Yesterday (10th March 2025), the Person-Centred Association pasted an image on their Facebook page stating ‘Trust the Process’. They added: ‘In a world full of pluralistic and integrative approaches, it’s important to get back to the core philosophy of Person-Centred Therapy—trusting the individual’s inner wisdom and valuing the process of growth’.
In person-centred circles, the mantra ‘Trust the process’ is commonplace, but is it actually a meaningful, coherent, and even person-centred injunction? In this blog, I want to suggest that—as a definitive statement as to what people should do and what the person-centred approach most fundamentally means—probably not.
I’m understanding ‘trust the process’, here, as a general trust in the inner wisdom of another—as the PCA post defines it. But I also look at understandings of ‘trust the process’ that are more specific to the context of therapy.
Whose Process?
First, whose process are we trusting here? Is it just the process of person-centred therapists and clients who want this approach or, for instance, are the processes of pluralistic and integrative therapists (those who, according to the post itself, are in far too great an abundance) trusted too? Certainly, from some of the social media comments I have received from self-identified advocates of a person-centred approach, there seems very little trust in the process of those who see the world differently. Take, for instance, the comments that our pluralistic reading of the person-centred approach is ‘delulu’ and would make Roger’s [sic] ‘turn in his grave’; or that our ‘wacky’ ideas about pluralism are ‘inauthentic’ and ‘unnecessary’. Where, here, is a genuine trust in the process of those who understand person-centredness in different terms?
Perhaps, it could be argued, the phrase ‘trust the process’ is just about therapy. It’s about trusting that, if the client and the therapy relationship are allowed to evolve ‘naturally’—without structure, goals, or conscious directions—good things will come about. I certainly believe there’s a lot of truth in that, but if the process is only to be trusted under certain circumstances (and you might say, Rogers’s six conditions for therapeutic personality change), then what happens to that ‘process’ once the client moves to a different context? Does their actualising tendency, their ‘desire to maintain and enhance the capacities of the experiencing organism’, somehow disappear or become untrustworthy? That, for me, would certainly run against Rogers’s description of the actualising tendency as the ‘sole motivating force’: if they’re not actualising once they leave therapy, what are they doing, and what’s driving that? And if that trust in the process is context-dependent, then it seems a fairly superficial understanding of how people act and heal: like a switch that can turn on and off. Surely the whole point of Rogers’s model of the person is that it is about people at their deepest, most fundamental level.
And what about trusting the process with people, including clients, who may have come to feel that they cannot ‘trust their own process’? Say, for instance, people who are abusing alcohol and feel that they cannot stop themselves alone. Is this self-insight and process to be trusted too, or is it that, actually, their process has become untrustworthy. Either way, it’s not clear here what it means to ‘trust the process’ and how to avoid it falling into self-contradiction.
This contradiction gets particularly acute when we enter the field of interpersonal perceptions: what one person thinks and feels about another person’s experiences. Say Person A, deeply and intuitively, feels that Person B is experiencing X; but Person B, in all their congruence, feels that they are experiencing Y instead. So whose process and experiences do we trust: Person A or Person B? If we trust Person A, we can’t be trusting Person B’s process, and vice versa. So, at this point, the injunction that we should ‘trust the process’ fundamentally breaks down. Here, instead, I think we have to say (as Rogers does) that, ultimately, the person is the expert in their own experiences, but then we are saying that Person A’s deeply felt intuitive experiences are wrong. And, more than that, that that person actually needs to be really open to hearing what the other is, in fact, saying about their experiences.
In my experience, in the person-centred field, that doesn’t always happen. That is, a belief in ‘trusting the process’ gets interpreted as believing that what we feel about others’ experiences are, inherently, right. Perhaps, in part, that explains way someone can feel it’s not un-person-centred to say that someone else’s deeply-felt beliefs are ‘delulu’ or ‘wacky’: ‘I’m just trusting my own sense of things’. But if ‘trusting the process’ means privileging one’s own perceptions and experiences over those that one is relating to, and engaging in ways that, to me, feel conditional, critical, and devaluing, it’s hard to see where the person-centredness is here.
More importantly, what about the majority of clients who come to therapy wanting guidance, structured, advice, and goals? Do we trust their process here or do we, actually, assume that we know ‘really’ what they want and need? If we take a position that, despite what the client says, we know really what is going on for them and what is best, how is person-centred therapy different from any other therapy that takes an expert position on the client?
Over-simplification
For me, the problem I see with ‘trusting the process’ is that, although it is a very clear, simple, elegant, and compelling way of explaining the world, like many other simple and succinct propositions it lacks a full understanding of the complexities and balances that are needed to navigate real life. Yes, absolutely: our intuition can be amazing and sometimes trusting our deep inner sense of things is an incredible guide; but that doesn’t mean that it always is. I think about myself when I’m travelling. Sometimes, when I’m lost, I have a deep, powerful sense of where to go, and if I trust it I find, to my amazement, that I ‘magically’ arrive at where I need to be. Great! But sometimes that deep intuitive sense of where I am is completely and utterly wrong. And research shows consistently that people’s intuitive experiences are not always right. Just as one example, 90% of therapists think that they are in the top 10% of most effective therapists—that just can’t be correct: Some of those people are deeply, intuitively wrong. Research also shows that people can be fundamentally affected by the context around them: for instance, I might deeply, intuitively feel that I want chocolate, for instance, but actually that’s been shaped and biased by walking past a series of adverts for Galaxy bars.
A ‘true’ process
So, with the example of chocolate, you could say, ‘Yes, but that’s not the person’s true process—it’s shaped by the external demands around them.’ And you could say the same thing about people wanting goals or structure in therapy: people may say they want that, but actually, at a deeper level, their process is directing them somewhere different. But first, that puts the person-centred therapist in the position of expert: ‘I know what you want and need, even if you think you need something else’. And second, what is a person’s true, genuine process? Where’s the line between what is true and what is a fake process (and, again, who gets to decide?).
Individualism
A basic problem with the idea of a ‘true process’ is that it’s based on an idea that people can be fundamentally separable from their environment. That there’s a true, original organism who comes into the world fully whole, and has wants, needs, and feelings that are distinguishable from external demands. But can we ever really separate a person from their environment? Is a baby not, inevitably, a product of their parenting, their family, their friends, their community, their sociopolitical environment? How can we ever separate the person out and, if we did so, what would that organism actually look like? Pretty much every contemporary theory of the person recognises that people are fundamentally intertwined with the worlds they inhabit: there is no real or genuine processes outside of that.
Accommodation and Assimilation
Piaget, probably the most important developmental psychologist of the 20th century, said that people grow through two process: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is where we integrate the external world into our pre-existing schema; accommodation is where we change our schema to adapt to the external world: understanding it in new and fresh ways. The edict to only trust the process emphasises just the one side of this coin—assimilation—and doesn’t take into account the fact that we also, inherently, adapt and change to the external world around us. We take in from the world, we learn from it, we grow and become bigger by understanding things we didn’t understand before. When you learnt about person-centred theory and practice, you didn’t just do it through trusting an internal processes and drawing on what you already knew. You opened yourself up to new ideas: the ideas, for instance, of Carl Rogers. That wasn’t in you there, totally, before. Maybe parts of it, inklings, but something outside of your own process also ‘knocked on your door’, showed itself, became integrated into you.
Determinism
And if we just trust the process, why go to therapy at all? Surely everything we have already been doing is a legitimate part of our process, so why change anything? Of course, we might say that going to therapy is part of that process, but so would not going to therapy, and so would, in fact, anything we do. So is there any point consciously trying to do anything, or are we just—like potato sprouts—determined to develop and grow in a particular way, whatever we try to do? In which case, why bother trusting the process if, whether we trust it or not, we’re following our process? Again, the injunction to trust our process falls into a web of self-contradictions.
‘If You Don’t Trust the Process, then Get Out’
A response might be, ‘Well, the person-centred way is to trust the process, and if you don’t trust the process, then that’s fine, but don’t call yourself “person-centred”.’ The problem here, of course, goes back to the fact that it’s then not trusting the process of those who understand ‘person-centred’ in ways that don’t focus exclusively on trusting the process.
Defining Terms
I guess what I’m arguing is that a statement like ‘Trust the process’ needs a lot more nuance and clarification. Some questions and potential contradictions I’d love us to delve deeper into are:
What is someone’s ‘process’? For instance, Is it all of someone, or some parts? Can there be elements of a person that are not part of their process? Is it the same as their experiential field? Their actualising tendency?
At what level should the process be trusted? Is it all levels, or what we see as ‘deeper’ levels and, if so, how does that get defined? And what should we trust if people, fundamentally, do not trust their own process? Do we trust their process despite or trust their distrust of their process (and, if so, how do we account for that in person-centred terms?)
Are all people’s processes to be trusted? What does it mean, for instance, to trust Elon Musk’s process?
What do we trust in terms of people’s processes about other people’s processes? If someone fundamentally doesn’t trust another person’s processes, what do we trust?
A Therapist-Led Direction
Why does it matter? I think, most fundamentally, I’m concerned that meeting a client through the assumption that they should ‘trust their process’ imposes on them a particular ideology that may not be the client’s own. I think of a client who comes to see a school counsellor—maybe the only therapist they can access—and that counsellor believes that, for the client to find ways forward, they need to trust their process and come to understand their inner feelings and wants. And maybe the client doesn’t believe that. Maybe the client, like many young people, wants direction, guidance, structure and goals—as well as space to explore their feelings. Then, I think, the therapist who ‘trusts the process’, paradoxically, is at risk of imposing upon the young person a particular ideology: a view of the world and of the therapy process that may not match, or fit to, the client’s lived reality or their personal preferences and needs.
And at worst, I think the phrase ‘trust the process’ can get ‘weaponised’. It becomes a way of telling someone to do something that, insidiously, implies that ‘deep’ down the person really knows that that way of feeling or acting is the best thing for them. So rather than an assertive and honest, ‘I’d prefer it, for me, if you do X,’ it becomes, ‘If you really trusted yourself, you’d know to do X and not Y.’ Of course, the most fundamental paradox about the edict to ‘trust the process’ is that, as an injunction to act in a particular way, it’s not trusting the person’s process to find their own process. It’s a direction, an instruction… fair enough, but it’s important to be honest and transparent about that, rather than presenting it as the other’s truth.
Does that mean that therapists shouldn’t wholly trust the process. No, it’s a belief and an ideology, and it’s no more wrong than believing in God or angels. But if therapists do believe, solely, that the way to grow is to trust the process then I think that they should make that explicit to clients, and to see how this sits with the client’s own understanding of growth and change, and to give the client a chance to opt in or out. And, I think, they should also have a plan for what to do if the client sees it very differently.
Conclusion
Simplicity and elegance does not make something right. Nor does the fact that something’s partially right make it wholly right. From a pluralistic person-centred standpoint, yes, absolutely, we should be recognising and promoting the wisdom of the client and their ability—and right—to find their own self-direction; as well as the beauty of the therapy process when we just allow things to evolve without conscious direction. But we can also do that while recognising the complexity of factors that help people develop and heal. From a pluralistic standpoint, it doesn’t all come down to one thing, however elegant and compelling that one thing might be. And, from a pluralistic standpoint, what it means to be ‘person-centred’ is to begin, not with a particular ideology, but with a curiosity and openness to the client’s own understanding of healing and change. So, yes, listen to the process, be welcoming of the process, let yourself be amazed by the therapy process—but also don’t treat the process as the be-all and end-all of therapy. Nothing is the be-all and end-all of anything. To be person-centred, from a pluralistic stance, is to have the humility and openness to recognise that there are always limits to our knowledge and understanding, and that there is always so much more we can learn.
Acknowledgements
Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash