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4 Periods of Development
- First-during the 1940's
- --Nondirective Counseling
- --Alternative to direct and interpretive approaches
- Second-during the 1950's
- --Client-centered therapy
- --Empahsis on client rather than nondirective methods
- --More phenomenological
- --Focus on actualizing tendency
- Third-late 50's into the 70's
- --On Becoming a Person
- --"becoming one's experience"
- ---Openness to experience
- ---A trust in one's experience
- ---An internal locus of evaluation
- ---Willingness to be in the process
- Fourth- during the 80's and 90's
- --Person-centered approach
- --Considerable expansion to education, industry, groups, conflict-resolution
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Person-Centered View of Human Nature
- At their core, humans are trustworhty and positive
- Humans are capable of making changes and living productive, effective lives
- Humans innately gravitate toward self-actualization
- --Actualizing tendency
- Give the right growth-fostering conditions, individuals strive to move forward and fulfill their creative nature.
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Person-Centered Therapy
A reaction against the directive and psychoanalytic approach
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Person-Centered Therapy Challenges
- The assumption that "the counselor knows best"
- The validity of advice, suggestion, persuasion, teaching, diagnosis, and interpretation
- The belieft that clients cannot understand and resolve their own problems without direct help
- The focus on problems over persons
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Person-Centered Therapy Emphasizes:
- Therapy as a journey shared by two fallible people
- The person's innate striving for self-actualization
- The personal characteristics of the therapist and the quality of the therapeutic relationship
- The counselor's creation of a permissive, "growth-promoting" climate
- People are capable of self-directed growth if involved in a therapeutic relationship
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Therapeutic Goals
- The client is to be achieving a greater degree of independence and integration
- Focus on person, not presenting problem
- Experience without the facade to become increasingly actualized through:
- --Openness to experience
- --Trust in themselves
- --An internal source of evaluation
- --Willingness to continue growing
- Encouraging these characteristics is the basic goal of person of person-centered therapy.
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The Therapist
- Focuses on the quality of the therapeutic relationship... being not doing
- Provides a supportive therapeutic environment in which the client is the agent of change and healing
- Serves as a model of a human being struggling toward greater realness
- Is genuine, integrated, and authentic, without a false front
- Can openly express feelings and attitudes that are present in the relationship with the client
- Is invested in developing his or her own life experiences to deepen self-knowledge and more toward self-actualization
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Incongruence
- The common state of the client
- Difference between self perception and their experience of reality
- Clients often seek therapy with a sense of hopelessness and are wanting someone to help them "find the way"
- C-C is designed to help them learn to be responsible for themselves by using the relationship for greater understanding
- The client then, in the context of this type of relationship, is the agent of change.
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Relationship Between Therapist and Client
- Rogers Stated:
- "If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself or herself the capacity to use that relationship for growth and change and personal development will occur?"
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Six Conditions (Necessary and sufficient for personality changes to occur)
- 1. Two persons are in psychological contact
- 2. The first, the client, is experiencing incongruence
- 3. The second person, the therapist, is congruent or integrated in the relationship
- 4. The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard or real caring for the client
- 5. The therapist experiences empathy for the client's internal frame of reference and endeavors to communicate this to the client
- 6. The communication to the client is, to a minimal degree, achieved.
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Congruence
- Genuineness or realness in the therapy session
- Therapist's behaviors match his or her words
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Unconditional Postive Regard
- Acceptance and genuine caring about the client as a valuable person
- Accepting clients as they presently are
- Therapist need not approve of all client behavior
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Accurate Empathic Understanding
- The ability to deeply grasp the client's subjective world
- Helper attitudes are more important than knowledge
- -- The therapist need not experience the situation to develop an understanding of it from the client's perspective
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Roger's Core Conditions for the Therapeutic Environment (Therapist)
- Empathy
- Unconditional Regard
- Congruence
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Rogerian View of Psychotherapy Implied Therapeutic Conditions
- Client and therapist must be in pscyhological contact
- Client must be experiencing distress
- Client must be willing to receive conditions offered by therapist
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Process of Client-Centered Psychotherapy
- Therapy begins at first contact
- Respect shown immediately to the client
- Therapy's length deteremined by client
- Quick suggestions and reassurances are avoided
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Application to Group Counseling
- Therapist takes on the role of facilitator:
- --Creates therapeutic environment
- --Techniques are not stressed
- --Exhibits deep trust of the group members
- --Provides support for members
- --Group members set the goals for the group
- Group setting fosters an open and accepting community where members can work on self-acceptance
- Individuals learn that they do not have to experience the process of change alone and grow from the support of group members.
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Person-Centered Expressive Arts Therapy
- Various creative art forms
- --promote healing and self-discovery
- --are inherently healing and promote self-awareness and insight
- Creative expression connects us to our feelings which are a source of life energy
- --Feelings must be experienced to achieve self-awareness
- Individuals explore new facets of the self and uncover insights that transform the, creating wholeness
- --Discover of wholeness leads to understanding of how we relate to the outer world
- The client's inner world and outer world become unified
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Conditions for Creativity
- Acceptance of the individual
- A non-judgmental setting
- Empathy
- Psychological freedom
- Stimulating and challenging experiences
- Individuals who have experienced unsafe creative environments "held back" and may disengage from creative processes.
- Safe, creative environments give clients permission to be authentic and to delve deeply into their experience
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Limitations of the Person-Centered Approach
- Cultural Considerations
- --Some clients may prefer a more directive, structured treatment
- --Individuals accustomed to indirect communication may not be comfortable with direct expression of empathy and creativity
- --Individuals from collectivisitic cultures may disagree with the emphasis on internal locus of control
- Does not focus on the use of specific techniques, making this treatment difficult to standardize
- Beginning therapists may find it difficult to provide both support and challenges to clients
- Limits of the therapist as a person may interfere with developing a genuine therapeutic relationship
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Client-Centered Therapy (ROGERS)
- Language: Common Sense
- How to Understand the Individual: Subjective Interpersonal
- Empahsis: Purpose
- Characterization of the Individual: Holistic
- View of Human Nature: People can be good or bad
- Role of Therapist: Facilitate patient's self discovery
- View of Transference: Not central to the patient's ability to change
- Presentation of the Therapist: A caring person who is willing to listen
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Psychoanalysis
- Language: Esoteric
- How to Understand the Individual: Objective Intrapersonal
- Empahsis: Causality
- Characterization of the Individual: Reductionistic
- View of Human Nature: People are bad
- Role of Therapist: Interpretation for the patient
- View of Transference: Inevitable, fundamental to the change process
- Presentation of the Therapist: Authority, teacher
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Client-Centered
Behavior Changes through internal factors
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Behavioral
Behavior changes through external factors
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Client Centered (CC) vs. REBT Differenes
- CC greatly values therapy relationship
- CC client-directed
- CC accepting of patient's perceptions
- In CC client chooses actions
- CC therapist relates to patient at the feeling level
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Client-Centered (CC) vs. REBT Similiarities
- Great optismism in the ability of people to change
- Perception that individuals are often overly self-critical
- Willingness to put forth great effort to help people
- Willingness to demonstrate their methods publicly
- Respect for science and research
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