Therapy is about entering into an intensely personal relationship with the client-relating not as a scientist to an object of study, not as a physician expecting to diagnose and cure, but as a person to a person.
I appreciate this description of the optimal therapeutic encounter.
First, as a therapist, I experience the client as a person of unconditional self-worth: of value no matter what his condition, his behavior, or his feelings. It would mean that the therapist is genuine, hiding behind no defensive facade, but meeting the client with the feelings which organically he is experiencing. It would mean that the therapist is able to let himself go in understanding this client; that no inner barriers keep him from sensing what it feels like to be the client at each moment of the relationship; and that he can convey something of his empathic understanding to the client. It means that the therapist has been comfortable in entering this relationship fully, without knowing cognitively where it will lead, satisfied with providing a climate which will permit the client the utmost freedom to become himself.
For the client, this optimal therapy would mean an exploration of increasingly strange and unknown and dangerous feelings in himself, the exploration proving possible only because he is gradually realizing that he is accepted unconditionally. Thus he becomes acquainted with elements of his experience which have in the past been denied to awareness as too threatening, too damaging to the structure of the self. He finds himself experiencing these feelings fully, completely, in the relationship, so that for the moment he is his fear, or his anger, or his tenderness, or his strength. And as he lives these widely varied feelings, in all their degrees of intensity, he discovers that he has experienced himself, and that he is all these feelings. He finds his behavior changing in constructive fashion in accordance with newly experienced self. He approaches the realization that he no longer needs to fear what experience may hold, but can welcome it freely as part of his changing and developing self. (Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person.)
1 comments:
This is an inspiring approach. I interpreted this description of therapy to mean the client is assumed to have intrinsic self-worth that he might not be in touch with. Furthermore the therapist has faith that the result of the client experiencing feelings outside the client's comfort zone will inevitably lead to an ever-expanding comfort zone. To me this suggests that initially the client's chief complaint is often somewhere along the lines of: "impaired range of emotion". One may be stuck angry, another wallows - both suffer from impaired range of emotions. Interesting perspective, I wish you and your clients wellness and success.
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