Dr. Rogers and the Lego Spaceship
(Towards a Teachable Focusing-Oriented Person-Centred Theory)
Clive
Perraton Mountford
The contents of this article were presented at the World Conference for Person-Centred and Experiential Psychotherapy and Counselling held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England Sunday 6 July—Thursday 10 July 2008.
Published in Self and Society, Vol 36 No 5 Summer 2009.
__________________________________________
Beautiful, Beloved, and Flawed
Every therapeutic
encounter is unique. My job as a counsellor is to track the grain of each
encounter as closely as I can, never dominating or seeking to control, never
using coercion or force however subtly. An internal logic will guide each session,
and I will help my client best if I really listen to
their words and for their experiencing, seeking to empathise and understand,
and giving my intuition its freedom. At the same time, I can trust that my
practice—which may look strange and insubstantial to critics—is supported by
over half a century’s worth of empirically grounded theoretical concepts and
structures; some of these have entered the mainstream, and some offer humane
alternatives to current fads for counsellor-centred therapies and the medicalisation
of human suffering.
Can I sign my name to this? Is it true? The first part doesn't go far
enough: there's more than this to effective person-centered therapy. As for the
final sentence, I don't think I can
extend my trust so far. Despite its elegance, and despite being deeply loved,
person-centred theory is—as most theories eventually prove to be—deeply flawed.
The flaw is conceptually simple: Classical
person-centered theory requires that all the things which might bring a client
to therapy originate in the conditions of worth the client has experienced
(Rogers 1959), but this is contrary to the evidence. Other common etiological
factors such as post-traumatic stress, lose-lose choices, bereavement, and
childhood deprivation also bring
clients to therapy, and they do not readily collapse into conditions of worth
issues. Campbell Purton first drew attention to the problem (Purton 2002 and
2004), and I have restated it in several places (e.g. Mountford 2006a and
2006b). Yes, it might perhaps be shown
that debilitating conditions of worth are associated with much client distress, but I foresee no way to reduce all client distress to conditionality or
account for the broad efficacy of person-centered counselling in such terms.
Therefore, there must be more to person-centered counselling than what Mearns
and Thorne have called "sabotaging conditions of worth" (2007, p.
98), and the classical account of how and why person-centered counselling works
must be incomplete.
Although there has been little overt response
to this critique, perhaps recognition of the problem is quietly going mainstream. The new and third edition of Person-Centred Counselling In Action takes
an interestingly different approach to person-centered theory. There is no
longer any reference to Carl Rogers's (1957 and 1959) necessity and sufficiency
claim, the one which rests upon his assertion that all client distress grounds
in conditionality, even though for many it remains a person-centered article of
faith. Instead, there is simply a discussion of conditions of worth and an
exploration of how the person-centered way of being is an antidote. There is
also a lot of theoretical material
post-dating conditions of worth theory, but to my eye—and in contrast to the
first and second editions—there is no complete and consistent theory of
person-centered counselling.
Where has our theory
gone? Is Campbell's critique (plus, perhaps,
earlier objections to necessity and sufficiency chronicled by Kirschenbaum
2007, p. 592) finally bearing fruit? If the latter is the case, then I am both delighted and, as they say,
"conflicted". I have spent much of the past six years working with
trainee counsellors, and if in consequence of critical objections which I have
been a party to I am now without a complete theoretical package to offer them,
then that is not a result which I sought or desire. I want, therefore, to
outline how I think such a package might be re-achieved. To that end, I first
need to explore some aspects of the relationship between person-centered
counselling and experiential focusing.
It's All the Same Duck
For me, person-centered counselling and
experiential focusing have always gone together. That is one reason the opening
statement does not go far enough for me. I trained in both simultaneously, and
I find that therapeutic accompaniment is as much about being tuned to what is
emerging from the implicit as anything I can represent in more
"classically" person-centred terms. When, several years ago, I was
asked to resurrect a person-centered training program in difficulties, I
initially included experiential focusing as a vehicle for personal development.
However, some of the trainees were unwilling to leave matters there. Like me,
they found that person-centered counselling and experiential focusing just
didn't seem separable, and over time the place of focusing within our training
program shifted. From a bolted on vehicle for personal development and
fostering the "core" or "counsellor conditions" it became
an inseparable aspect of the training, of how we think about therapeutic
relationship, and—increasingly—of what we conceive person-centered counselling
to be.
At the heart of this shift is an important and
perhaps original recognition: there is a continuum of modes of therapeutic
relating which link the most structured and "formal" kind of focusing
to what one might call "conversational therapy". The continuum has
been described in detail elsewhere (Mountford 2006c), but I do need to
introduce and discuss the main spine of it here in order to justify what I'm
going to be claiming later. The spine consists of:
Conversational Therapy
Conversational Focusing
Closely Held Focusing
Meditative Focusing
When I first met focusing, I was introduced to
what I now think of as meditative
focusing: feet on the floor, eyes closed, clear a space, etc. This is the
kind of practice described in Gene Gendlin's little self-help book Focusing (1981). Over time, and with the
help of clients, I began to use focusing in a much less formal way and to
gently encourage clients towards an awareness of their felt sense without
invoking any focusing terminology. I might, for example, ask “Does that feel
right?”, while patting my belly, and the client will (in focusing language)
respond by resonating what has just been said with their felt sense and finding
an answer. A counselling session utilizing this kind of focusing will usually
involve many such short visits with the felt sense and subsequent returns to a
more conventional mode of conversation. I'm sure the pattern is familiar to
many focusing-oriented therapists (cf. Mearns and Thorne 2007, p. 80). I call
it conversational focusing.
So far, I believe, all this is pretty standard.
What I want to describe next is perhaps less so. Although Gene Gendlin's Focusing presents a meditative style of
focusing, a more recent example of his work shows him very actively involved
with the focuser, who is themselves very actively involved with Gene (Gendlin,
date unavailable). Using students and eventually clients as co-experimenters, I
explored this way of focusing, and it has proved congenial and powerful. It is
as purely and concentrated a focusing process as meditative focusing, and a
session will often last as long or longer. The focusing companion, however, is
much closer to, and much more actively in relationship with, the focuser. The
companion can "hold" the focuser, and help them to accept their
experiencing just as they might during more conversational exchanges. For both
parties, the experience is one of intimacy and what is becoming known as
"relational depth" (Cooper and Mearns 2005). There really is no
barrier, or possible barrier, between a focuser and a focusing companion who
are both relating from their immediate felt experiencing, making frequent eye
contact, and in steady verbal communication. Because such a distinctive way of
relating needs a handle, my students, training colleagues, and I call it closely-held focusing.
I say this is a distinctive way of relating,
but I'm told that from an observer's perspective it looks (and reads) a lot
like classical person-centered counselling. In a way that is unremarkable
because most of the focusing companion’s responses will be
"client-centered" reflections and summaries; in another way it is
deeply remarkable. This is focusing
as any two people engaged in closely-held
focusing will assure you, but to an observer they won't, for the most part, appear to be focusing so much as
engaging in intense person-centered counselling. I subscribe to the If it looks like a duck, and walks like a
duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. school of reasoning, and I
think that closely-held focusing must be both a modality of focusing and a nuance of person-centered
counselling. The corollary is that focusing and person-centered counselling
cannot be as different as some believe.
What Is the Paradigm?
I don't wish to make him sound like a stuffed
exhibit in the Counselling Hall of Fame, but Brian Thorne is for many the
paradigmatic person-centered counsellor, and Brian has made video records of
his work. In The Cost of Integrity
Brian (1997) can be observed not just
offering the loving presence and acceptant relationship which he is noted for;
he can also be seen relating to his
client in a manner readily understood in focusing terms. I have put it to Brian
that, in general, he is guided throughout his interaction with clients by what
in focusing terms would be called his own "felt sense", and that he
systematically responds to his clients in such a way that they are gently (and
not always so gently) encouraged deeper into their own experiencing and into
relationship with their felt sense.
He agrees. He also agrees that this description applies to Carl Rogers’s later
work as well. (As Greenberg (1996) has argued.) In other words, two of the most
effective and influential representatives of person-centred therapy can be
understood as working in ways which are partly explicable in focusing terms.
(Process experientialists like Greenberg have a different but related way of
thinking about this which I'm not going to discuss here. See for example
Kirschenbaum (2007) pp. 530-533.)
From here it is a small step to the claim that
conversational person-centered
counselling—or conversational therapy
as I called it above—is closely related to
conversational focusing which in turn connects to closely-held and meditative
focusing. Thus, in addition to the apparent duality of closely-held focusing, there is a clear link running from conversational person-centered counselling to the most structured and formal kind
of focusing.
Is that a duck I see running loose?
One Therapy; Two Legs
A simple and for me compelling explanation for
what I am asserting is that person-centered counselling and experiential
focusing do not just share a common origin in the collaborative work of Carl
Rogers and Gene Gendlin, they are different and differently emphasized aspects
of the same fundamentally indivisible way of offering therapy. One aspect of this way of offering
therapy is the utterly acceptant—and at times passionately
acceptant—relationship within which counsellor and client can be themselves
without fear or any pretence. It is the kind of relationship which Brian Thorne
promotes as central to effective therapy and which Dave Mearns now theorizes as
having "relational depth". Another
aspect of this way of offering therapy is the recognition that human beings and
human experiencing are processes, that process sometimes needs a little
friendly attention in order to run smoothly, and that in any case attending to
our awareness of awareness is probably the most important thing a human being
can do. (That is not a typo.)
I have likened these twin aspects to the two
"legs" of therapy (Mountford 2006c), and I find that I still favour
that image. If we look back to the 1950s, and particularly if we consider
Rogers’s (1956) unpublished address “The Essence of Psychotherapy: Moments of
Movement”, then it seems clear that what eventually became person-centered
counselling and focusing-oriented counselling was one entity moving forward
upon two "legs" : there was relationship
and there was attention to process.
(Cf. Kirschenbaum 2007 pp. 528-529.) More recent exponents give the
impression—or at least I gain the impression from more recent exponents—that a
counsellor can get around just fine using only one of these legs, but—for
me—hopping is inadequate locomotion.
I do not know whether what I am now claiming
will seem self-evident, or controversial or just plain misguided.
However, if I am right, then the practice I am
describing needs a theoretical story which stresses both relationship
and attention to process, and I think that I have the beginnings of one. It isn't fully worked out yet, but
it does promise the theoretical package for trainees which I lamented earlier.
That proviso suitable for trainees really is important. Although Gendlin himself
has an evolving and deeply impressive body of theory, and despite my nearly 40
years of pedagogic experience, I cannot imagine how I would teach Gendlin's
theory to a cohort of counsellors in training. What I need is the kind of neat
and accessible package provided by the first two editions of Person-Centred Counselling in Action and
derived from Rogers's 1957 and 1959 papers. Students understand and like that
package.
That Lego Spaceship
Suppose that years ago you were given a model
spaceship made out of Lego. You really prized the spaceship, and you put it on
a shelf to admire. Over time, it acquires dust, and it begins to look a very
dated kind of spaceship. You might, of course, revere it so highly that you
just continue to leave it alone. Or you might take it down and make some small
modifications which update it. Or you might even say to yourself that it is
after all made of Lego, and there is no reason why it cannot be broken down
into its constituent parts and assembled quite differently. The first and
reverential option is akin to the way person-centered purists relate to our
tradition. The second option is akin to what Mearns and Thorne have done in
their recent book. The third option is the one which attracts me. Although
there is no doubt that in his 1957 and 1959 papers Carl Rogers gives pride of
place to conditions of worth theory and the necessity and sufficiency claim,
and there is certainly no doubt that this is part of what makes the theoretical
package so elegant and appealing, there is also no reason why we might not
build something a little different with the materials provided.
Of the constituent claims of classical
person-centered theory, one group draws my interest at least as powerfully as
the conditions of worth material. It is the things Rogers says about
incongruence and distortion and denial. For example, the second of the famous
six conditions states "…the client…is in a state of incongruence, being
vulnerable or anxious." (1957, p. 221) In other words, every client who
comes to therapy is incongruent, distorting and denying their experiencing, and
this can be thought of as the reason why
they are coming to therapy: living with this level of incongruence is just not
sustainable or worthwhile. For the client who engages with therapy, the
direction of travel is towards greater congruence, greater "capacity and
tendency to symbolize experiences accurately in awareness" (1959, p. 234),
and greater openness to experiencing. Thus it is consistent with the 1957 and
1959 papers (and in keeping with Rogers’s broader interests) to characterize
therapy as perhaps one of many kinds of process whereby a person moves away
from distortion and denial and towards what might be characterized as
"awareness and acceptance", towards (in Gene Gendlin's phrase)
"making friendly" with their experiencing. In the 1957 and 1959
conceptions, the fundamental reason for incongruence is always traceable to
conditions of worth, but I see only benefit in recognizing that things aren't
quite so simple and many different springs can feed our need for what
eventually becomes a kind of crippling dishonesty with, and alienation from,
ourselves and our environment.
What I am suggesting now destroys the neat,
self-sustaining system of belief provided by adherence to conditions of worth
theory coupled with the necessity and sufficiency claim, but that loss looks
increasingly a blessing. When I think how much so-called person-centered
training and practice has become something of which the best one can say is
that it probably does no harm, and I reread Carl Rogers’s views on Freud's
"insecure disciples" and their "iron chains of dogma"
(Rogers 1959, p.191), it begins to seem that our neat, self-sustaining system
has become a thing to smother us.
When First We Practice To Deceive…
Developing a theoretical statement applicable
to conversational therapy, meditative focusing, and everything in
between, and filling the hole left by excising the necessity and sufficiency
claim, leaves no choice but to reassemble those Lego pieces. An additional
benefit of doing so may be at least a partial antidote to creeping
dogmatisation. However, contrary to what I suggested in Mountford (2006c) I
cannot begin by appealing to the usual notion of congruence I have just been
discussing. It is important to be clear about the reason for this. Congruence
is originally a geometric concept applicable to isometric shapes (triangles, in
the classroom context), and therefore two clearly identifiable shapes must
exist before we can say that congruence is exhibited. As the term is used in
counselling, there must still be two clearly identifiable things—such as
experiencing and behaviour—before we can speak of congruence. Focusing,
however, is about that which does not yet exist. It is a process whereby we
seek and prepare to receive a felt sense,
attend while the felt sense forms, and then acquire a handle or some kind of "name" for that felt sense.
Focusing is a little like sitting beside what may prove to be a rabbit hole, or
may turn out to be some other kind of hole altogether, and waiting to see what
emerges. What is more, if we take seriously what Gendlin has to say about the nature of the implicit—and, perhaps, when we pay close attention to our own
experience of the implicit—we find that there is neither a rabbit nor anything
else down that hole initially: whatever
emerges into awareness does so in consequence of us paying attention and cannot
be said to have been there prior to our attention. Therefore, we cannot
speak of congruence and incongruence in a focusing context.
It is about here that my job becomes more
difficult. I have a clear sense, a felt sense, of a way of being which is
characterized both by a high degree of congruence in the person-centered sense
and by a high degree of openness to whatever may emerge from the implicit and
into awareness. This way of being has to do with a relatively comfortable and
confident relationship with the moment by moment play of my experience, but I
fear that I am already pushing against the boundaries of the language I'm
using, and I find no simple word or phrase to characterize what I'm talking
about. I do think that it is a way of being, and I do incline to characterize
that way of being as a preparedness to accept and hold in awareness whatever
is, here and now. I also recognize that what I'm saying may be less than
transparently clear to anyone else, and so I will try approaching all this from
a different direction.
Working in environmental ethics as well as
counselling, I'm aware how much philosophical time and energy has been spent
trying to specify what makes human beings different from other animals, and I
have my own contribution to offer. Human beings are spectacularly good at
deceiving each other, deceiving themselves, and interfering with their own
psychological process and experiencing. We really are very good at incongruence
and a kind of dissociation which separates us from the implicit, from the
organic emergence of awareness, and from knowing how it really is to be us in any given situation.
Initially, this is functional within our environment. We deny and distort our
experiencing in order to try to meet conditions of worth and maintain a
particular self-concept. (Classical person-centered theory.) We retreat from
our experiencing and smother our feelings almost before they are born because
we cannot, or we fear that we cannot, hold and survive them. (Fragile process.)
We blot out our experience, or attribute experiences to separated parts of
ourselves, because they are unbearable. (Dissociative process and, I would
suggest, post traumatic stress.) We separate into different and sometimes
deniable configurations in order to deal with paradox, conflict, and competing
demands upon us. (Configuration theory.) We set aside our feelings and
experiences because there simply isn't opportunity to process them.
(Bereavement, traumatic incidents, war, etc.) The list could be continued, but
I hope that what is here illustrates my point: we routinely practice the
antithesis of what I am loosely calling openness,
awareness, and acceptance on an everyday basis and mostly for initially
good reasons. Then circumstances change, perhaps we change independently of our
circumstances, and what was once functional becomes problematic. We recognize
that something is wrong with us and with our lives. Some of us then seek
therapy. The therapist's job—as I currently conceive of it, and I believe this
conception compatible with both classical person-centered theory and focusing
practice—is to provide an environment and a kind of accompaniment which makes
it possible for the client to move towards that degree of openness, awareness,
and acceptance which, overall, works best for them right now. This can then
result in further change and the yearning for yet more openness, awareness, and
acceptance and so therapy can sometimes become a very long-term process of
"self-development".
A Job Description with Familiar Consequences
If the therapist's job is, for the most part,
as described, then some important claims advanced by classical person-centered
theory are close to logical consequences of that description. For brevity, I
will present them in point form. (Much that is claimed for "the
therapeutic alliance", e.g. Kirschenbaum (2007) pp. 594-598, is perhaps
similarly explicable, but my present concern is person-centred theory.)
1.
It is pretty much axiomatic that a
client can only go where the therapist can, and is willing, to follow.
Therefore, a therapist must themselves be seeking openness, acceptance, and
awareness, and be relatively open, acceptant, and aware when with their client.
(Cf. condition 3, Rogers 1957, p. 221.) A therapist who is less in touch with
their experiencing than their client may make the client’s difficulties
greater. (I have heard Mary Hendricks cite research supporting this assertion,
but I have not yet tracked it down.)
2.
If the purpose of therapy is to
foster openness, acceptance, and awareness, then it will be best if the
therapist starts by accepting and really trying to understand and enter into
their client’s individual phenomenal reality. We are social and relational
creatures, and whether or not we are burdened with problematic conditions of
worth, it is easier for us to be open and acceptant towards our experiencing
when we are with others who understand, accept, and value our experiencing.
Furthermore, if we doubt our own worth and the value of our experiencing, and
particularly if it is difficult to be our experiencing for reasons like shame,
then acknowledging what we are and what we are feeling will be a whole lot
easier knowing that we are in the company of someone who really does
unconditionally accept us and perhaps even loves us. (C.f. Conditions 4 and 5,
Rogers 1957, p. 221.)
3.
The kind of acceptance involved here
is acceptance of one's own experiencing, of who and what one is and how that
feels, of how it is to be this particular locus of awareness and evaluation
within this particular phenomenal reality. Such awareness cannot be gained in
consequence of someone else interpreting us, or explaining us to ourselves, or
telling us how it is to be us: it must grow from within, and there is no other
way to acquire it. (C.f. classical person-centered non-directivity.)
4.
This does not mean that there are never times when it makes sense for the
therapist to offer suggestions, disagree, or even argue with their client on
the basis of their experiencing. It
does, however, mean that such things must always be done within a context and
in such a way that the client is entirely free and able to reject what the
therapist is saying in favour of their own experiencing.
5.
Given these points, something much
like the overall person-centered relationship expounded and exemplified by
Mearns and Thorne (2007) is close to being a logical consequence of the way I
have described the therapeutic enterprise.
Note that there is no theoretical reliance upon
conditions of worth in any of this, but that when conditions of worth are adversely
affecting a client, then just about everything said by classical
person-centered theory remains applicable.
Now what about the focusing side of things?
A Culture of Dissociation
Like some spiritual and meditative practices,
regular engagement with experiential focusing leads not just to a recognition
that human beings are superlatively good at meddling with their experiencing,
but that we are living at a place and in time whereby a particular kind of
meddling is highly rewarded. I have described elsewhere how our culture
separates the cerebral and the rational from the inward and the personal
(Mountford 2006a, section 9.), and with the possible exception of the arts and
entertainment the former is rewarded while the latter is disparaged. Thus we are
encouraged from an early age to become divided creatures, to turn away from the
inward and the personal, and to strive towards a paradigm of rationality which
is more deeply a paradigm of dissociation. My sense is that most of the clients
I have worked with are afflicted in this way. When a client tells me "I
don't know who I am.", that usually cashes out as "I'm not in contact
with my experiencing.”
Therapeutic focusing is an antidote to all this
and a way of beginning to rebalance ourselves. We are not—as a client recently
told me his prior life and education led him to believe—a brain on a stick. We
are an organism, an animal that has evolved a large and capable brain in the service of its organismic needs.
The organism is not there just to
support and pander to the brain; if anything, matters are the other way around.
Although as I write that I recognize how much I am beginning to view this whole
dichotomised conception of ourselves as fundamentally disordered. Feeling and
thinking—living in awareness of the implicit and the emergent, and taking time
to reason things through—are probably innately much closer to one indivisible
process than it is possible for someone raised and educated as I have been to
comprehend. Therefore, it is essential when working with clients who seek
openness, awareness, and acceptance that something much like focusing be
available to them as and when they're ready to engage with it. Implicated in
most client distress will be a degree of culturally mediated dissociative
process and a lack of awareness and trust in the implicit and their own felt
sensing.
One (Indivisible) Relational Offering
I wrote earlier about what I think of as
counselling's two legs, and it is now
possible to say more about their similarity and difference. For the most part,
classical person-centered counselling involves offering a particular kind of
relationship to another (the client)
so that they can experience (and if necessary begin to develop) that kind of
relationship with themselves. Focusing companionship
simply in and of itself involves offering a particular kind of relationship to another's felt sense (the focuser’s),
and to that which is implicit for them, so that they can more readily
experience (and if necessary begin to develop) that kind of relationship for themselves.
In both cases, the relationship can be
characterized in terms of openness, awareness, and acceptance. What differs is
the recipient, and I think that this
is why, at least in conversation, Brian Thorne has expressed some reservations
about the use of focusing within counselling: he fears the loss of
person-to-person relationship. If I am right, however, and if being close to
our felt sense and the implicit in a friendly and welcoming manner is integral
to our humanity, and if a much tighter integration of that which is felt and that which is thought is both natural to us and in
our best interests, then we cannot really distinguish relating therapeutically
to the individual and relating therapeutically to their felt experiencing. That
merging of the two kinds of relationship is precisely what I believe I noticed
about Brian's own way of working, and it probably constituted the initial grain
of sand around which all this theorizing and argument has gathered.
There remain two threads which need noting even
if I cannot tie them off.
The first thread is the question: What is to be
done about the actualizing tendency? For some, the actualizing tendency is a
treasured part of person-centered theory, and there is certainly no analog
within focusing theory. That is because focusing theory doesn't need one. If we
are working with a process-conception of human being, it is otiose to say that
either the process or the individual "actualizes" because, by definition,
a process is already doing just that. Perhaps another way to put this is that a
living organism can be counted on to get on with living, and to do its best to
flourish within its environment without any need for steering or pushing
interventions from outside, because that's just (empirically) how organisms
are. The "actualizing tendency" is ontologically unnecessary.
However, if it is felt useful and
necessary, or if I'm getting something badly wrong, then I cannot see that
invoking an actualizing tendency causes problems for anything I have said here.
The second thread is highlighted by a remark
made by Judy Moore when I presented some of these thoughts to a recent process
model symposium. She noted a very Buddhist feel to my conception of therapy.
I'm sure Judy is right, and it can hardly be an accident given that I have been
engaged in Buddhist practice longer than I have been a therapist. However, so
far as I can ascertain, everything which I say here is drawn directly from
person-centered theory, focusing theory, and my own clinical and focusing
practice. Moving towards a conception of therapy involving Buddhist practice
and theory would necessitate considering the roots of human suffering as
understood within Buddhism. It would be a very different conception, and all
that I want right now is a theoretical story to tell about focusing oriented
person-centered counselling because that is what I offer to my clients and seek
to teach my students.
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A Study of a Science vol.3. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Thorne, Brian (1997) The Cost of Integrity. Videotape produced by Centre For
Counselling Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich.
Scott, Walter (1810) Marmion; A Tale Of Flodden Field, canto VI, XVII, provided the
section title "when first we practice to deceive". Various editions
of Marmion are available in Google
Books.