Person-centered Therapy - Processes

Processes

Rogers believed that the most important factor in successful therapy is the therapist's attitude. There are three interrelated attitudes on the part of the therapist:

  1. Congruence - the willingness to relate to clients without hiding behind a professional facade.
  2. Unconditional Positive Regard - therapist accepting client for who he or she is without disapproving feelings, actions or characteristics. It shows the willingness to listen without interrupting, judging or giving advice.
  3. Empathy - understand and appreciate the client's feeling throughout the therapy session.

According to Rogers, a therapist with these three attitudes would allow the client to express their feelings freely without having the feeling that they are being judged. The therapist does not attempt to change the client's way of thinking in order to explore the issues that are most important to them.

Read more about this topic:  Person-centered Therapy

Famous quotes containing the word processes:

    Our bodies are shaped to bear children, and our lives are a working out of the processes of creation. All our ambitions and intelligence are beside that great elemental point.
    Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978)

    The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
    Willa Cather (1873–1947)

    The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practiced by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones.
    Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)