Psychology2016

Psychological Therapies 593

love, warmth, respect, and affection without any conditions attached. If people think that there
are conditions put on the love and affection they receive, their ideal selves will be determined
by those conditions and become more difficult to achieve, resulting in a mismatch of selves
and unhappiness.

So the key to getting over unhappiness would be to get the real

and ideal selves closer together? How does a therapist do that?

Rogers believed that the goal of the therapist should be to provide the unconditional
positive regard that has been absent from the troubled person’s life and to help the person
recognize the discrepancies between the real and ideal selves. He also believed that the
person would actually have to do most of the work, talking out problems and concerns in
an atmosphere of warmth and acceptance from the therapist, so he originally called the
people in this therapy relationship “clients” instead of “patients,” to put the therapeutic
relationship on a more equal footing. As a result, Rogers’s therapy is very nondirective
because the person actually does all the real work, with the therapist merely acting as
a sounding board. However, therapists may help individuals redirect or reallocate their
attention to focus on feelings not fully processed previously (Prochaska & Norcross, 2009).
Later, the term client was changed to the even more neutral term person. His therapy is
now called person-centered therapy because the person is truly the center of the process.

BASIC ELEMENTS Rogers (1961) saw three key elements as being necessary in any suc-
cessful person–therapist relationship.

• Authenticity The therapist must show authenticity in a genuine, open, and honest
  response to the individual. It is easier for some professionals to “hide” behind the role
  of the therapist, as was often the case in psychoanalysis. In person-centered therapy,
  the therapist has to be able to tolerate a person’s differences without being judgmental.


• Unconditional Positive Regard Another key element of person-centered therapy
  is the warm, accepting, completely uncritical atmosphere that the therapist must
  create for the people they work with. Having respect for an individual and their
  feelings, values, and goals, even if they are different from those of the therapist, is
  called unconditional positive regard.


• Empathy Last, the therapist needs to be able to see the world through the eyes
  of the person they are working with. The therapist has to be able to acknowledge
  what people are feeling and experiencing by using a kind of understanding called
  empathy. This involves listening carefully and closely to what individuals are say-
  ing and trying to feel what they feel. Therapists must also avoid getting their own
  feelings mixed up with their clients’ feelings (e.g., countertransference).
  A person-centered therapist typically responds in a way that seeks clarification and
  demonstrates attempts to understand the experience of the individual. Reflection refers
  to a technique therapists use to allow clients to continue to talk and have insights with-
  out the interference of the therapist’s interpretations and possible biases. Reflection is lit-
  erally a kind of mirroring of clients’ statements. Here’s an example from one of Rogers’s
  own therapy sessions with a client (Meador & Rogers, 1984, p. 143):

Client: I just ain’t no good to nobody, never was, and never will be.

Rogers: Feeling that now, hm? That you’re just no good to yourself, no good to

anybody. Never will be any good to anybody. Just that you’re completely

worthless, huh?—Those really are lousy feelings. Just feel that you’re no

good at all, hm?

Client: Yeah.

MOTIVATIONAL INTERVIEWING A variation of person-centered therapy is motivational
interviewing, or MI (Miller & Rollnick, 2002), which has been described by Hal Arkow-
itz and William R. Miller as “client-centered therapy with a twist” (p. 4). In contrast to
person-centered therapy, MI has specific goals, to reduce ambivalence about change and

nondirective

therapy style in which the therapist

remains relatively neutral and does

not interpret or take direct actions

with regard to the client, instead

remaining a calm, nonjudgmental lis-

tener while the client talks.

person-centered therapy

a nondirective insight therapy based

on the work of Carl Rogers in which

the client does all the talking and the

therapist listens.

authenticity

the genuine, open, and honest

response of the therapist to the client.

unconditional positive regard

referring to the warmth, respect, and

accepting atmosphere created by the

therapist for the client in person-cen-

tered therapy; positive regard that is

given without conditions or strings

attached.

empathy

the ability of the therapist to under-

stand the feelings of the client.

A Rogerian person-centered therapist listens

with calm acceptance to anything the client

says. A sense of empathy with the client’s

feelings is also important.

reflection

therapy technique in which the thera-

pist restates what the client says rather

than interpreting those statements.