Chapter 4: Client-centered therapy Flashcards
positive psychology=
an approach to psychology that emphasizes the desirability of focusing on clients’ strengths as the engine of change. This focus has overlap with the actualizing tendency of client-centered therapy.
Further, both approaches focus on applying scientific methods. However, there is also some critique stating that their interventions still ground themselves in the medical model with positive interventions (happiness exercises for depression).
feminist therapy =
a psychology/therapy approach that addresses that many women’s problems are rooted in social structures that oppress them, instead of in their psyches. The feminist movement in the late 1960s led women therapists to challenge the dominant therapeutic paradigms and ideas and the authority of the male founders. Psychologists often represented male authority and their reductionist ideas of ‘what women (should) want’.
overlap feminist therapy en client centered therapy
both aim to empower the client.
wat is het misverstand rondom CBT
For a very long time, CBT has been dominant based on the assumption that it is more strongly evidence-based than other approaches. However, this is misleading as many studies show that all psychotherapy models are roughly equal in effects (Dodo bird verdict) and that the therapeutic relationship is much more important for the outcome.
Critics of CBT maintain that the therapeutic relationship is used to get the patient to conform to and comply with the therapist’s advice and guidance: the therapist is the one with expert power. Obviously, this is ethically problematic from the client-centered perspective.
Rogers’ understanding of human nature comprises 3 levels of understanding:
- nomothetic (universal): human beings are deeply the same and tend to respond in similar ways in particular situations (all humans have circulatory systems).
- Group differences: there are differences between certain groups of people (older people’s circulatory systems may be less efficient).
- Idiographic (uniqueness): each person is unique and never exactly like another person (no person’s circulatory system is exactly like anyone else’s).
Therapeutic relationship in client centered therapy
Within the context of client-centered therapy, the therapist’s non-directive, accepting attitude should stimulate a climate of freedom and safety to promote the actualizing tendency. The client actively co-constructs the therapy in an accepting and empowering environment.
nondirective attitude
an attitude of trust in a person’s inner resources of growth and self-realization. It does not imply passivity or lack of responsiveness, but it encourages an equal power relationship instead of encouraging therapists to believe that they can become experts on others’ lives and choices.
basic concepts on the clients side
- Self-concept: the client’s perceptions and feelings about self. A major component in this is positive self-regard, which is often lacking in clients that seek help.
- Locus of evaluation: the basis for a client’s standards and values (external vs. internal). At the beginning of therapy, patients are often overly concerned with what other people think of them (external locus), which later changes to being about their own inner experiencing (internal locus).
- Experiencing: the way in which a client experiences oneself and the world (rigidity vs. openness). Many, but not all, clients usually move from a rigid mode of experiencing to one of greater openness and flexibility.
3 essential qualities of a therapist that are conditions of therapeutic change:
- congruence/genuineness
- unconditional positive regard
- empathic understanding
Congruence (genuineness):
the therapist’s ongoing process of assimilating, integrating, and symbolizing the flow of experiences in awareness. It is about being aware of and willing to represent feelings that one has in the present moment (and not hide behind the mask of professionalism). Congruence usually manifests itself in a perceptible (appearance, verbal and non-verbal) transparency, genuineness, and self-disclosure.
unconditional positive regard=
a non-judgmental openness and acceptance of the client as a person with their own behaviors, beliefs, and values, irrespective of the therapist’s own values. The therapist should make every effort to be aware of evaluative or judgmental responses and set them aside. It does not mean that the therapist has to approve the behavior of the client. Rather it is about trying to understand this behavior as the best possible adjustment: what is the meaning of the behavior?
Empathic understanding =
= the ability to absorb the expressed meanings of the client as if seeing the world from the client’s perspective and to feel along with the client’s pain or joy. It is an active, continuous attitude of wishing to grasp the client’s expression, meanings, and narrative. However, it is important to note that this empathy remains temporary: it should be ‘as if’ one is the patient, not losing oneself in it. Empathy does not only promote the therapeutic relationship, it also promotes exploration of the client’s perspective and emotion regulation.
19-proposition theory of personality & behavior=
a growth-oriented theory of personality and behaviour by Rogers, based on 19 propositions:
every organism is at the center of his/her own world, which is the reality. the organism has one basic tendency: an actualizing tendency and behaviour is the goal-directed attempt to satisfy this need. the self is formed as a result of an interaction with the environment and evaluations of other people. experiences that occur are symbolized into some relationship to the self or denied because they are inconsistent with the structure of the self. in the latter case, there is incongruence, which is the basis of psychological maladjustment. in contract, psychological adjustment exist when the concept of the self is such that all experiences may be symbolized (are not denied) into one integrated self structure.
experience =
the private world of the individual, the reality for a certain person.
experience may be conscious but can also be more difficult to bring into awareness. an individual is the only one who can know his/her experience completely because they are the only one with their internal frame of reference.
symbolization =
the process by which an individual becomes aware or conscious of an experience. We have a tendency to symbolize experiences in ways that are consistent with the self-concept.
(A self-confident person may symbolize a silent audience as attentive and interested, while a less confident person may symbolize the audience as unimpressed.)
