Client-Centered Therapy Flashcards
Who is the founder of Client-Centered Therapy?
Carl R. Rogers (1902 - 1987)
The Rogerian Hypothesis
Individuals are most able to access their own creative resources when provided a relationship offered by a genuine, congruent therapist who is experiencing unconditional positive regard and warm acceptance and is empathically receptive to the client’s own perceived realities.
What distinguishes client-centered therapy from the medical model regarding the current thinking of mental illness?
The claim of sovereignty of personhood.
Are clinicians experts on their clients’ lives in client-centered therapy?
No. Clients have self-authority as active agents of personal and social change and are architects of their own lives,
What is the Actualizing Tendency?
Organisms are motivated to maintain and enhance themselves. They move towards differentiation. People do the best they can under the circumstances they perceive and that are acting on them.
What is idiographic?
Level of uniqueness. (Specificity)
What is nomothetic?
Universal. (A universal level of analysis.)
How does idiographic, or level of uniqueness, apply to Rogerian therapy?
Each person has a unique history of experiences and learnings, and a way of using the therapeutic situation. Rogers approach is oriented to the phenomenology of the unique person.
How does universal, or nomothetic, level of analysis apply to Rogerian therapy?
Roger’s theory of personality is cast in terms of universally applicable constructs, such as each individual developing a need for positive regard.
Congruence
Congruence is the state of wholeness or integration within the experience of the person, a hallmark of psychological adjustment. The capacity to symbolize experiencing in conscious awareness and to integrate those experiences within our concepts of self.
Did Rogers view humans as inherently good or evil?
No.
There is one central source of energy in the human organism. It is conceptualized as a tendency toward fulfillment, toward actualization, involving the maintenance and enhancement of the organism.
There is one central source of energy in the human organism. It is conceptualized as a tendency toward fulfillment, toward actualization, involving the maintenance and enhancement of the organism.
Does the client actively co-construct their therapy?
Yes.
What is the therapist’s nondirective attitude?
It is a moral compass that guides our course without dictating the route. Is is nonauthoritatian and attuned to protecting the autonomy of the client.
What are the basic concepts on the client side of the process?
Self-concept, locus of evaluation, and experiencing.
What is a major component of one’s self-concept?
Positive self-regard, which is often initially lacking in clients.
External locus of evaluation
Occurs when a client is overly concerned with what others think of them.
Internal locus of evaluation
Occurs when a client is more genuinely self-determining, and shift their standards and values from other people’s judgment to their own inner experiencing.
What are Roger’s three essential therapist-offered conditions of therapeutic personality change?
Congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding.
Who uses the person-centered approach?
Educators, nurses, psychologists, students, artists, and business consultants.
What is the organisms one basic tendency and striving?
To actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism.
What is behavior?
The goal-directed attempt of the organism to satisfy its needs as experienced in the field as perceived.
How does emotion come into play?
Emotion accompanies and in general facilitates goal-directed behavior.
The best vantage point for understanding behavior is…
from the internal frame of reference of the individual.
Experiences are either a, b, or c.
a) symbolized, perceived, and organized into some relationship to the self
b) ignored because their is no perceived relationship to the self
c) denied symbolization because it is inconsistent with the structure of the self
Psychological maladjustment exists when
when the organism denies to awareness significant sensory and visceral experiences, which are not organized and symbolized into the self structure.
Psychological adjustment exists when
the concept of the self is such that all the sensory and visceral experiences of the organism are assimilated on a symbolic level into a consistent relationship with the concept of self.
Children will actualize themselves, in spite of the painful experiences of so doing. In the same way, they will become independent, responsible, self-governing, and socialized, in spite of the pain which is often involved in these steps. Even where they do not, because of a variety of circumstances, exhibit the growth, the tendency is still present.
Children will actualize themselves, in spite of the painful experiences of so doing. In the same way, they will become independent, responsible, self-governing, and socialized, in spite of the pain which is often involved in these steps. Even where they do not, because of a variety of circumstances, exhibit the growth, the tendency is still present.
Conditions of worth may…
sow the seeds of confusion about self, self-doubt, and disapproval of self, as well as reliance on the evaluation of others.
What is experience?
the private world of the individual. Each individual is the only one who can know it completely.
What is reality?
The primary reality to be understood is the reality perceived by the individual.
What is an organism’s actualizing tendency?
Dynamic processes motivated by an inherent tendency to maintain and enhance themselves. It is an axiom in client-centered theory, functions continuously, directionally, and holistically through-out all subsystems of the organism. This theory is biological in nature, not moral.
What is syntropy?
All living organisms are evolving toward greater complexity, fulfilling those potentials that preserve and enhance themselves.
What are the Core Conditions?
Congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding.
Is the client in a state of incongruence when first meeting the therapist?
Yes.
Congruence
The therapist does not deny the feelings being experienced, even when they are anti therapeutic, and is willing to express feelings that exist in the relationship. It is avoiding hiding behind the mask of professionalism. It also means accurate symbolization of experience in the internal self-awareness of the therapist. It is being real and authentic in the moment. It manifests itself in a perceptible transparency or genuineness and relaxed openness.
Empathic Understanding
The therapist is trying to grasp the point the client is making, and this leads to empathic understanding of responses that capture the client’s intention, agency, emotional associations, etc.
There is simply no room for any other type of counselor activity or attitude. If he is attempting to live the attitudes of the other, he cannot be diagnosing them, he cannot be thinking of making the process go faster. The understanding is not spontaneous but must be acquired. This is to be done to the exclusion of any other type of attention.
There is simply no room for any other type of counselor activity or attitude. If he is attempting to live the attitudes of the other, he cannot be diagnosing them, he cannot be thinking of making the process go faster. The understanding is not spontaneous but must be acquired. This is to be done to the exclusion of any other type of attention.
Unconditional Positive Regard
Warm acceptance, nonpossessive caring, nonjudgmental openness
To understand all is to pardon all. We are not called to justify our clients’ choices or behavior but to understand them.
To understand all is to pardon all. We are not called to justify our clients’ choices or behavior but to understand them.
Organismic Valuing Process
In the ongoing organismic valuing process, individuals rely on evidence of their own senses to make value judgments. This is in contrast to “oughts” and “should.” The responsibility derives from a person’s internalized condition of worth.
Phenomenology
A method of exploration that primarily uses human experience as the source of data and attempts to include all human experience without bias. (Phenomenology is the basic method for most existentialists.)
