Person Centered Therapy
In studying the different approaches to biblical counseling I have found person centered therapy to speak to me the most. I am not claiming that I will only use this approach or that this is the best approach. I am saying that this approach grabbed my heart and I have a fervent need in practicing this approach in my life and in the lives of others. In my personal life, this type of therapy work best in dealing with my needs. Person centered therapy gives the client the opportunity to let the Holy Spirit speak to them and guide them in sorting out the issues in their life. I have found that I personally use person centered therapy in my own life and I didn’t even know it until recently. Through talking my head off to a close friend or by writing a blog on the internet I would “clear my head” and always feel so much better about my situation. I just thought that is what worked for me but I had no idea that it was an accepted professional counseling approach.
Carl Rogers, the founder of person centered therapy, was born in 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois. His father was a civil engineer and his mother was a housewife and devoted Christian. He was the middle child and had two older brothers, an older sister, and two younger brothers.
Faith was a big part of his childhood. From a young child his mother would read to him and his siblings stories from the bible. When he was older he became an altar boy and was very disciplined in living the standard of a born again believer. His first career choice was agriculture. After that he went to study history and then religion. At age 20, after spending two years at Union Theological Seminary, he felt that he was entering the ministry for the wrong reasons so he left to pursue a career in psychology. He lived a very successful career in this field and made significant discoveries advancing the science of psychology. In The Carl Rogers Reader it was said about Carl Rogers that “more than any individual, he was responsible for the spread of professional counseling and psychotherapy beyond psychiatry and psychoanalysis to all the helping professions - psychology, social work, education, ministry, lay therapy, and others.”
He was an instrumental American psychologist who didn’t see his clients as his colleagues did. It is my personal opinion that his faith and belief in God is what enabled him to receive a profound discovery in the field of counseling. One of the several remarkable things that Rogers did was change the term “patient” to “client”. He didn’t refer to the people he saw as patients because he didn’t see them as sick in a medical sense. Instead he referred to them as clients because they were people simply seeking help with problems of life.
Rogers made a profound discovery as a result of his failure, in a sense, and honesty with one of his clients. He was counseling a woman and he came to a point when he realized that he was incapable of helping her. He decided that the best thing to do was to be honest with her. In doing so, as you can imagine, the woman’s emotions overtook her and she started to cry uncontrollably. She began to pour out to him all her cares and troubles. He realized that if he could provide a specific atmosphere then the client could help themselves.
This type of counseling was originally called Client Centered Therapy and was later renamed to what we know it as today, Person Centered Therapy. It doesn’t require a lot of academic training, instead, it simply requests the therapist to have an open heart and a non-judgmental spirit. Rogers often told his clients, “I can’t solve any of your problems for you, but I can help you to solve your own problems, and doing that will make you better.”
Person Centered Therapy views the client as their own best authority on their own experiences. It views the client as being fully capable of fulfilling their own potential for growth. A lot of times people don’t go to counseling because the society portrays it as being weak and unable to live life on your own. The beauty of the person centered approach is that they enable you to do the opposite of what our society is telling us about the counseling industry. A couple of the goals in person centered therapy is to increase the independence of the client and allow them to trust in themselves.
Person centered therapy has three core conditions. The first condition is unconditional positive regard. This means that the therapist accepts the client unconditionally and non-judgmentally. Achieving potential requires favorable conditions. Under adverse conditions individuals may not develop in the ways that they otherwise would. The atmosphere needs to allow the client to freely explore all thoughts and emotions, positive or negative, without endangerment of rejection or condemnation. Trust is the problem a lot of times when talking about common life issues and it is also key in person centered therapy.
Individuals often cope with the conditional acceptance offered to them by others by gradually coming to incorporate these conditions into their own views about themselves. They will soon be someone completely different from who they really are just because people create conditions. They say I will love you and accept you if you meet my criteria. They might say I will let you be part of the group if you do this and that. Acceptance is what everyone wants so we adjust who we are to satisfy their need of who they need us to be and to satisfy our need to be loved and accepted. When individuals are denied acceptance and unconditional positive regard from others they may begin to lose touch with who they really are and what God has truly called them to be.
The second core condition is empathetic understanding. This means that the therapist needs to accurately understand the client’s thoughts, feelings, and meanings from the client’s perspective. Rogers was quoted in the Carl Rogers Reader as saying, “I have found it of enormous value when I can permit myself to understand another person.” He later said, “I have found it enriching to open channels where by others can communicate their feelings, their private perceptual worlds, to me.” When the therapist enters into the mind of the client, not only does that give values to their point of view but it also shows the client that they are accepted without condition.
Congruence is the last of the three core conditions in person centered therapy. Congruence means that the therapist is authentic and genuine. The therapist doesn’t need to put on a show on how professional they are or how holier they are than the client because that might hinder the client from opening up. Instead the therapist needs be unpretentious yet stay professional in a transparent manner to the client.
The person centered approach takes clients as their own best authorities. The focus is always on the client’s own feelings and thoughts, not on those of the therapist and certainly not on diagnosis or categorization. This is one common critique of this approach. Some clients may prefer a more structured atmosphere where the therapist takes more control and does more teaching and analyzing.
Another negative observation of this approach is that person centered therapy is unbiblical. I have found one article stating that person centered therapy is completely the anti christ because they don’t use the bible. It may not use the physical bible in its structure but its structure is based on the teaching of the bible. Jesus gives the new commandment in the gospel of John.
John 13:34-35 says, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” You will not know the disciples of Christ by their wardrobe and by how they dress. You will not know the disciples of Christ by the amount of college degrees on their office wall. You will not know the disciples of Christ by how much of the bible they know. The Son of God says in the Word that you will know His disciples by their love. How much more can you love someone than by creating an non-judgmental atmosphere as Christ did that will bring healing to their soul.
