Essay year 1 '' Integrative Counselling '' Student ID '' TOW08271484
17th December 2008
Identify the key elements of the therapeutic relationship in Person Centred counselling; in what ways do you see this differing from other helping relationships?
This essay will define the core conditions necessary to facilitate personal growth within the person centred therapeutic relationship. I will go onto discuss the differences that occur when seeking a similar resolve using relationships outside of the therapeutic environment.
Person Centred Counselling was developed by Carl Rogers (1902-1987).
The approach emphasises humans having one inherent motive, he called this “the actualising tendency” (Rogers 1989:250), the theory, that as humans we, like flowers, want and need to grow to the best of our potential.
People, Rogers said, experience difficulty in life because they lack the capacity to know why they behave in ways that prevent them from moving forward in their lives i.e.; actualising.
He refers to conditions of worth inherent from childhood that creates unhealthy self concepts (values/conditions caused by external relationships) that prevent organisms from living as a fully functioning persons. Instead they adopt behaviours aimed at obtaining love and acceptance (Rogers 89:249-250).
His theory, based on his clinical experience, suggests that given correct psychological conditions the therapeutic relationship can offer the individual the opportunity to develop and discover how and why they suffer: help them face their unhealthy concepts, learn to trust themselves as a human organism, set in motion change in current behaviour, and begin a process to move forward, reaching fully their inner capabilities and potentialities (Rogers 89:249-250).
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Rogers said that the therapeutic relationship required the following “necessary and sufficient” conditions. “As long as they existed and continued for a period of time then the process of constructive...