Person Centred Therapy

Each individual will go through the 7 Stages of Process in their therapeutic journey.

1) Rigidity and Externalisation – Little sense of responsibility or emotional awareness. Rare to see in session because someone at this stage is unlikely to come to therapy.

2) Slight Loosening and Limited Awareness – Emotions are still distant and experience is evaluated through external expectations.

3) Emerging Self-Reference – May notice discrepancies between how they view themselves and what they feel. Might see changes in self-esteem, identity, and authenticity.

4) Greater Emotional Awareness and Acceptance – Acceptance of inner experience even when uncomfortable.

5) Ownership and Responsibility – Feelings belong to the self rather than imposed from the outside. Clearer sense of internal direction and emotional experiences are trusted more.

6) Deep Emotional Experiencing – Feeling in the present moment. Moments can be transformative and integrative.

7) Integration and Flow – Emotional awareness and self-acceptance are well integrated. Change is natural rather than requiring deliberate effort. Experiences self as a process rather than a fixed identity.

The 6 Necessary and Sufficient Conditions Needed for Therapeutic Change

1) Therapist – Client Psychological Contact – a relationship between client and therapist in which each person’s perception of the other is important.

2) Client Incongruence – The client’s experience and their awareness are incongruent with each other. There is a lack of alignment between the real self and the ideal self.

3) Therapist Congruence – The therapist is genuine in their involvement in the therapeutic relationship, They’re not ‘acting’ or faking. They can draw on their own experiences (self-disclosure) to facilitate the relationship.

4) Therapist Unconditional Positive Regard – The therapist accepts the client. There is no judgement, approval or disapproval.

5) Therapist Empathic Understanding – The therapist has an empathic understanding of the client’s internal frame of reference. They understand the client from the client’s point of view.

6) Client Perception – The client perceives, at least a bit, the unconditional positive regard and empathic understanding of the therapist.

N.B. Conditions 3, 4 and 5 are considered the Core Conditions necessary for a therapist to display.

Phenomenal Field Theory of Personality

Developed by Donald Snugg and Arthur W. Combs

The phenomenal field is the field of our experiences. It is everything that the individual is aware of. It is subjective reality.

To understand an individual (or an organism), you have to understand what it’s like to be at the centre of their phenomenal field i.e. their frame of reference, their point of view, their worldview, their perspective.

An organism belongs to their own phenomenal field and their sense of self defines what it is in the field is internal versus external. Preserving and enhancing this self (aka the phenomenal self) is the motivation that governs all parts of the field.

What is recognised as being part of the field depends on the sense of self felt by the organism in the middle of the field. See: defence mechanisms. Psychopathology is caused by threat to the phenomenal self that is not handled well, leading to defences, neurosis, and psychosis.

Therapy involves having clients let go of inappropriate perceptions, behaviours, cognitions, and emotions that have been set up as defences.

Theory of Organismic Personality Development

All organisms have a self-concept. In a healthy organism it is organised and consistent, yet fluid and open to outside experience. It is available to, though not necessarily in, awareness.

A fully functioning person is someone with the ‘good life’, who is able to continually aim to fulfil their potential. Their sense of self is not a fixed state but a process. They are open to all experiences as they are congruent. They have an ‘existential life’ in that every moment is filled with meaning because their actions align with personal values.

An individual who is incongruent has an ‘ideal self’ that is imposed onto them from external forces which does not match their values. This happens when the individual receives conditional positive regard, creating standards that must be met in order to feel worthy.

An incongruent person pursues positive regard by being false and not realising their potential. They try to maintain their self-concept instead of allowing it to be fluid and are, therefore, always on the defensive because their lives are not authentic.

The Actualising Tendency

"Given a free choice and in the absence of external force, individuals prefer to be healthy rather than sick, to be independent rather than dependent, and in general to further the optimal development of the total organism”

Every organism has a drive towards self-protection, self-enhancement, and flourishing. This drive is never the goal of therapy, but the “engine” that makes psychotherapy work. This is why therapists should aim to be non-directive as this process of self-actualisation is what is doing the healing. The therapist only aids the client in work that the client has already begun.

Self-actualisation is the ongoing, adaptive process of maintaining and enhancing the portion of the phenomenal field that is the ‘self’. This is done though internal and external experiences being integrated or addressed. It is a process that is biological and value-neutral, that promotes the self-regulated interdependence of a valued member of society.

The therapist helps create a phenomenal field that promotes self-actualisation by providing the 3 core conditions. These conditions free the client from external references and allow the client to express themselves from their own internal reference i.e. authentically.

Characteristics of the Actualising Tendency

It is individual and universal, ubiquitous and constant.
It is holistic (applies to all aspects).
It is directional towards maintenance and realisation of potential.
It is primarily tension-increasing. Tension reduction is a secondary, corrective reaction.
It tends towards greater autonomy.
It is prosocial – others can play a part in actualising and enhancement of the self can enhance others.
In humans it involves self-actualisation i.e. a healthy sense of self that is free to continually reflect and reinterpret its existence.
It is channelled through the reflective consciousness.

Conditions of Worth

From a young age, people are given conditional positive regard from care givers and significant others. They receive positive attention if they reach a certain standard or display certain values and they are given negative attention if they don’t.

These conditions are soon internalised and can lead to feelings of worthlessness if not achieved. They even become a part of their self-concept and are seen as truth instead of opinion. As a result, the individual’s behaviour is aimed at gaining more positive regard rather than self-actualisation.

One result of therapy would be to develop unconditional self-regard.

Locus of Evaluation

Having an internal locus of evaluation means that you value and trust your own understandings and judgements about yourself. An external locus of evaluation means that you hold the judgement of others as more valuable and trustworthy than yours.

Most clients starting therapy will have an external locus of evaluation. This is why it is important to remain non-judgemental and to allow the client to develop their own locus of evaluation.

Example:
‘Well done! I’m so pleased with you’ (reinforces external of evaluation).
‘I can see you’re delighted with that, and so proud of yourself’ (encourages internal of evaluation).

Symbolisation

The organism accepts experiences into awareness by ‘symbolising’ the experiences and making meaning from them. This is not just a cognitive abstraction, but a way of integrating an experience into the organism.

The therapist that is able to understand a client from the client’s internal frame of reference can reflect the experience back to the client in a non-judgemental way, giving the client a chance to symbolise the experience and accept it into their awareness.

“Another question I ask myself is: Can I let myself enter fully into the world of his feelings and personal meanings and see these as he does? Can I step into his private world so completely that I lose all desire to evaluate or judge it? Can I enter it so sensitively that I can move about in it freely, without trampling on meanings which are precious to him? Can I sense it so accurately that I can catch not only the meanings of his experience which are obvious to him, but those meanings which are only implicit, which he sees only dimly or as confusion?” - Carl Rogers

Defence Mechanisms

When there is an experience within the phenomenal field that does not align with the self concept (incongruence), individuals may use one of two defence mechanisms.

Denial: completely denying to acknowledge any experience that contradicts your self concept

Distortion: A threat to self concept is distorted until it fits the concept.

The work of using defences will get harder as the threat is not addressed. The self concept will become more rigid and this can lead to neurotic symptoms.

If situation worsens, the individual becomes aware of the incongruity as the defence fails to work and personality becomes disorganised and behaviour irrational.

Defences are addressed in therapy by providing a threat-free environment through unconditional positive regard.

“In my early professional years I was asking the question, how can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?” – Carl Rogers

Alfred Adler

Founder of Individual Psychology, a holistic school of psychology – The human is a whole and should be studied within the context of the environment.

Ideas:
Focused on child development. Looked at helping adults with maladjustment and also with preventing this in children.

Goal of therapy is to excavate past experiences to integrate better into community and the here and now.

There are no chance memories. Each one is an expression of a ‘private logic’ and are metaphors for an individual’s personal philosophy of life.

Birth order is a useful way of exploring how siblings impact development (Freud only focused on parents).

Developed the concept of the ‘inferiority complex’: If one organ is weak, the others will compensate for it. This can also lead to over compensation where a weakness becomes a strength. This evolved into being about emotions instead of organs.

Otto Rank

Considered the first relational psychoanalyst.

Ideas:

Psychotherapy is a collaborative process of learning and unlearning with emotional experience at the centre.

Neurosis is a failure in creativity and can be overcome by finding new ways of thinking.

Resistance is a positive creative force that allows clients to feel their own will again. - Being a push over is no good for our clients!

Self renewal is a measure of greatness. An individual needs constant separation from internalised beliefs – unlearning – to let go of old identities that trap growth.

While Freud saw psychoanalysis as the ‘draining’ of the libidinal drive, Rank wanted to bring emotional reciprocity and immediacy to the counselling room and cultivate the creative will.

Jessie Taft

Rank’s biographer. She developed the functional approach to social work which is still used today.
Her work and her interpretation of Rank’s work was an inspiration for Rogers’ own work on the dynamics of the therapeutic relationship.

Ideas:
The Functionalist Theory claims that society is in a state of balance and kept that way through the function of society's component parts. This theory has underpinnings in biological and ecological concepts. Society can be studied the same way the human body can be studied – by analysing what specific systems are working or not working, diagnosing problems, and devising solutions to restore balance.