Person-Centred Approach: Personal, Professional And Theoretical Dimensions
The Person-Centred Approach - Personal, Professional and Theoretical Dimensions
In this essay I will be looking at the Person-Centred Approach in Counselling and Psychotherapy. I shall be exploring the professional and theoretical dimensions through a personal lens, as someone who has recently completed an introductory course in Person Centred Counselling. This will include a concise overview of what the Person-Centred Approach is and a reflective look through the course, the experiential exercises and my thoughts and feelings about them both then and now.
First, we must briefly look at what the Person-Centred Approach is and its roots. The accepted progenitor is Carl Rogers, who developed the PCA after discovering the humanist ideas of …show more content…
This means that we behave in the world in response to our personally experienced reality. (Merry, 1999 p.15)
From Rogers work we have his Nineteen Propositions – a theory of personality. There are also his six necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Together, these form a foundation from which we can learn, evaluate and start to implement the PCA.
Within the Six Conditions there are the Three Core Conditions – Empathy, Congruence and Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR). Rogers believed that if the Six Conditions exist within a therapeutic relationship, then positive change will occur. And with the Three Core Conditions, we have the nucleus of the Person-Centred Approach. If the therapist is congruent, experiences UPR and empathic understanding for the client, again, positive change will occur. And the more genuine this is for the therapist, with less professional façade, then the more natural the counselling relationship and the outcome of this. …it is clear that to understand a person one must attempt to grasp his or her way of perceiving reality or, in short, one must understand empathically. (Mearns & Thorne, 1988 p. …show more content…
This took the form of the paw print exercise – a group counselling session with many counsellors and one client. I had started this particular evening not in a good place. This was why it was wonderful to realise that, when it came to this exercise and focus was needed, my own problems, anger and mind chatter fell away. And the much need UPR, congruence and empathy came into play. I would like to make clear that this was not a conscious happening – I did not give myself ‘a talking to’ in anyway. It was only after the exercise had ended and with very positive feedback from the tutor that the realisation that everything negative that I had brought with me had gone. It was a moment of self-awareness which helped to carry me through the second half of the course, believing that I was on the right path, so to speak. As Rogers states (1967, p.284), for positive change in therapy “… that the therapist is experiencing an accurate, empathic understanding of the client’s world as seen from the inside.” I feel that I gained an understanding of this through the paw print
In this essay I will be looking at the Person-Centred Approach in Counselling and Psychotherapy. I shall be exploring the professional and theoretical dimensions through a personal lens, as someone who has recently completed an introductory course in Person Centred Counselling. This will include a concise overview of what the Person-Centred Approach is and a reflective look through the course, the experiential exercises and my thoughts and feelings about them both then and now.
First, we must briefly look at what the Person-Centred Approach is and its roots. The accepted progenitor is Carl Rogers, who developed the PCA after discovering the humanist ideas of …show more content…
This means that we behave in the world in response to our personally experienced reality. (Merry, 1999 p.15)
From Rogers work we have his Nineteen Propositions – a theory of personality. There are also his six necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Together, these form a foundation from which we can learn, evaluate and start to implement the PCA.
Within the Six Conditions there are the Three Core Conditions – Empathy, Congruence and Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR). Rogers believed that if the Six Conditions exist within a therapeutic relationship, then positive change will occur. And with the Three Core Conditions, we have the nucleus of the Person-Centred Approach. If the therapist is congruent, experiences UPR and empathic understanding for the client, again, positive change will occur. And the more genuine this is for the therapist, with less professional façade, then the more natural the counselling relationship and the outcome of this. …it is clear that to understand a person one must attempt to grasp his or her way of perceiving reality or, in short, one must understand empathically. (Mearns & Thorne, 1988 p. …show more content…
This took the form of the paw print exercise – a group counselling session with many counsellors and one client. I had started this particular evening not in a good place. This was why it was wonderful to realise that, when it came to this exercise and focus was needed, my own problems, anger and mind chatter fell away. And the much need UPR, congruence and empathy came into play. I would like to make clear that this was not a conscious happening – I did not give myself ‘a talking to’ in anyway. It was only after the exercise had ended and with very positive feedback from the tutor that the realisation that everything negative that I had brought with me had gone. It was a moment of self-awareness which helped to carry me through the second half of the course, believing that I was on the right path, so to speak. As Rogers states (1967, p.284), for positive change in therapy “… that the therapist is experiencing an accurate, empathic understanding of the client’s world as seen from the inside.” I feel that I gained an understanding of this through the paw print