emotions are totally contradictory.

As most people know, you can have very loving and very hateful feelings. feelings for the same person, usually your partner or your parents, so it's a very human experience and, as a person-centered counselor, you're always trying to map that terrain and look for the subtleties and the complexities and the contradictions, and not necessarily, It always even corrects all those contradictions, so this is a very delicate process and it is one where you want to know, when you reflect on someone, what you are perceiving within them, you want to make sure that you have understood it correctly. and you're humble enough to allow them to correct you and ask them for clarification, so this is very much part of this process of accurate empathy and being able to understand their internal emotional landscape, so next let's talk about the counseling process. an overview of how this process works or how this approach works, so the person-centered approach is what they call a process-oriented approach and what that means is that the counselor or therapist's attention is always on the process , what is happening in the room rather than the content, stories about who is angry with whom for what reason or who is sad for what and for what reason, so the focus is always on the emotional process of what happens with the client and in how the client interacts with himself and others and typically those patterns are repeated in different situations, different relationships, different contexts, as well as in the relationship with oneself, so you are focusing on the small emotional processes in the life of the customer rather than in the content of what the customer brings, those specific complaints that the customer brings something similar, let's talk about in case of conceptualization Carl Rogers actually had a very clear theory of change in terms of passing through seven different stages and therefore it is a process of taking a client out of this state of not being very aware that their emotions cannot be expressed to becoming a big step in moving through these various stages so that they can be completely present and experience your emotions in the moment and even allow your entire identity to be much more fluid.

And this is also part of this treatment process, in terms of these seven stages of change, and a lot of people don't actually realize that they had such a developed theory in terms of how we conceptualize the counseling process in this early period. the person's personality is relatively fixed, the problems may not really be recognized and certainly are often very difficult to identify or talk about an emotion and in the next phase he or she becomes more able to open up to see problems and then in In the third stage, the person becomes more able to talk about their feelings that happened in the past, so they are not hot emotions in the moment, but are more from the past and in the fourth stage, the person becomes more open to reconsidering and how they construct their own identity and that of others and are able to concretize and verbalize deeper and more complex emotions and then, once you reach the fifth stage, they are able to verbalize more and more that are in the moment. and experiences as they arise, so being able to talk about how they feel embarrassed about sharing a particular story, maybe if that was really difficult, and being able to talk about the shame of talking about those emotions, even though that's the present moment of what's happening.

As emotions arise in the moment, in the sixth stage the person can experience very difficult emotions as they arise and is able to accept them and tonight not try to silence them, deny them or pretend that they are not. there, but they can feel that complexity of emotions with acceptance and then without reacting and they were able to skillfully engage these emotions without making bad decisions without attacking others without attacking themselves and so this is this and finally in the south in the The seventh day, usually someone in the fifth and sixth stages finds solutions to problems like depression and anxiety, etc., and then in the seventh stage, there is a lot more self-realization, where the person becomes much more fluid in her total experience of herself, her emotions, and her life.

So this typically happens outside of the counseling relationship, so next we'll move on to talking about the counseling relationship in person-centered therapy. Arguably one of the distinguishing features of humanistic approaches such as person-centred therapy is that the therapeutic relationship is seen as the main agent of change in the therapeutic process and this is very different to, say, psychodynamic theory where the focus is on perception through relationship and that empathy helps them have perception, that's where change happens similarly. In CBT you will hear much more about empathy, now there is talk that it is important and that it is necessary to have a therapeutic relationship and CBT, but it is not the agent of change.

The agent of change is being able to alter behavior. patterns and cognitive patterns, so humanists are very different in focusing on this relationship as the primary agent of change in the process and, again, this therapist, as we've talked about the focus, it's a little bit redundant to have this slide, but It is the format that follows the textbook and the therapeutic presence, the core conditions, that are the main vehicles for change and that is what the therapist, the count or the counselor brings to that process, so next let's talk about the conceptualization of the in-person viewing case. centered therapy and again, this is a place where there are a lot of misconceptions because a lot of people end up thinking, oh, I learned person-centered therapy and in my first semester communication skills class, you know, where I reflected feelings, that's why I am now a trained humanist.

I know the therapist and there is actually a much more complex way of conceptualizing that Rogers used when working with clients, so one of the first areas of conceptualization is the ability to experience and communicate oneself and therefore, being able to experience oneself and one's identity and ability to communicate that similarly you will see this recognition of feelings so can the client identify feelings in the past? Can you identify them in the present? Can you talk about them in the present when you talk about them in the present? Are they congruent or is it their facial expression? matching your words, so there's a lot of focus on that and that overflows, I guess, into the expression of emotions, so both the recognition and the ability to express them, so there's this focus on the present moment experience, Can you experience your emotions, your lived experience? in the moment and accept it without trying to deny it, rationalize it or else you know you separate yourself from it, you can experience that without feeling overwhelmed so it's not just about experiencing your anger and you know start to get angry and this is about from can you? experiment and make the experience move instead of knowing that losing control, hurting yourself or others, is not part of this process, they look and then something else he looks at or person-centered therapists look at are personal constructions, so how are you. building your identity the stories you tell yourself about who you are as well as the facades Rogers uses the term we all wear these masks you know who we are at work or at school with our friends or with our partner with our families we are the In the store How edible these facades can be, so Rogers firmly believed that these are all facades that caused a lot of suffering and trapped us with the source of many of our problems, we were not being ourselves and therefore we looked at those constructions. you know I'm common in terms of you know I'm an emotional person I'm a logical person I'm an intelligent person I'm a dumb person all those constructs don't really hold much water, although we build our identities on them and they often become problematic, so these are the constructs that person-centered therapists will track and help clients explore, especially begin to explore them in the ways and reduce the ways in which they create suffering. real focus on the complexity and contradictions that are part of being human, especially when you look at our emotional life, so we are all plagued with multiple layers of complex contradictions, we are all hypocrites and we are learning to engage, we handle that skillfully, we learn to accept it. others are equally complex and equally riddled with contradictions in a skillful way, so it is also a big part of the process, perceptions of problems and responsibilities are also analyzed if you always think that the problem lies with someone else and that someone more is responsible now than you. you are unhappy so they need to change, the world needs to change because you are suffering, that is, at least from a person-centered worldview, a very immature way and therefore, yes, you may have an unreasonable boss and that's what you have.

How are you going to respond? How are you responsible for that half just because they are rude to you? Does that mean you're going to be rude too? What is your responsibility in that? And so help clients see how they perceive problems as well. how they take responsibility for that and finally, more contemporary person-centered counselors and therapists talk a lot about peak experience and flow, and this is when you'reexperiencing optimal states of being and how we help clients experience more of that. These are the ways that person-centered counselors conceptualize their clients when they arrive and also track this throughout the therapy process to know when and how to intervene and here's a chart, um, it's in the book as well.

I know. a little bit small here on my PowerPoint slide, but it's very hard to cut it out, but you can basically see the process here, there's once stages 1 to 7 and then each of these key elements, expression and communication of self recognition of feelings, expression of feelings you know. At first there is much less of all of this and as you progress through the seven stages, the person may be much more fluid in the way they experience their identity. Accept that they can be different people in different contexts. They try to do it. you are aware of it, you try it, you know you are responsible for it. and you were also able to experience your own feelings and emotions as they arise with acceptance and be responsible for how you handle those feelings as they arise in the present moment and this is the process of conceptualizing how this movement exists. from stage 1 to stage 7 the therapist facilitates by using the core conditions, so next we are going to talk about goal setting in person-centered therapy.

Now person-centered therapy actually has predefined goals that are part of the theory, so these are goals that the therapist pretty much brings to the process and that are universal to basically all clients from the therapist's perspective. I guess you already know and especially move on to postmodernism. Know? Do customers agree with it? Do you know what this means cross-culturally? Those are all issues that need to be considered, but it is one of the therapies that has a long-term goal built into it, unlike some of the newer, postmodern therapies that don't necessarily have a long-term goal built into the theory concepts, so which basically all person-centered and virtually all humanistic approaches have built in the goal of promoting the real realization of the self by becoming the person, the self that one really is, so there is this idea of ​​finding the true self that It's built into the approach and so it's really about realizing one's potential, being authentic, having a meaningful life and this is supposed to be one of the distinctions between existentialists and humanists, is that humanists really believe. that everyone naturally tends toward positive prosocial growth and that is true. traumatic experiences and other, you know, contextual issues that the throat, you know, slowed our growth or diverted it, so this is very much part of the longer-term late phase goals, but it's always an assumption incorporated. within the theory about where we take these clients when we work with them and also the objectives when you write them and there are many of these examples in textbooks, but they are process-oriented objectives, your identity identifies areas where the person needs to change your internal process, like reducing, you know, increasing the amount of responsibility that maybe the client takes on in working with difficult relationships in a work or school or family context, so those are the more processual goals that you can We would look at this. theory, so next we will move on to talk about doing or interventions and all of this in many ways is a theory about your way of being in the room.

There are other, however, some interventions for which most of the new ones. Therapists are quite happy, so many of the quote-unquote person-centered interventions are taught in early skills classes, both in counseling and therapeutic programs, social work programs, psychology programs, even in the models of peer counseling that are often taught in high school and even in a college curriculum, so these are the basic interventions that the therapist uses to help the client move through these seven stages of almost station. the evolution of the human being, so the first, as we have talked about, is the self of the counselor in the central condition of this is an intervention who you are and how you are in the room the presence that you bring your mental state your state of being is largely part of the intervention how you are and who you are the second is what they call focusing on listening or attending and So, this is your ability to be a very focused and attentive listener.

This can often involve non-verbal actions like nodding your head and being able to listen and concentrate, and when I actually listen to clients I have a video playing in my head, you know what? They are describing and I see their partner in their work context in the kitchen and their house, or their hallway, a house mapped in my head, but there is a very concentrated listening in which you are attending to what is happening and, therefore, Generally, at least when I'm practicing. I'm completely there. I really don't have any other thoughts going through my head. It's very concentrated.

There is a discipline to focusing on listening. Then another intervention is to summarize what the person has said. course that summarizes the key elements that will link to the various processes that the therapist follows and often you are summarizing the emotional terrain of what they have described and for many people it sometimes seems very simplistic when you first hear a summary , but for many people, it is very powerful to hear their experience summarized by someone else, especially if they have not told their story to many people, very often. In fact, I was recently working with a man who had been the victim of a violent relationship and I just summarized what happened.

It was very, very powerful because this was not a story that he had told many people to clarify again seems very simplistic can be very powerful to clarify is to ask for details on how to try to clarify so that you understand you know what was going on and this again It's helpful for you to be precise and understand what's happening, but it can also be very helpful for them, especially when you're clarifying emotions or intentions. This can often be very powerful even for them and then the feelings are reflected. especially if someone comes in and tells this story, oh my gosh, I can't believe someone said lalalala.

Often people start like that and the job of the therapist or counselor is to take this dramatic story or sometimes, you know, sometimes it's to take the dramatic story or maybe it's not even that dramatic, take the story and identify the terrain. emotional and sometimes even if the various characters can be very helpful in knowing what is happening and reflecting it back to the client, especially if that was not clearly part of their story and/or if they talked about it in a very intellectual and alpha way. Reflecting Part of how you reflect is that you were present with that very new emotion, say wow, that actually sounds very painful, it sounds like you know what it must have felt like.

It's a lot like a betrayal, you know what type you were at the time, you feel vicariously in some way that betrayal or that hurt, especially if they're talking about it, they're very detached from their emotions, but you can be doing that without being weird and extreme because you can also create personas by doing this, but by being able to mirror them so that you bring them slowly, you know more directly in touch with those emotions, process-oriented questions or those questions that are going to be linked. Go back to the various areas identified in the seven stage model, you know, so look at the process, identify the feelings and look at how you expressed those feelings in the moment, can you feel them right now, how they feel right now?

You know, you know, tell me when you put that mask on, what that's like, what it's like when you take that mask off, so here you are starting to trace the different levels of kind of personal evolution through the seven stages, so focused on person. Therapists are really focused on these areas of emotional expression, they build the facades by taking responsibility, so there are certain issues that the therapist is, the internal processes that the therapist focuses on also become very concrete and specific, especially when talking about the emotional terrain. Do you know what it was sadness or sorrow?

Know? Is it a feeling of betrayal? Is there anger in that betrayal? Is there more sadness in that betrayal? For person-centered counselors, you need to use it carefully and then initially I think of new therapists. When I say new therapists, I mean the first five years often, but using it with supervision because I always say it's the only intervention that when it goes wrong is around. It's often impossible to repair that because if you reveal something that makes a client feel like they can't trust you, it's very difficult, often not impossible, but it can be very difficult to repair that rupture, so you have to be very slow with that, It's very it's a difficult term, it can be very, very powerful, but it can go very wrong: there is a person-centered confrontation and usually it's a little bit since then, maybe they could stop the humanistic versions of therapy, but you have to confront the contradictions that you are saying that you don't want your known husband to reject you but then you are saying to reject him, you know or whatever, you help point out this, these contradictions, there is immediacy in talking about how the client is experiencing emotions in the present moment and often between the therapist and the client in the session right here now are you mad at me how is it where do you know what that's like for you so you know what else you know what you want? to tell me how you feel, you know you haven't been held back, you know it's appropriate with you or fair with you or accurate or whatever and again finally focusing, so if the clients are all over the place you're helping them focus Focus on these core process areas so that they can recognize these processes and learn how to deal more skillfully with their inner life, so these are some interventions and it is important to know that simply doing this does not make you a person. therapist centered, as many people sometimes have that impression from their initial skills training course, there is a conceptualization piece, it is very important to actually become a skillful person centered counselor or therapist, so what not to do, in There is actually a very famous and trained collaborative family therapist and one of his things he used to say is that it is much easier for me to tell you what not to do than to tell you what to do and in that sense let's look at what person-centered therapists usually don't do, so one is to give the reassurance like clichés oh oh, everything will be fine, you should worry about that.

I mean, this is what you get from a friend and this is not what you are paying a therapist or counselor for. You also want to avoid giving advice on how. to troubleshoot again, this really just stops the whole process. The idea here is for this person to explore their own internal process rather than solving the problem of the day, so you are using all of their problems of the day to help them reflect better. understand more skillfully engage in your inner process, the next thing is to ask for an explanation, then why did you do that for your behavior?

The next two here are agreeing with a client and disagreeing with the client, and this is something that is usually learned the hard way in terms of So agreeing with a client, it seems to clients. they love it, usually most of us love to agree with it, it feels great, so it's very tempting to just agree with clients that you know jump on their bandwagon, yeah, your husband shouldn't have done it. that or you know that he is very disrespectful to your children. I agree, so it is a very dangerous thing and not very therapeutic or useful, it closes the process, it closes the client's expectations of exploration and what you want to do is have them. look at what's in the middle of those interactions, how they experience them, how they respond, what their inner self is, then you want them to go back and explore the process around that, rather than agreeing that it was good or bad that so-and-so did X or even the client did reflective process, it's not about the content it's about your internal process and how you are responding to all these processes, these challenges that arise in your life, in the last two here you are giving approval and expressing disapproval, so the last one that expresses Disapproval obviously similar to a green disagreement is probably going to upset your client, disrupt the therapeutic alliance, and be problematic, but more importantly it prevents you from exploring and being a judge of your own behaviors;

It is not the counselor or therapist's job to determine whether or not the client has made a good or bad decision, it is the client's job to touch that and then similarly give approval and sometimes clientsthey'll ask you directly for approval or, you know, I did it right, you know, I did the wrong thing and very often clients will do that. Ask this very directly, it's very tempting to want to answer yes or no to those questions and clients would prefer us to do that because, but you know, they can go see their hairdresser or bartender friend to get approval for what they're going to a adviser. or a therapist because they are paying all that money for you not to give them that approval, but for them to come in and determine as much as possible from their true self if they approve if they disapprove how they always approve disapprove of their own behavior what they like what they don't like like it's not your job to make they would rather you come and do it for them makes life simpler but it does involve engaging their inner complexities so they can move deftly through life and all its complexities so this is some of person-centered cancer don'ts, so I also want to mention here that there are special interventions for special populations, one of the most well-known is non-Guided Play Therapy developed by Virginia Ax Line and she uses eight humanistic principles. to facilitate a very similar process with children using play and it's a non-directive approach that was developed briefly, you know, in congruence actually or at a similar time with Carl Rogers.

Non-directive play therapy is still used a lot today. A lot with children who have experienced trauma or who have other internalizing symptoms, similarly, there is expressive arts therapy and Rogers' daughter is actually a leader in this area and uses art with adults as a way to express, experience and process their internal world. and this is another form of therapy that uses these person-centered principles. I think they're both very aligned with how Carl Rogers' basic concepts work in terms of how to have a therapeutic conversation, but in these cases using the art one with children with adults and adolescents and to facilitate the exploration of that internal process and help them again to move towards greater self-realization, these are discussed in my book and many other books in greater detail, so next we will talk about Research and the evidence base and many people are not fully aware of how Carl Rogers was a dedicated researcher and not qualified.

He developed research methods for psychotherapy process methods, some of the first in the field. Psychotherapy is something very difficult to research and measure accurately and especially. When he began to observe people's internal subjective reality instead of measuring behavioral outcomes, he tried to find ways to measure what was happening in the therapy process related to the client's internal reality. Subjective realities very difficult to really study these processes. but he was a research Hughes, but I think he developed a lot of the research practitioner model in terms of, as a practitioner, you should research what's going on and that research for them to inform your practice, in terms of research and The evidence base for the person-centered approach was actually developed by Carl Rogers using process-oriented research methods and so the development of this approach and he was exploring this hypothesis are the three core necessary and sufficient conditions for change for many. modern academics.

I would argue that the three core conditions are necessary but not necessarily sufficient for all clients to experience change and that is where the evidence base is right now regarding Carl Rogers' hypothesis that the three core conditions are necessary. and enough in terms of evidence-based humanistic treatments, the most influential many would say would be emotion-focused couples therapy developed by Sue Johnson. I have an online lecture available on this approach, but it largely combines systems thinking, assessments, and representations. very much with a humanistic way of intervening along with the attachment conceptualization of adult relationships, but its approach and how it intervenes in their way of being is very much in line with what Carl Rogers pioneered.

Similarly, there is a movement of research into the common factors and argument here. The research results here, these researchers and not all researchers agree on what is the best research, what constitutes research, constitutes sufficient research, but the core of the common factors, researchers would say that there are more similarities between the therapy models that differentiate, because when the therapy models are analyzed. and takes into account researcher bias and other factors such as most approaches are quite similar, they are very similar results when compared when you start controlling for a variable, such as knowing if the researcher is a cognitive behavioral therapist and what is investigating. and what they're comparing it to, that's the overall finding and that when you start doing meta-analyses of the various outcome studies that they identified for common factors or their two different schools, but the most common ones for common factors, they're all frequently described. in too much detail in my book, but the most significant here is that 30 percent of outcome variants, so this is 30 percent of whether the client gets better or worse, can be attributed to the quality of the relationship. therapy specifically having those qualities that Carl Rogers advocated here, so it is the most important variable, the therapist has direct control over the only other one, it is 40% of the client, the variation of the result is just the client factors, so, how severe they are, how motivated, what resources they have.

Having therapists can help clients activate some of that, but they don't have 100 percent control over that, but what they do have control over is the quality of the therapeutic relationship. The other two common factors are the intervention techniques themselves, as well as the inspirational techniques. I expect each of them to be about 15 percent, but of these, the one that imposes the most is the variable that the therapist has the most control over and that has the greatest impact and whether the therapy is successful or not is the quality of the therapeutic relationship that Miller Duncan and Hubbell have. developed a session rating scale, the SRS, which is free and available online and you can go to Scott Miller's or Barry Duncan's website.

Links are in my textbook, but they have a measure where the clients you meet are very short, super short and measure with the clients. You know, it rates the quality of the session and the therapeutic alliance and what they've found is that clients need to have a very low tolerance in terms of clients need to feel like the therapist is talking, we're talking about the right things. do the right things and that there is a strong alliance for there to be a positive outcome, so it's really surprising how high the cutoff score is and if it falls below, I think it's 36 on the forty point scale that I normally lower light there will not be a positive outcome and the therapist needs to work on the relationship, so this is something we have a lot of control over and has a big influence on whether or not clients know how to solve their problems through the counseling process or therapeutic, so next I just want to take a moment to talk about using person-centered therapy with diverse populations, so it's very important to remember that when you're working cross-culturally and across genders, even across social and economic classes, the expression of emotion is is very much dictated by cultural norms and then within the gender norms for that culture and, for example, in the United States, you know, American culture is more emotionally expressive, but women have much more permission to express softer emotions, such as sadness, pain and emotions in general, than men. and men generally have much more permission to be angry, but they are often made fun of for having softer emotions and are generally socialized not to be particularly expressive, so it is very important to consider this and not pathologize what is socially normal for more restricted emotional expression. is culturally within the norms of American culture, then we also look at individualistic versus collective values.

The integrated goal of self-actualization is closely aligned with individualistic values ​​and culture, such as in Northern Europe and the United States of America. Canada we tend to have much more individualistic values. values ​​and so when you work with someone from a culture that has very collectivist values, especially if there are recent immigrants, even when I say recent immigrants, I think the first three are even, you know, those who obviously come with their children . kids, I'm often referring to four generations, you still see a lot of the norms of these collectivist cultures, so there's an ethical question to consider when you work with someone from a culture that has much stronger values ​​towards you, you have to sacrifice some of your own needs, your own desires, your own fulfillment for the family or the relationship and of course it is very important to consider this because there is a kind of ethical link here: by using this approach you are generally promoting individualistic rather than collective values . values ​​and I think it's something that a pushed era needs to talk about and you can even talk about it and the paradox that you meet someone often if you're working in the United States there are many millions of people who very actively live collectivist values. cultures and power, however, its work also living in the United States, where many of these individual values ​​are dominant, so having a dialogue and discourse about this is very important, can be very meaningful in helping the individual navigate more consciously and successfully. these different sets of values ​​and let me tell you there's no simple answer here, but I certainly think you can use this approach to identify them, but it's very important to do so when working with diverse clients and therefore in terms of working with clients . um, who is gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, person-centered, is frequently used with these populations because the focus is on subjective reality, like mapping the landscape, the contradictions, the façade is a very strong theme, often I work with these clients and the whole.

The process of coming out is a process of self-actualization, it is often very difficult and painful, but it can be conceptualized along the lines that Rogers laid out in terms of becoming authentically who you are. The difficult thing is discrimination, oppression, social rejection. rejection that a person experiences whether or not they know part of the heterosexual norm of their culture, so these are some of the considerations in terms of how to use person-centered approaches and ideas sensitively with various diverse populations. I hope you found this. to be a useful lecture and introduction to the work of Col Rogers, truly one of the most brilliant thinkers in the field, who simply brings a spirit of humanity to the field in such a profound way, his influence really cannot be overstated, I wouldn't.

I think and So I invite you to publish one of his books if you are going to be a part of this mental health profession and explore this work in much more depth than perhaps the average therapist, counselor, social worker or psychologist. explore his work