Clive reflects...What kind of therapy do we offer?
Therapists make therapy in the image of their own needs. That much I am certain of.
I have never been able to make much use of advice, or criticism, or other people's agendas, or even "feedback" unless it really is carefully put and well-intentioned. If I smell judgment, then I go into a defended kind of mode at best, and at worst I go into battle. What I really need is to feel that it's okay to just be me, follow my nose, and learn by screwing up sometimes. The relationships which matter will remain constant and flourish while I do those things.
Working as a school and university teacher, I came to think that I am in no way unusual, and that pretty much everybody is like this. (There is a dangerous premise in there which says that maybe some people don't know they're like this… I have to watch out for that one.) Anyway, as I learned eventually, this way of viewing people is a part of person-centered counselling. Each of us is our own best expert given opportunity and the right environment. I take that seriously. I think it's fair to say I have put a lot of time and effort into trying to become able to offer that environment and be somebody who can offer it without effort because that's mostly who I am. I think I am speaking for my colleagues, here, too, although they got there by their own special roads.
What I also need is to be in friendly awareness of how things are for me, of how I am experiencing and responding to the world around me from moment to moment. Of course, I can't be aware of everything at any given time. Attempting that leads to serious craziness. But if something seems important, then I want to be able to give it some attention and know how I am in respect of it. I don't mean necessarily be able to tell a story about it, put words to it right away. I mean sense within me how we stand, how it sits with me. And what I learned as I trained as a counsellor and began to practice as a counsellor is that if I can do this, if I can stay with what it is I am experiencing without pushing it away, turning away, or letting it drown me and swallow me, then I can process. Even when bad things have happened. What I also began to recognize as a counsellor is that this, too, seems to be true of pretty much everybody.
It follows from all this that what I need to be offering as a counsellor is opportunity for an acceptant, nonjudgmental relationship, and sometimes a bit of encouragement and help with the processing stuff. That's getting close to what I and my colleagues understand by focusing oriented person-centered therapy. It isn't quite the whole story, though. There's at least a couple of other things going on which I, at least, find it harder to make theoretical sense of although they're certainly empirically the case.
As Carl Rogers (who got the person-centered ball rolling) got older, he kind of gave himself permission to be more and more just who he was and what he was feeling when he was with clients and in groups and training situations. He found that somehow it all worked better when he did that. What worked for Carl is worth trying, and I have found (sometimes to my considerable surprise) that the more I can be "just me", then the better therapy seems to work. That can mean not always talking and acting like a person might think a therapist would because it means talking and acting like Clive, and "Clive" comes before "therapist". Again, I think I am speaking for my colleagues, and that's a big reason why we are colleagues. We find it uncomfortable when people act out "being counsellors".
Now, the other thing which seems so important is what Brian Thorne calls "tenderness". It's not enough to care from a safe and protective distance. When a person is hurting, when a person is confused, when a person feels lost and pretty much worthless, they need tenderness and they need love. It’s a special kind of love they need, and something which the world is very short of, because it doesn't ask for anything in return, and it doesn't involve the needs of the person doing the loving. (Okay, yes, I offer therapy for a fee, and that is asking for 'something'. If I didn't charge a fee then I couldn't be a therapist.)
Think about it. Love is almost always a reciprocal arrangement at its best and close to a commercial bargain at its saddest. Sometimes, we need things to be less reciprocal so that we can get a sense of how things really are for us, and a bit of room to let them shift and change and move along.
I guess that is why I am still in relationship with the man who taught me some of this and with "ex-clients" and "ex-students" who taught me even more.
SITE LINKS