Person-Centered and Experiential Therapy
· Post one thread of at least 400 words.
· APA 7th Edition format
· Answer each question thoroughly
· Must use at least three required scholarly journal articles published within the last three years.
Discussion Assignment Instructions
The student will complete the discussion assignment in paragraph format, answering the questions given in the Discussion assigned week. The student will post one thread of at least 400 words. The student will answer each question thoroughly and must use a minimum of the three required scholarly journal articles published within the last three years.
Discussion Thread: Person-Centered and Experiential Therapy
This discussion board centers on Person-centered and Experiential therapy. Please create a new thread and answer the following:
1. Compare and contrast the two therapies.
2. What are some of their strengths and weaknesses?
3. Which therapy would lend itself to Biblical integration?
4. What are some multicultural aspects to consider?
5. End your post with a lingering question for each of these therapies.
· Post one thread of at least 400 words.
· APA 7th Edition format
· Answer each question thoroughly
· Must use at least three required scholarly journal articles published within the last three years.
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https://canvas.liberty.edu/courses/816237/pages/watch-gestalt-therapy?module_item_id=84651815
https://canvas.liberty.edu/courses/816237/pages/watch-union-with-christ?module_item_id=84651824
https://psyctherapy.apa.org/Title/777700155-001?Client=EBSCO&custid=liberty
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Chapter 8
Person-Centered Therapy
Person-centered therapy, originally called nondirective therapy in the 1940s and then client-centered therapy in the 1950s, was founded and developed by Carl Rogers (1902–1987). He began what some have considered a revolution in the counseling and therapy field by emphasizing that certain core therapeutic conditions (i.e., congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding) provided by the therapist in the relationship with the client are necessary and sufficient to facilitate client change. Rogers also had an optimistic view of human beings, including therapy clients, believing in their capacity for positive change and growth into fully functioning persons, given appropriate support and safety. Rogers’s person-centered approach focuses on the capacity of the client to heal and to grow in the context of a warm, empathic, and genuine therapeutic relationship with the therapist. He de-emphasized techniques and diagnoses that tend to dehumanize people. Instead, Rogers placed the client as a person and the therapeutic relationship in the center of effective counseling and therapy. This was revolutionary at a time when more-deterministic views prevailed, such as Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic approach and the beginnings of some behavioristic conditioning approaches that emphasized the clinical expertise of the therapist and therapeutic techniques for helping clients change. Rogers used the term “client” rather than “patient” to refer to the person receiving therapy because he did not perceive the client as someone who is “sick” and in need of a cure.
Rogers eventually expanded his person-centered therapy approach to areas other than counseling and therapy, such as marriage, education, business and management, administration, and politics. In his later years, he even became involved in applying his ideas and approach to efforts at reducing international conflicts and enhancing world peace.
Biographical Sketch of Carl Rogers
Carl Ransom Rogers was born on January 8, 1902, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He was the fourth child in a family of six children, five of whom were boys. His father was a contractor and civil engineer who did well professionally and financially. Although his parents were warm and loving, they were also legalistic and controlling, influenced by their fundamentalist Protestant religious background that frowned on activities such as dancing, drinking, card playing, and going to the theater (see C. R. Rogers 1961). When Rogers was twelve years old, he and his family moved to a large farm near Chicago. A sensitive, shy introvert, Rogers was not very sociable and preferred to spend time with his books and in his own world of thought (H. E. Rogers 1965).
Rogers also spent much of his time in the summers using farm equipment and developing his interest in agriculture and scientific methods in farming (Kirschenbaum 1979). He initially pursued scientific agriculture as his major at the University of Wisconsin. Rogers became involved with the YMCA on campus and was selected to be one of the twelve students from the United States who traveled to Peking (now Beijing), China, in 1922 as delegates to the World Student Christian Federation Conference. In meeting other bright and creative students who had religious beliefs that differed from the strict fundamentalistic beliefs of his parents, Rogers experienced a deep transformation of his own religious views, becoming more open and liberal. He also became more of himself (Bankart 1997, 292), with his true personality emerging after being away for six months on this significant trip.
Rogers changed his major from agriculture to history and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1924. Two months later he married his childhood sweetheart, Helen Elliott, and they drove to New York City, where he studied at Union Theological Seminary, a school that was more liberal than his parents would have preferred (Thorne 2003). His father had offered to fund his theological studies at Princeton, but Rogers exercised his independence by going to Union instead. After two years at Union, where he took a few psychology courses, he left the seminary and began a PhD program in clinical and educational psychology at neighboring Columbia University. Rogers completed this doctoral program in 1931.
Rogers worked for twelve years in the Child Study Department at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Rochester, New York, where he gained valuable clinical experience working with underprivileged and delinquent children referred by social agencies and the court system (C. R. Rogers 1961). He also trained and supervised other psychologists and social workers. Eventually Rogers went beyond the traditional psychoanalytic approach to therapy and began to develop a more nondirective counseling approach. He wrote The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child (1939) during his time in Rochester.
Rogers moved to Columbus, Ohio, to become a full professor at Ohio State University in 1940. In that same year, he gave a groundbreaking lecture titled “Newer Concepts in Psychotherapy” at the University of Minnesota on December 11 and recalled this date as the “day on which client-centered therapy was born” (Kirschenbaum 1979, 112). This significant lecture and his subsequent book, Counseling and Psychotherapy (1942), sparked a major response from mental health professionals, with both enthusiastic support for and scathing criticism of his nondirective counseling ideas (Thorne 2003), which deemphasized technique and diagnosis. Rogers therefore became a “quiet revolutionary” (see Farson 1975).
Rogers’s early ideas on nondirective counseling, or client-centered therapy, were partly influenced by Otto Rank, who, like Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, had broken away from Freud and his psychoanalytic group. Rogers attended a three-day seminar in Rochester conducted by Rank. He was thus exposed to Rank’s ideas emphasizing the uniqueness and experience of the client and the need for the therapist to relinquish the role of an authority and instead become more of a nonjudgmental helper (Rank 1945). Rogers’s thinking was also influenced by two other people with whom he had contact: Elizabeth Davis, a Rankian-trained social worker at the Rochester clinic, and Jessie Taft, who was one of Rank’s students (C. R. Rogers & Haigh 1983).
In 1945 Rogers went to the University of Chicago, where he became a professor of psychology and the director of the university counseling center. He further developed his theoretical ideas and also engaged in research with his colleagues and graduate students to evaluate the effectiveness of his nondirective counseling approach, which eventually was renamed client-centered therapy in his significant book Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications, and Theory (C. R. Rogers 1951). In 1956 Rogers received the first distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, presented to him by the American Psychological Association, an organization he had served as president in 1946–1947. He thus became a well-known figure in the counseling and therapy field, and client-centered therapy established itself as a major approach to therapy.
Rogers left the University of Chicago in 1957 to assume a new position at the University of Wisconsin in the Department of Psychology and then in the Department of Psychiatry. He had a difficult time in the Department of Psychology, disagreeing with how graduate students were treated in a somewhat oppressive educational environment that did not offer them enough freedom and support to develop their own creative ideas and work. As a result, he had frequent conflicts with his colleagues (Thorne 2003; P. Sanders 2004).
Rogers undertook a large research project that evaluated the impact of the therapeutic relationship on schizophrenics who were hospitalized (C. R. Rogers et al. 1967), but the study encountered several problems and yielded few statistically significant findings. However, two conclusions could be made from the results of this research project: clients who experienced the highest level of accurate empathy were the most successful, and clients’ evaluation of the therapeutic relationship correlated more highly with therapeutic success or failure than the therapists’ evaluation. Rogers managed to write and publish another substantial book, On Becoming a Person (1961), which led to even greater renown for him. In 1957 he published what is now a classic article on the necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change, focusing on congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathy. He resigned from the University of Wisconsin in 1962.
In 1964 Rogers moved to La Jolla, California, where he became a resident fellow at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute for four years. After leaving the institute in 1968, he helped form the Center for Studies of the Person in La Jolla, where he also became a resident fellow. The center was the base from which he traveled around the world to deal with international conflicts and to work on peacemaking efforts. He continued to publish significant books on a wider variety of topics covering the application of person-centered ideas to areas such as education (1969, 1983), encounter groups (1970), marriage (1972), and personal power, including psychotherapy, family life, administration, education, and politics (1977).
Rogers continued to travel, write, and work on international projects and global issues until the last days of his life. He received many awards and honors in his lifetime, including the Distinguished Professional Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 1972. He was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as a result of his tireless efforts to resolve global conflicts in a peaceful way. In 1987 Rogers broke his hip in a fall. He had successful surgery for the broken hip but died shortly thereafter from a heart attack on February 4, 1987 (Cain 1987a). Rogers has been described as a man who lived his life in a way that was consistent with his person-centered theory: as an author, therapist, and person he was consistently the same man (Cain 1987b).
Major Theoretical Ideas of Person-Centered Therapy
Perspective on Human Nature
Person-centered therapy as developed by Rogers has a positive and optimistic perspective on human nature. It views the person as basically good and trustworthy, with an inner and innate tendency toward growth and wholeness leading the person to be all they can be. This actualizing tendency, which is the major motivation in every human person, moves an individual toward self-actualization or becoming mature and autonomous, under appropriate conditions that are supportive and safe for the person (see C. R. Rogers 1961, 35).
Rogers also described the organismic valuing process, which guides the actualizing tendency with an innate capacity to choose what will be self-enhancing or self-actualizing rather than what will be self-destructive. He believed that when person-centered therapists provide the therapeutic conditions of congruence (realness or genuineness), unconditional positive regard (warmth and acceptance or respect), and accurate empathic understanding (of the client’s inner, subjective world) in a way that the client can experience them, then the right conditions of support and safety enable the client to grow and self-actualize. On the other hand, if negative “conditions of worth” are imposed on a person or a client, usually by society and parental figures or other family members, then the actualizing tendency is alienated, and the individual may then develop defensive and maladaptive reactions to an environment that the individual experiences as oppressive and dangerous. The behavior that eventually results may include evil acts of cruelty and hatred, which Rogers acknowledged can and do occur. However, he was convinced that this is not the innate nature of a human being but rather an acquired aspect of human behavior (see Parrott 2003, 178).
Rogers believed that, given appropriate conditions fostering growth, human beings are basically good and trustworthy, capable of choosing their own direction in constructive and insightful ways, and able to be productive and effective in their lives (Cain 1987b). Person-centered therapy therefore focuses on the client and their capacity for healing, growth, and self-actualization as well as self-determination. It does not view the therapist as an authoritative expert. The ultimate responsibility for healing and growth in therapy lies with the client (see Corey 2021, 171), who is capable of becoming a fully functioning person when the actualizing tendency is allowed to blossom and be expressed.
Person-Centered Theory of Personality
Rogers developed and described both a theory of personality as well as a theory of psychotherapy from a person-centered perspective (C. R. Rogers 1959). His theory of personality consists of nineteen propositions that are somewhat complex, and it has therefore attracted much less attention than his theory of psychotherapy (C. R. Rogers 1980, 60).
Rogers’s (1959) theory of personality (including a theory of psychopathology) from a person-centered perspective, with its nineteen propositions, can be condensed into four major features, according to J. Sommers-Flanagan and Sommers-Flanagan (2018, 117–119).
The first feature of a person-centered theory of personality is that it is mainly a self-theory (Bankart 1997). Rogers described the organism as the locus of a person’s total psychologi
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