A therapist not trained in Person-Centered Therapy is like a musician who never learned his scales, basic skills for his profession. But, going to a therapist who only practices Person-Centered Therapy is like listening to a musician practicing scales. It gets pretty tedious and you wonder if it’ll ever go anywhere.
Carl Rogers, who developed Person-Centered Therapy, likened therapy to growing a plant. When you provide the right kind of soil, the right amount of sunlight, and the right amount of water, plants grow themselves.
Rogers said there are three things needed to help people grow: empathy, acceptance, and sincerity.
Empathy
People who’ve been told their thoughts and feelings aren’t important get alienated from their feelings and sloppy in their thinking. When they’re with someone who is eager to understand their point of view, they start to take more responsibility for what they feel and think, because it matters.
Therefore, if you want to help another person be the best they can be, show you understand things from their point of view. Display a little empathy. Paraphrase what has just been said so you can demonstrate empathic understanding. Identify feelings. Summarize the thoughts that the other has just expressed. When you do so, the other person starts to hear what he’s saying. If it sounds like nonsense, they can make it more lucid. If it’s wisdom, they can start listening to their own best advice.
Acceptance
People who are with someone who accepts them without judgment become freer to talk about their thoughts, feelings, and actions. If they’re still trying to work things out, they’re able to play with thoughts and ideas. If you get judgmental, you shut down this process. When you pronounce the thing they said as good or bad, they figure the matter is closed and stop it right there.
Acceptance is not the same as approval. Carl Rogers wouldn’t have react positively any more than he would judge negatively; he’d just be open to what is being said. A positive judgment is still a judgment and will hamper a person from feeling free to change her mind.
Sincerity
People know when you’re acting fake. They can’t trust you then. If you are acting high and mighty, telling someone what to do, acting like you know better than them, they start paying more attention to what you’re doing than what they came for. If you’re cloying and sentimental, they wonder who you really are; they question whether they are dealing with a real human being. On the other hand, when they’re with someone who’s real; they can get real, too. You can both take off your masks.
To help a person grow, strive for authenticity, transparency, and forthrightness, so what they see is what they get. If they have questions for you, answer them clear and honestly. Don’t hide behind a degree or a role. Go ahead and talk about yourself, not so you can be the center of attention, do it so they don’t have to think about you at all.
For all the gentle wisdom that supplying empathy, acceptance, and sincerity possesses, most of the time it’s not enough. Rather, it’s a little like giving a monkey a typewriter and expecting he’ll come up with Hamlet. It assumes we have all the time in the world.
Whenever I meet with a client who has been to other therapists, I ask how effective they thought those therapy sessions were. The most common complaint I get is that the therapist just sat there, seldom said anything, and didn’t make any suggestions. I think I know what happened. Those therapists thought they were giving the client the maximum space to explore themselves without interference. They were practicing Person-Centered Therapy. The only problem was, they stopped there.
The approach essentially frees people up to heal themselves. Most people who come to therapy do not believe they can heal themselves. If they could, they wouldn’t be paying a counselor to sit and watch them do it. They need help and they are often so clouded and hampered by their misery that, if they cannot be relieved of their symptoms quickly enough, they’ll give up on the whole enterprise. They’ll leave therapy, or worse; they’ll turn to some ill advised activity or substance that promises instantaneous relief.
I find Person-Centered Therapy most useful as a foundation upon which I build everything else. It’s the method I employ in the beginning, when I’m establishing my credentials as having the authority to teach the client something new by virtue of having listened to her all this time. And it’s what I fall back to if I’m baffled or if my attempts to teach didn’t go so well. That is why I’m not only a Person-Centered Therapist. I’ll use other methods, more directive methods, as well; so you can feel you’re getting somewhere and gaining something from the experience.
Of all the tools in the reflective eclectic toolbox, Person-Centered Therapy should be kept at the top. Without empathy, acceptance, and sincerity nothing else good can happen. Without it, it’s impossible to help anyone grow; but it should not be the only tool in the toolbox.