Raskin, N.J., Rogers, C.R. & Witty, M.C. (2019). Client-centred therapy. In Wedding, D. & Corsini, R.J. (eds.) Current Psychotherapies (10th ed.) (pp. 104-106). Cengage Learning.
Within the specific context of client-centered therapy, the therapist’s experience of identifiable therapeutic attitudes engenders a climate of freedom and safety, which is hypothesized to free and unsnarl the actualizing tendency. Within this accepting, real relationship, clients are free to participate in the situation in any way they wish. Active narration of whatever is most present is accepted—as is silence. The client propels the process. Bohart has described the clients’ active, self-healing capacities. These self-righting potentials, in concert with the therapist-provided conditions, promote positive change. In this interactive model, the client actively co-constructs the therapy (Bohart, 2004, p. 108).
Because both the therapist and the client are unique persons, the relationship that develops between them cannot be prescribed or predicted in advance. Their unique encounter is premised on the response of the therapist to a person who seeks help. Manualized therapy practices cannot be truly client centered because they apply the same treatment protocol to all clients. Conversely, client-centered therapists tend to be spontaneously responsive, accommodating to the requests of clients whenever possible. This willingness to accommodate requests—by answering questions, changing a time, or making a phone call on behalf of a client—originates in the therapist’s basic trust in and respect for clients and their aims and goals (Brodley, 2011a). The therapeutic relationship accounts for a significant percentage of the variance in positive outcome in all theoretical orientations of psychotherapy (Wampold & Imel, 2015). In orientations that are more directive, in which the therapist guides the therapy, clients may feel disempowered. Proctor sites one client who recalls her experience in psychodynamic therapy:
The discourse of transference had the effect of completely trapping me in a position where I could not trust my own experience; my disagreeing with my therapist’s interpretations was used as further evidence of my defences and why I could not trust myself. The fact that there was some sense in some of the interpretations made it even harder for me to trust my own knowledge and feelings. This effect was hardly surprising, given the psychoanalytic discourse about the therapist as “expert” and the patient as riddled with immature unconscious defences. (Proctor, 2017, p. 148)
This client’s experience exemplifies the disempowering and undermining effects of the client’s self-authority. Our mission of empowering clients to find and value their own voices and sensibilities can only succeed by a commitment to implement the nondirective attitude. This attitude informs all of our therapeutic expressive behavior (Levitt, 2005).
As client-centered therapists, we commit ourselves to an attitude of trust in the person’s inner resources for growth and self-realization despite psychological limitations, trauma, or oppressive environmental conditions. Our radical trust in the client’s inherent growth tendency and right to self-determination is expressed in practice in the nondirective attitude (Brodley, 1997; Raskin, 1948, 2005). While participating in this emancipatory process, the therapist cannot employ means that disempower the client without falling into contradiction (see O’Hara, 2006, p. 121).
This foundational attitude crucially informs the therapist’s intentions. The therapist’s nondirective attitude does not imply passivity or the lack of responsiveness; it does not inhibit the freedom of the client-centered therapist. As it represents our ethical commitment to the egalitarian nature of the therapy, it is not an expression of orthodoxy as some authors have claimed but is rather a moral compass that guides our course without dictating the route. It is nonauthoritarian and attuned to protecting the autonomy of the client. As challenging today as it was in 1951, when Rogers stated,
[t]he primary point of importance here is the attitude held by the counselor toward the worth and the significance of the individual. How do we look upon others? Do we see each person as having worth and dignity in his [sic] own right? If we do hold this point of view at the verbal level, to what extent is it operationally evident at the behavioral level? Do we tend to treat individuals as persons of worth, or do we subtly devaluate them by our attitudes and behavior? Is our philosophy one in which respect for the individual is uppermost? Do we respect his capacity and his right to self-direction, or do we basically believe that his life would be best guided by us? To what extent do we have a need and a desire to dominate others? Are we willing for the individual to select and choose his own values, or are our actions guided by the conviction (usually unspoken) that he would be happiest if he permitted us to select for him his values and standards and goals? (Rogers, 1951, p. 20)
To develop as a client-centered therapist, you must be willing to take on the discipline of learning to be an open, authentic, empathic person in the relationship and constantly seek out ways to equalize power in the relationship (Proctor, 2017). This nondirective attitude stands in direct opposition to much of graduate education in clinical psychology, social work, and related fields in which students are encouraged to believe that they can and should become experts on others’ lives and choices.
Basic concepts on the client side of the process include self-concept, locus of evaluation, and experiencing. In focusing on what is important to the person seeking help, client-centered therapists soon discovered that the person’s perceptions and feelings about self were of central concern (Rogers, 1951, 1959b). A major component of one’s self-concept is positive self-regard, which is often lacking in clients who seek therapeutic help. Some of the earliest psychotherapy research projects showed that when clients were rated as successful in therapy, their attitudes toward self became significantly more positive. More recent research underscores this important aspect of positive therapy outcome in person-centered and experiential therapies (Timulak & Creaner, 2010).
Rogers’s group also found that clients tended to progress along a related dimension termed locus of evaluation. As they gained self-esteem, they tended to shift the basis for their standards and values from other people’s judgments to their own inner experiencing.
People commonly began therapy overly concerned with what others thought of them—that is, their locus of evaluation was external. With success in therapy, their attitudes toward others, as toward themselves, became more positive, and they were less dependent on others for their values and standards (Raskin, 1952). These clients may be described as having moved from an external locus of evaluation to an internal locus of evaluation, and thus they are more genuinely self-determining. Ryan and Deci state:
Comparisons between people whose motivation is authentic (literally, self-authored or endorsed) and those who are externally controlled for an action typically reveal that the former, relative to the latter, have more interest, excitement, and confidence which in turn is manifest both as enhanced performance, persistence, and creativity . . . and as heightened vitality…self-esteem . . . , and general well-being. . . . This is so even when people have the same level of perceived competence or self-efficacy for the activity. (Ryan & Deci, 2000, p. 68)
A third central concept in client-centered therapy is experiencing, a dimension along which many but not all clients improved (Rogers, Gendlin, Kiesler, & Truax, 1967) as they shifted from a rigid mode of experiencing self and world to one of greater openness and flexibility.
The therapeutic attitudes and the three client constructs described in this section have been carefully defined, measured, and studied in scores of research projects relating therapist practice to the outcome of psychotherapy. There is considerable evidence that when clients perceive unconditional positive regard and empathic understanding in a relationship with a congruent therapist, their self-concepts become more positive and realistic, they become more self-expressive and self-directed, they become more open and free in their experiencing, their behavior is rated as more mature, and they cope more effectively with stress (Rogers, 1986a).
