Humanistic and Constructivistic Psychotherapies Flashcards
What is Person Centered Therapy’s Personality Theory?
Carl Roger’s Person Centered Therapy based on belief that all people have an innate “self-actualizing tendency” that serves as the major source of motivation and guides them toward positive, healthy growth.
Central concept: Notion of the self, or the “organized, consistent conceptual gestalt composed of perceptions of the characteristics of the “I” or “me” and the perceptions of the relationships of the “I” or “me” to others and to various aspects of life, together with the values attached to these perceptions”
Rogers believed that each person has the ability to become self-actualized(i.e., to reach his/her full potential) but to do so, the self must remain unified, organized, and whole.
What is Person Centered Therapy’s view of maladaptive behavior?
The self becomes disorganized as the result of incongruence between the self and experience, which can occur when the individual experiences conditions of worth.EX: when a child finds out that positive regard from her parents is conditional rather than unconditional:that is when the child learns that she will receive affection and attention from her parents only when she behaves in certain ways. In this situation, the child will feel incongruence between her sense of self(how she acts) and her experience in the world(how her parents want her to act). Incongruence produces unpleasant viceral sensations that are subjectively experienced as anxiety and serve as a signal that the unified self is being threatened. A person may attempt to alleviate anxiety through the defensive maneuvers of perceptual distortion or denial. While these maneuvers may be temporarily effective, they are counter to self-actualization.
What is Person Centered Therapy’s therapy goals and techniques?
Primary goal of person centered therapy is to help the client achieve congruence between the self and experience so that he/she can become a more fully-functioning self-actualizing person.
The techniques:
When the right environment is provided by therapist, the client will achieve congruence between self and experience and will be carried by his/her own tendency toward self-actualization.
Right environment involves 3 facilitative conditions:
Unconditional positive regard(Respect): Therapist must genuinely care about the client, affirm the client’s worth as a person, and accept the client without evaluation or judgment. Positive and negative judgments are both considered non-therapeutic.
Genuineness(Congruence): therapist must be genuine in therapy since any lack of genuineness will undermine client’s trust. Therapist must honestly communicate his/her feelings to client when appropriate.
Accurate Empathic Understanding. Accurate empathy refers to therapist’s ability to see the world as the client does and to convey that understanding to the client. Through nodding, maintaining eye contact, and “reflection of feeling.”
Avoid directive techniques, assigning a dx, do not view transference as a necessary component of therapy although acknowledge and accept it, but not interpret it.
What is Gestalt Therapy Personality Theory?
Founded by Fritz Perls and is based on premise that each person is capable of assuming personal responsibility for his/her own thoughts, feelings, and actions and living as an integrated “whole.”
According to Perls, the personality consists of self and the self-image. The self is the creative aspect of personality that promotes the individual’s inherent tendency for self-actualization, or the ability to live as a fully integrated person.
The self-image is the “dark side” of the personality and hinders growth and self-actualization by imposing external standards.Which aspect of the personality dominates depends, in large part, on the person’s early interactions with the environment.EX: childhood, a parent provides a child with support and opportunities with overcoming frustration for the self to develop. If given too much support in the form of approval and/or is shielded from all frustration, the development of self-image grows more than the self.
What is Gestalt Therapy’s view of maladaptive behavior?
Neurotic (maladaptive) behavior is considered “growth disorder” that involves abandonment of the self for the self-image and a resulting lack of integration. Neurotic behavior often stems from a disturbance in the boundary between the self and the external environment that interferes with the person’s ability to satisfy his/her needs and maintain a state of homeostasis.
4 Major Boundary Disturbances:
1.Introjection: Occurs when a person psychologically swallows whole concepts, i.e., when the person accepts concepts, facts, and standards from the environment without actually understanding or fully assimilating them. Introjectors have trouble distinguishing between “me” and “not me” and in therapy are often overly compliant.
2.Projection: Involves disowning aspects of the self by assigning them to other people.Extreme projection can result in paranoia.
3.Retroflection:Entails doing to oneself what one wants to do to others. A retroflector may turn his anger toward another person inward.
4.Confluence:Refers to the absence of a boundary between the self and the environment. Confluence causes intolerance of any differences between oneself and others and often underlies feelings of guilt and resentment.
What is Gestalt Therapy goals and techniques?
Major goal of Gestalt therapy is to help the client become a unified whole by integrating the various aspects of the self.
Techniques:Gestalt therapists avoid diagnostic labels and view historical events as important only when they directly impinge upon the client’s current functioning. They regard the client’s transference to be counterproductive and respond to it by helping the client recognize the difference between his/her “transferene fantasy” and reality. Gestaltians consider the primary curative factor in therapy to be awareness, which is defined as a full understanding of one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions in the here and now and they use a variety of “ready-made” exercises and spontaneous experiments to lead clients toward greater awareness.
EX: empty chair technique and other games of dialogue are used to help clients become aware of and integrate aspects of personality that have been disowned or denied. Dreamwork is also used as technique. For Gestaltians, elements of a dream represent different part of the self(including parts that have not been fully accepted and integrated) and dream work involves having the client role-play elements of the dream as a way to integrate the parts of the personality they represent.
What is Existential Therapy view of maladaptive behavior?
Emphasis on personal choice and responsibility for developing a meaningful life and assume that people are not static but instead are in a constant state of evolving and becoming.
Maladaptive behavior is the result of an inability to cope authentically with the ultimate concerns of existence–i.e., death,freedom, existential isolation, and meaninglessness. EX: distinguish between existential anxiety and neurotic anxiety. Existential anxiety is considered a normal response to ultimate concerns and can serve as a source of motivation to change and grow.
Neurotic anxiety is frequently the result of an attempt to avoid existential anxiety, is out of proportion to the situation that elicited it, is often outside conscious awareness, and can be immobilizing.
What is Existential Therapy goals and techniques?
The goal of existential therapy is to help clients live in more committed, self-aware, authentic, and meaningful ways. In therapy, clients are helped to recognize their freedom to choose their own destinies and to accept responsibilities for changing their own lives. The therapist-client is considered the most important therapeutic tool, although specific interventions are sometimes used. EX: paradoxical intention is used to reduce a client’s fear and requires the client to focus in an exaggerated and humorous way on the feared situation.
What is Reality Therapy Personality Theory?
William Glasser’s Reality therapy is based on choice theory, which assumes that people are responsible for the choices they make and focuses on how people make choices that affect the course of their lives.
According to Glasser, people have 5 basic innate needs that serve as the primary source of motivation: survival, love, and belonging, power, freedom, and fun. Of these the need for love and belonging is most important since relationships with others are necessary to fulfill all other needs. When a person fulfills his or her needs in a responsible way–that is, in a conscious and realistic manner that does not infringe on the rights of others to fulfill their needs–the person has adopted a success identity. However, when a person is unable to satisfy his/her needs or does so in irresponsible ways, the person has assumed a failure identity, which Glasser believes underlies most forms of mental and emotional disturbance.
What is Reality Therapy view of maladaptive behavior?
A key assumption is that mental illness is the result of an individual’s choices. From this perspective, a person is not depressed due to unpleasant childhood experiences or a chemical imbalance in the brain but because he/she has chosen to “depress” him/herself. A person might depress himself, for example, because he believes that doing so will help him obtain attention from others or allow him to avoid unpleasant activities.
What is Reality Therapy goals and techniques?
Reality therapy rejects the medical model of conceptualization of mental illness; focuses on current behaviors and beliefs, views transference as detrimental to therapy progress, stresses conscious processes, and emphasizes value judgments, especially client’s ability to judge what is right and wrong in his/her daily life.
Primary goal of reality therapy is to help clients identify responsible and effective ways to satisfy their needs and thereby develop a success identity. Techniques: accomplished through the use of questioning, encouragement, and other strategies that help clients explore their needs and perceptions, explore and evaluate their behaviors, and develop and commit to a realistic plan of action. During therapy, attention is paid to client’s “total behavior” which consists of his/her actions, thoughts, emotions, and physiology, primary emphasis is on actions and thoughts which can be most easily controlled by the client.
What is Personal Construct Therapy Personality Theory?
George Kelly’s Personal construct therapy focuses on how the client experiences the world. It assumes that people choose the ways that they deal with the world and that there are always alternative ways for doing so.
According to Kelly, a person’s psychological processes are determined by the way he/she “construes” (perceives, interprets, and predicts) events, with construing involving the use of personal constructs. As defined by Kelly, personal constructs are bipolar dimensions of meaning(e.g., happy/sad, competent/incompetent, friendly/unfriendly) that begin to develop in infancy and may operate on an unconscious or conscious level. No two people have the same set of personal constructs or ways of organizing their constructs. Kelly also proposed that people act as scientists who continually test their personal constructs by checking the accuracy of the predictions derived from them and then revising constructs that lead to inaccurate predictions.
What is Personal Construct Therapy view of maladaptive behavior?
Rejects medical model of mental illness and replaced with anxiety and hostility and other forms of maladaptive behavior as a result of inadequate personal constructs. As described by Kelly, anxiety is the result of the “recognition that the events with which one is confronted lie outside the range of one’s construct system.”EX: a person may experience anxiety after developing a stroke-related paralysis because she doesn’t have constructs that help her determine how to behave in various situations as a person with a disability. EX: hostility occurs when a person continues to rely on constructs despite invalidating evidence and tries to force people, objects, or events to fit those constructs.
What is Personal Construct Therapy goals and techniques?
Practitioners of Personal Construct therapy consider the therapist and client to be mutual experts and “co-experimenters” who work together to derive tasks that will help the client identify and revise or replace maladaptive personal constructs so that the client is better able to “make sense” of his/her experiences. To achieve this goal, therapists use assessment techniques and tx strategies. The goal of assessment is to identify the content and process of the client’s construing. The repertory grid is one method of assessment and involves having the client identify people who have various roles in his/her life (e.g., mother, father, sister, brother, closest friend) and the ways in which those individuals are similar and different. Another technique is the characterization sketch in which the client describes him/herself from the perspective of someone who knows the client well. W/regard to tx, Kelly devised fixed-role therapy to help clients “try on” and adopt alternative personal constructs. It involves having the client experiment with other ways of experiencing life by acting out in his/her daily life the role of a fictional character who is psychologically different from the client.
