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Person-Centred Therapy
Person-Centred therapy is a humanistic approach developed by Carl Rogers in the 1950s. Human beings have an innate tendency to develop themselves and often this can become distorted. Using the person-centred approach puts the client’s own perception central to the therapy. Use the skills-based materials below to help you understand the impact of the therapy.
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Four Key Skills
To hone your person-centred approach it’s important to consider the four advanced skills: Information sharing, challenge, immediacy and silence.
Use the role play scenario with a colleague or friend to analyse your approach and its impact.
Counselling for Depression
Model
Counselling for depression is underpinned by a person-centred experiential approach.
To train in counselling for depression you need two years post-qualification experience. Have a look at the framework to see how you compare.
Experts of Their Own Lives
Clients are the experts of their own lives and it is important to form a relationship with them.
Explore how Carl Rogers intended person-centred therapy to help people grow as a whole in this extract from the CPCAB co-pub Counselling Skills and Studies.
Carl Rogers' six necessary and sufficient conditions for positive personality change
Rogers (1957, p. 213) set out six ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’ (within which the three ‘core’ conditions are embedded) for therapy:
- That two persons are in contact
- That the first person, whom we shall term the client, is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable or anxious
- That the second person, whom we shall term the therapist, is congruent in the relationship
- That the therapist is experiencing unconditional positive regard towards the client
- That the therapist is experiencing an empathic understanding of the client’s internal frame of reference
- That the client perceives, at least to a minimal degree, conditions 4 and 5, the unconditional positive regard of the therapist for them, and the empathic understanding of the therapist.
Person-centred therapy is non-directive (its first, original name) in that, unlike many other therapies, the therapist does not set the goals, focus or direction of therapy. Instead, the client’s emerging experience in the moment is the driving focus of the work.
Extract taken from An Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy by Andrew Reeves (2nd Edition)