| This entry is a day or
so late because it was Thanksgiving last Thursday. I say that as if that's all
the explanation you need. Roy has a great affinity for the USA and we have many
American friends - so with that excuse we usually hold a Thanksgiving party
(along with the July 4th one as well). So, this year the party falls in the
middle of a training weekend, but undaunted Roy proceeded to cook dinner for
eight.
What this all means is that I get home from the first day of the training
course to entertain six friends then got up at 8 am in order to get to the
second day of the course. Hence, this entry is a little late. Did you want to
know that ?
But, as this weekend was about Person Centered Counselling (PCT) that's a bit
about my personal centre. As you may have guessed from my last entry I have
just a few preconceived ideas about PCT. Happily, this weekend has put them
into a much more useful and respectful frame. We spent the first day looking a
the theory and trying out the process with each other and the second day
watching a tape of Rogers and filling in the gaps.
The theory, as I understand it is as follows:
Personal Development: This
states that people develop a concept of the "self" and that this
process of development is termed "Self Actualisation". Further, that
this process of self actualisation is inherent in all people - its a part of
life itself. The client is trustworthy and conflicts arise between the concept
of the self and that of the "real world".
|
The Therapy: This was much
more fun and I think caused a few of my fellow participants a bit of a problem.
There are four conditions for PCT therapy, these are:
1. Empathic understanding.
2. Unconditional acceptance of the client.
3. Congruence of the therapist.
4. Presence of the therapist.
|
Psychological Health: This is
a concept that is made up of three main points:
1. Openness to experience.
2. Organismic trusting.
3. The ability to live fully and creatively.
|
But just what does all that mean. Well,
its designed to form a process that begins with Trust moves to Intimacy and
ends with Mutuality and a successful outcome for the therapeutic session. In
one of our small group sessions the group that I was in came up with the
following statement about PCT:
In the empathic process the system
of the client self actualises and so solves the problems.
|
Personally, I think that that statement
sums up all that there is to know about PCT. Ofcourse, there is a great deal of
detail that goes with that but in essence that's PCT. Rather like NLP can be
described as the study of the structure of subjective experience so the above
statement describes PCT.
The difficulty that I saw my fellow participants having, or some of them at
least, is that from this point on its all experience. Some were asking for what
I understood to be a script. Rather like in NLP we have question frames or
specific phrases that can be used to induce a desired response. PCT has none of
this.
In some ways it reflects parts of Freud and the Free Association process but
with some intervention by the therapist. In our group exercise I observed and
experienced the therapists mirroring back the clients words whereas I tried to
process what the client was saying and feed that back in order to test my
understanding. The empathic process demands that the therapist be actively
involved whilst staying within the landscape of the client.
I fixed on the concept of the landscape because the trainer observed my PCT
exercise and said that I had led the client rather than just staying with the
client moment to moment. My argument was that I introduced only material that
the client had brought forward albeit earlier in the interaction. This was not
true PCT I was told. It seems that PCT therapists, or this trainer, saw the
client in a linear format with emotions coming sequentially. This means that a
client can have only one emotion at one time. This I thought to be factually
wrong. Working with parts leads me to conclude that people have many emotions
at once and that we are dealing with a landscape that changes focus all the
time.
However, later when we watched Rogers himself I saw him do exactly the same
thing. He led the client with questions that reflected back earlier comments.
He always stayed with the landscape of what the client had described but he was
quite happy to return to earlier comments made by the client and even go to the
edge of the landscape and ponder on what might exist outside the border.
I said that it seemed that Acolytes had learned from the Master and were now
restructuring PCT but passing it off as the real thing, whereas it seems that
the new PCT was much more restrictive that the original concept. Maybe people
needed to return to the original ideas to ensure that they were teaching what
the said they were. Or maybe the original was wrong or flawed ?
It was an interesting and enjoyable weekend and I have learned a lot. Now all I
have to do is choose the essay that I want to write for this module.
|