Dr Rogers and the Rebellious
Right Arm
Clive Perraton
Mountford
Published in Self and Society, Volume 34 Number 2,
Sept-Oct 2006.
This is not the talk which I gave at the Process Model Colloquium at UEA in July 2007, but it contains a slightly earlier development of many of the ideas which I shared during that talk.
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My Rebellious Arm
It was my right arm which defied the party
whip. I usually know what my arms are doing, but for several moments, the right
one seemed to declare independence. I’d been asked to indicate my ‘counselling
orientation’ at a Saturday workshop by raising my hand. This was several years
ago now. At ‘person-centred’, my arm hesitated long enough for myself and the
colleague beside me to notice.
Why was it hesitating? I was a recently trained person-centred
counsellor who had gone so far as to sell the family home and travel 6000 miles
to acquire the training of his choice, I advertised as a person-centred
counsellor, and I had the reputation of a passionate and radical exponent. My
arm, however, had other ideas, and when I gently enquired what sort of
counsellor it was part of, it
replied, “An open-centred
counsellor.” I did ask what that was,
but no clear answer was forthcoming.
Given someone sitting in a personal-development
workshop on a pleasant Saturday morning in Norwich, holding a covert
conversation with his arm, then—more troubling conclusions aside—it is
reasonable to suppose him under the influence of Gene Gendlin's ‘experiential focusing'.
That was indeed the case. However, the bodily sense that I was not a person-centred counsellor was entirely unimpressed by the
suggestion that I was a focusing-oriented counsellor, and it
continued to remain unsatisfied by my tentative offerings for the next several
years. Only in the last few months have I finally got what Gendlin might call a
‘handle’ on all this.
It is my current sense of what my arm’s
rebellion was all about that I want to share with you here. And if this is this
also the longest attempt to explicate a felt sense on record, perhaps the Guinness Book of Records will be
interested as well. I shall begin by saying a little about the practice of
experiential focusing and my exploration of some of its possibilities.
Four Initial Modalities
When I first learned about 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, and for a year or two I
thought of experiential focusing as this whole package.
Focusing worked for me, and I found that it
worked for some of my clients. With familiarity, however, I began to recognize
that some of the packaging was not always necessary or useful. I started to
introduce focusing in a less formal manner, and to gently and informally
encourage clients towards an awareness of their felt sense such that I, as the
counsellor, might ask “Does that feel right?”, while patting my belly, and the
client would respond by resonating what had just been said with their felt
sense of the matter and finding an answer.
Clearly, this gives the counsellor an educative
function, and some will view that as inconsistent with good practice. When a
client who has little or no sense of their experiencing is saying “Help me!”,
however, such education seems entirely right and necessary so long as power is
not lifted from their hands.
Anyway, I began to think of this less
structured use of focusing as conversational
focusing and to distinguish it from the more formal meditative focusing which I had first learned:
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In conversational focusing there is more movement between the felt sense—and therefore for most of us the belly—and the head and our cognitive processes. The steps taken are frequently very small, and the focusing takes place within a broader context of therapeutic conversation and relationship.
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In meditative focusing 20 minutes to half an hour at a time may be spent with the evolving felt sense, with its shifts and changes, and the focuser’s communion is more with themselves than with their focusing partner.
In addition to meditative focusing and
conversational focusing I was soon to become familiar with two other and
quite different focusing modalities.
The first of these was whole–body focusing which I was introduced to by Kevin McEvenue.
Because whole–body focusing is
initially nonverbal, it allows me access to that which is beyond language and
possibly rooted in experiences I had prior to the acquisition of language. I've
never tried whole-body focusing with a client, but I have introduced it to
counselling trainees, and many are as impressed as I am.
The second of the two additional modalities is
something I stumbled upon with the help of some very creative clients. This
kind of focusing always starts off as meditative
but transforms into quite a different kind of journey. It as though for some
people there are times when moving into the body and relating to the felt sense
of an issue invites a cascade of metaphors and symbols like those which arise
in dreams. What is more, the focuser is able to move around in and interact
with these in the manner of a psychodrama. When I have been the focusing
companion, my role has felt more like the director of a psychodrama. Yet
everything that is happening feels rooted in the focuser's body and its
knowing.
What should we call this manner of focusing? To
me, it is dreamscape focusing.
I have used dreamscape
focusing myself, and I have counselled several clients who liked to work
this way and seemed to make substantial progress. One young client found that
over two or three weeks all his pain coalesced into a kind of rock in his ches;
he took the rock out and placed it on the arm of his chair (while in the
dreamscape), and he left it there when the session ended (and he was back in
the ‘real world’). When he returned the following week, the rock was not to be
found anywhere in my office, and it was certainly not to be found in his chest.
I have also worked with a client who sometimes
likes to begin making sense of a dream by choosing an aspect of it and seeking
the felt sense of that. On occasion, she will then re-enter the dream with me
alongside, and the dream will continue to unfold and evolve with me once again
acting like the director of a psychodrama.
Given these clearly distinct ways of focusing,
‘experiential focusing’ is certainly not
identical with the whole meditative focusing package. What is experiential focusing then; how
shall we define it? Common to the four modalities I have described is the
simple act of bringing awareness to a felt sense and acquiring at least a
minimal handle for it. (Or—following Gendlin more precisely—encouraging a felt sense to form,
bringing awareness, and acquiring a handle.) Understood in this way, focusing
may take place within any number of settings and be facilitated in a variety of
different ways. It is reasonable that there should be more than one therapeutic
focusing modality.
Closely Held Focusing
Meditative focusing, conversational focusing, whole-body focusing, and dreamscape focusing: that makes four distinct focusing modalities which, until a few months ago, I was using in concert with, but still somehow separated from, my person-centred counselling practice. Then I watched a New York Focusing Institute video recording of Gene Gendlin teaching focusing (there are several to choose from on their website), and some of the colleagues I watched the video with were quite critical of Gene’s way of doing business. I thought about the difference between what Gene says in the Focusing book and what he now seems to offer—most of that meditative stuff has gone out the window, and Gene is now very vocal and active—I thought about how my own ways of offering focusing have changed, and I decided to try something which I had never yet tried as a counsellor.
When I was a schoolteacher, particularly when I was a novice schoolteacher, I used to observe competent colleagues and commit their modus operandi to memory. If I found myself faced with a situation I did not know how to deal with, I put myself in the shoes of a chosen colleague and dealt with it as though I was them. Over time, what I had internalised blended with my own ways of being and became something uniquely mine. Thinking about it now, I still do this today when I am teaching—my pedagogic configuration is a mosaic of subconfigurations which are an homage to talented colleagues—but until a few weeks ago I had never used this tactic as a counsellor. I am not entirely sure why that is—the tactic is tried and proven—but perhaps my reluctance has to do with the desire to be authentic and fully myself. Even so, as I reflected on the arguments about what Gene was ‘up to’, it came to me that the only way to answer the question was to try ‘doing it like Gene’, see how that felt, and find out how it was for the focusing companion.
At this juncture serendipity stepped in. I met
with my professional year counselling students two days later, and one of them
wanted to talk about having seen Gene
Gendlin in a focusing video and the way in which he worked… I offered to
try being a ‘Gendlin–style’ focusing companion with a volunteer so that we
might get a better sense of what Gene was doing and why. We recorded the
session, and I later had it transcribed.
The following day, and at the request of
another student, I offered a session of approximately 30 minutes Gendlin–style
focusing. The focuser’s eyes remained open throughout most of the session, and
I was vocal and active in responding to her and in supporting her as she
struggled with an evolving felt sense and emerging understanding of what that
was all about. We felt that the session was productive, and when the student
said that she would like to take things a little further, we conducted a
similar focusing session the following week. Both these sessions were recorded
and transcribed as well.
In all, I recorded three focusing sessions in
which I attempted to work ‘Gendlin–style'. By the time we made the third
recording, I had tried something similar with a couple of clients as well, and
it was all beginning to feel entirely comfortable and authentic. It won't do,
though, to go on calling this way of offering focusing Gendlin–style focusing; that's a bit like calling Carl Rogers a
Rogerian therapist. I shall call it
closely held focusing for reasons which I hope will become clear. It is, I
believe, a distinct and very powerful focusing modality.
Here is a brief excerpt from one of the
transcripts to give a flavour of closely
held focusing.
F1) …It…
C1) Go to the feeling of it
F2) [pause] If I was…what is the feeling? If I was good enough…he wouldn’t want to top himself.
C2) Can you stay with the feeling of ‘if I was good enough, he wouldn’t want to top himself’?
F3) Yep
C3) Are you…
F4) Oh yeah I can bring that straight up for you…
C4) You…you’ve got that
F5) Yeah
C5) You’ve got that…you’ve got that…and maybe…maybe try asking that what’s that all about? That feeling of ‘if you were good enough he wouldn’t do this’…
F6) [pause] It’s just an insecurity, that’s not a feeling. It’s…it’s just a fear
C6) It’s just a fear…
F7) It…it just yeah…I…I can’t think…I can’t…
C7) You can’t…
F8) I can’t grasp…
C8) You can’t grasp…
F9) …what that is…it’s…
C9) Just wait…just wait if you can…let yourself be aware of it. Just stay with it if you can…
F10) [pause] It just feels like an insecurity
C10) It just feels like an insecurity
F11) But I can get a handle…it won’t come…I can’t…
C11) OK
F12) It’s very elusive…
C12) It’s very elusive
F13) Mmm
C13) There’s insecurity
F14) Yes
C14) But unusually for you…
F15) Yes [small laugh]
C15) …there’s no real sense of what this is about
F16) No…just that if…yeah there is…if he loved me as much as I love him…
C16) Ah
F17) he wouldn’t want to leave me… That’s what it is.
C17) Does that feel right?
F18) Yeah…yeah [sniffs]
C18) If he loved you as much as you love him…
F19) Yeah
C19) …he wouldn’t want to leave you
F20) Yeah…he’d…he’d…he’d…yeah…he’d want to be…he’d want to see it out.
C20) He’d want to see it out
F21) Yeah…that’s what it is
C21) That’s what it is
F22) Yeah…it hurts
C22) It hurts
F23) Yep [pause and lets out a deep breath]
Perhaps this already demonstrates why I call
the modality closely-held focusing.
It is as purely a focusing process as meditative
focusing. 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 be with and beside their experiencing just as they
might during a more conversational exchanges. Throughout this part of the
session, and indeed throughout most of the rest of it, the focuser and
companion were in steady eye contact. At no time did the focuser feel alone. As
she subsequently made plain, if she had, then none of this would have been
possible.
A Continuum of Possibilities
The landscape occupied by these now five
different focusing modalities might grow clearer—and they themselves might
become conceptually more distinct—if I provided a way of relating them one to
another. To do that, I want to look back to the beginnings of my own
counselling career.
I trained as a person-centred counsellor with
Brian Thorne and in the practice of Gene Gendlin’s experiential focusing (with
Campbell Purton) within the same ten months. In consequence, when I began to
earn my living as a counsellor I was aware of what were apparently two distinct
therapeutic modalities rooted in the same client-centred heritage :
‘Thorne-mode’ (loving perception and relationship) and ‘Gendlin-mode’
(focusing-oriented). I soon began to differentiate focusing-oriented ways of
working in the manner I have been discussing, and so it was easy to conceive of
Gendlin-mode as consisting of several related kinds of practice, but I
struggled to relate any of them to the kind of loving perception and
relationship which I had learned about from Brian.
What had experiential focusing to
do with the loving presence and deep, acceptant relationship which Brian
deployed with such efficacy?
This was far more than an academic question for me because I knew that I
offered both focusing and a variant of loving perception and relationship to my
own clients. I wanted to know what I was up to.
Brian's (1997) demonstration video recording The Cost of Integrity illustrates what I
believe to be the makings of an answer. He does not just offer loving presence and acceptant relationship and leave the
matter there. He is guided throughout his interaction with a client by what in
focusing terms would be called his own ‘felt sense', and he responds to his
client 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. I have asked Brian
whether this statement meets with his approval, and it does. He also agrees
that it applies to Carl Rogers’s later work as well. In other words, two of the
most effective and influential representatives of what one might call
‘mainstream’ person-centred therapy can be understood as working in ways which
are partly explicable in focusing terms.
A lot more might be said about all of this, but
I want to stay close to the question: How
does a therapy of loving perception and relationship relate to experiential
focusing? In partial answer, I propose that there is a continuum of
therapeutic practice which has a therapy of loving perception and relationship
at one end and meditative focusing at
the other. The other focusing modalities I have discussed can be placed upon or
related to this continuum. I'm not
saying that the continuum will provide an exclusive
account of the ways in which person–centred and focusing–oriented counselling
and accompaniment may vary. It is simply one
possible way of bringing conceptual order to what is presently a confusing
array of practices. For ease of reference, I shall now begin talking about the
Thorne end of this continuum as conversational
therapy and so add a sixth distinct therapeutic modality to the five
already listed. Thus the continuum consists of:
Conversational Therapy
Conversational Focusing
Closely Held Focusing
Whole-Body Focusing
Dreamscape Focusing
Meditative Focusing
Whole-body focusing and dreamscape
focusing are offset because they relate
to the continuum rather than being clearly and directly in the line of its development.
Why This All Makes Good Sense (In Practice)
I now need to try to persuade you that this
continuum proposal makes good sense. I shall do so initially with a short list
of claims about the therapeutic modalities I have identified. After that, I
will propose some modifications to standard person-centred theory which help
make to sense of the relationships I am proposing. That will lead us back to the
rebellious right arm which started all the trouble.
Here is the short list of claims:
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Conversational therapy is grounded in and takes place within the context of a warm, acceptant, and authentic relationship which can be broadly characterized as ‘person–centred’. At least as I practice it, the therapist is afforded considerable freedom of response. There really is a conversation. This is not true of meditative focusing where the emphasis is upon a more ‘client-centred’ and literal reflection of the focuser's utterances and experience and where there may also be some process assistance. It is not true of closely held focusing either, but the style is more conversational in this latter case.
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In conversational therapy it is common for there to be no very clearly expressed goal at the outset of a session and no explicit job description for the therapist. In a focusing session, there is always a clearly expressed goal even if it is only to get a sense of how things are for the focuser right now, and the focusing companion usually has a pretty clear job description.
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Both conversational focusing and closely held focusing can only take place within a relational context and in both cases the focusing partner's role is more expansive than in meditative focusing. The companion's role is notably more expansive in the case of conversational focusing than in closely held focusing and moves between that of a focusing partner and a conversational therapist.
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Given all this, conversational therapy and closely held focusing can be positioned on a rough continuum that runs between conversational therapy and meditative focusing. At the conversational end there is no need for an explicit goal or job description, and the companion’s responses are those of a genuine conversation. At the meditative end there is always an explicit goal and the companion usually has a job description of some sort; the companion's responses consist almost entirely of reflecting what is offered by the focuser. Conversational focusing is closer to the conversational therapy end of the continuum, and closely held focusing is closer to the meditative end. Closely held focusing involves more focusing, less conversation, and more emphasis upon the literal reflection of what the focuser is saying and doing.
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Given my description of the continuum so far, one might be forgiven for asking whether the relationship is most important in conversational therapy and least important in meditative focusing. I believe that to be false. The therapist or focusing companion may seem less a part of the process as one moves away from conversational therapy and towards the meditative end, but to conclude that the therapist or companion is less a part of the process involves serious misunderstanding akin to concluding that a classical client–centred therapist is not really part of the therapeutic process. The therapist or focusing companion provides the relationship within which awareness and process best occur.
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This last point has an important corollary which I will state as a question: Is relationship harder to provide when accompanying someone who is engaged in meditative focusing than when with someone who is practicing conversational or closely held focusing? It is a delicate thing to accompany someone whose eyes are closed and who is very much engaged with their own experiencing, provide that person with a clear sense that they are being understood and held, and, at the same time, not intrude upon their process. It might even be that meditative focusing is not the best style for trainee counsellors to cut their focusing teeth on and that it is not the best style for many counsellors to practice. Providing the right kind of relationship under these circumstances requires that the focusing companion have both considerable personal presence and the capacity to be present in a relatively egoless way.
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There is now one noticeable loose end hanging. At least, I can see one noticeable loose end. What are we to make of whole–body focusing and dreamscape focusing in light of the continuum I have described? Perhaps the focuser enters these modalities when a kind of internal brake or censorship is released during focusing. Speaking for myself, it is an effort to sit still in a chair and focus. There is something somehow more natural about getting up and beginning to move and that is whole–body focusing. Is the same true of dreamscape focusing? Just as when dreaming and asleep, the focuser would relinquish the usual interpretive laws of ‘reality’ and dreamscape experiencing would emerge. In other words—and as suggested by the list presented earlier—whole–body focusing and dreamscape focusing can be understood as diverging from the main continuum as the focuser's practice and the companion's style of accompaniment moves towards the meditative end.
It is hard for me to know just what further
questions these points raise; I'm still very close to it all. However, there is
one thing which seems in need of further explanation; it is my founding
assertion that conversational therapy
and meditative focusing are related
closely enough to form the ends of a continuum. To provide that additional
support, I must engage with some theory, or perhaps it would be more accurate
to say some ‘explication of practice’. Theory so easily takes on a life of its
own, forging those “iron chains of dogma” which Carl prophetically warned
against (Rogers 1959); whereas what I want to discuss is very closely linked
to, led by, and must be easily modifiable in light of, ongoing therapeutic
practice.
A Therapy That Walks On Two Legs
My point of departure is the unexceptional
observation that people come for therapy, just as Carl Rogers averred, because
they are in a situation of unbearable incongruence.
Such incongruence is not usually just a matter
of thinking or feeling one thing and doing or saying another. That is the
simplest sort of incongruence, and I doubt that it alone would bring a person
to therapy. The incongruence I have in mind is not even easily reducible to the
“denial and distortion” described in Rogers’s famous 1957 and 1959 papers. This
kind of incongruence means that I don’t deceive you about what I am
thinking and feeling so much as I deceive myself by not thinking and feeling what is, as it were, in me
to think and feel. The kind of incongruence which really tears souls apart runs
even deeper and is even harder to bring to awareness. It is the incongruence
which results from a person being out of step with their deepest
physical—”organismic” if you like—knowing, with that level of awareness which
focusing draws from.
An example of the opposite of this kind of incongruence was summed up by Rogers
(1956) in a paper which is still not been published, and whose publication
might, I think, have altered the course of what I'm going to describe below.
Anyway, in that paper Carl says the following about the state of his client:
“Her viscera, her tear ducts, and her awareness…are congruent”. Her viscera, tear ducts, and awareness…
Exactly. There is a kind of congruence available to us which involves a ‘lining
up’ of all aspects of us and our experiencing, and when, instead, parts of us
are routinely and habitually ‘out of line', or when a certain situation or
relationship always seems to throw us out of line, then we suffer. This, in my
experience, is the primary reason why clients coming for counselling.
The antidote to at least the last two kinds of
incongruence is theoretically very simple: awareness
and acceptance. The kind of
congruence Rogers is describing above comes—as he notes in the same unpublished
paper—when there is deep and bodily awareness and when there is acceptance of
what is in awareness. In other words, counselling is about helping a person to
achieve greater awareness, acceptance, and self-acceptance. Without these
things one stalls; ‘process’ becomes log-jammed, or in Gene Gendlin’s phrase we
become “structure bound”. As I write this, I am thinking it occurs when and
because we try to control our experiencing—that is what incongruence
is—and all we succeed in doing is putting a monkey wrench into our own works.
(Gendlin himself does not see ‘structure bound’ and ‘incongruent’ as
theoretically equivalent notions, but I am inclined to try to relate them.)
Why do we do this? Why would any
half-way sane creature do this to themselves?
I think the answer is that we fear to be our
experiencing, and perhaps we are so constructed that we cannot fully be
our experiencing in the absence of acceptant others. Maybe too, there is a
further wrinkle here. Pain really is hard to bear, and we humans are skilled at
keeping our pain at bay. Pain experienced with another—another we can trust not
to increase our pain or use it to exploit us—is more bearable. Many of us,
however, have had a preponderance of experiences which demonstrate that others will
add to or use our pain. Therefore, we cannot be our pain, and we cannot be
our experiencing. Our very survival depends upon continued incongruence.
If people come to counselling because of
incongruence, or because they are structure bound, and fear is heavily
implicated in all this, and if for most of us being open to our experiencing
really is hard to achieve in solitude, then the counsellor’s job description is
almost a logical deduction. She must work with her clients to help them achieve
the awareness and acceptance which ease incongruence and lubricate process. She
must furnish the kind of relationship which eases fear and pain and facilitates
self love.
These are what I think of as the two legs of therapeutic practice:
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One leg—the awareness leg—is about being with clients in such a way that self-awareness and self-acceptance are promoted.
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The other leg—the relationship leg—is about offering relationship of the kind which the famous “core” or “counsellor” conditions point towards.
My sense is that over the past 50 years, since
Carl wrote his formative papers towards the end of the 1950s, these legs have
diverged until the client/person-centred/experiential tradition is close to
dismemberment. I want to make a fuss about that and see if some of us, at
least, can’t regain a more comfortable posture. It seems significant to me that
the order in which the 1956, 1957, and 1959 papers were written is the opposite of that in which they were published, and it is the last of the three to be written which most clearly evidences the
two ‘legs’ and has a distinct ‘focusing feel’ to it.
The awareness
leg has been developed in the work of Gene Gendlin and the process
experientialists. The relationship leg
was already pretty substantial by the 1960s although the recent work of Brian
Thorne—which draws together person-centred practice with the apprehension of
divine love—adds detail to a previously sketchy dimension. (See, for example,
Thorne 2002.) For the most part, however, these developments have occurred in
isolation from each other, and the two legs have been presented separately in
the literature. It is interesting how little attention writers like Mearns,
Thorne, Merry and Sanders have paid to the need to help clients achieve greater
awareness of their experiencing: the emphasis has been on the relationship.
I don’t know why this has occurred, but it
seems salutary to me that the two theorist-practitioners who have most
influenced my own work walk securely upon both legs when with clients and
trainees. Gene Gendlin oozes ‘core conditionality'; he is about as
‘person-centred’ as a person can get. Brian Thorne is the master of conversational therapy and, as I pointed
out earlier, this involves a steady
deepening of the client’s level of awareness. Yet Gene talks and writes almost
exclusively about focusing, and Brian talks and writes almost exclusively about
relationship and loving perception. Why?
Therapeutic practice so obviously requires both aspects in equal measure.
To put this another way, I am persuaded that
the client/person-centred/focusing-oriented tradition is an essentially and
originally two-legged creature which has become confused and a bit lame over
the past half century. This conviction is my primary theoretical reason for asserting that conversational therapy and meditative
focusing belong upon the same continuum of therapeutic modalities. The
conviction is supported by my experience of working at those different points
along the continuum which I have identified: my clinical experience tells
me that this way of thinking about the theory makes good sense.
There is a little more to add here because it
was only while learning to offer closely
held focusing that I first felt that I was directly and fully experiencing
the connection between experiential focusing and a therapy of loving perception
and relationship. The division in my practice that I had experienced until then
vanished within three short sessions, and the way that I offer therapy seemed
to have become ‘one thing'. It feels as though right now this may well be
driving further changes in the way that I offer and conceive of therapeutic
accompaniment. Or perhaps I should simply say in the way that I conceive of myself as offering therapy
because so far as I can ascertain my clients are not aware of any difference…
The point I wish to really highlight
is this: the practice of closely held focusing was revelatory for me, and I am
told by students that it has changed their conception of person-centred
practice as well. That was the advertisement!
Open-Centred?
Of course, everything I am saying here is
predicated upon my belief that the standard conception of person-centred theory
is vitiated by the claim to “necessary and sufficient conditions”, and by its
insistence that the source of all psychic ills is those dread conditions of
worth. (See Mountford 2006a, 2006b, and 2006c.) In other words, I am
contemplating a theory whose centre has rotted out and saying: Well,
actually, there is still a lot of sound wood left here to build with.
If you disagree with that view of matters,
then you may well disagree with other things that I am saying.
I may be contemplating an account of
therapeutic practice much of which I believe is still sound, but I am not sure
that what I am contemplating is best called person-centred
counselling. For one thing, as I have also recently argued elsewhere, the
original person-centred recipe for relationship holds good for relationship
with sentient nonhumans and perhaps the whole ‘created order'. For another
thing, it isn’t at all clear to me that an effective counsellor is
‘centred’ on their client or any other specially privileged object. They are
centred on, or open to, whatever is
moving through their awareness or potentially available to their awareness
while with their client. They are there
for their client. They
are there in the service of their client much as a trusted mountain
guide might be, but that does not make them person
or client centred.
What is more, if we lose the hallmark
person-centred conviction that counselling is all about conditions of worth,
and replace it with the assertion that counselling is about the client’s
increasing levels of awareness and acceptance, then the counsellor can
justifiably do some pretty non-person-centred things. She can offer
interpretations; she can argue with her client; she can offer advice…she can do
pretty much whatever—in that moment—will help the client achieve awareness and
acceptance and maintain it through time. She can also consistently operate
along the continuum which stretches between conversational
therapy and meditative focusing. To me that feels like an ‘open’ approach to
therapy, open-centred counselling
rather than client or person-centred counselling.
Is this also an ‘integrative’
approach to counselling ? My
answer is a definite No.
For one thing, no additional theoretical
commitment is needed by an open-centred counsellor; everything I am claiming is
already either explicit or inherent in Rogers’s three papers from the latter
1950s. For another thing, the counsellor’s way of being and way of relating to
the client remains in accordance with the conditions spelled out in the
person-centred recipe. It is simply that the open-centred counsellor no longer
views these conditions as anything more than a recipe, and she is freer from
constraint because she is no longer mesmerized by conditions of worth theory
and the fear of creating more of the same. Fear cripples counsellors as
effectively as it cripples their clients.
That
does, I believe, take us back to what my arm was protesting about
in a personal-development workshop, on a
pleasant Saturday morning in Norwich, several years ago.
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