Person-Centred Therapy: Four Currents

It’s generally accepted now that the person-centred approach isn’t just one ‘thing’: it’s made up of lots of different ‘tribes’ or ‘branches’, like the ‘classical approach’ and ‘emotion-focused therapy’ (see blog here).

But how do all these different strands come together? It seems to me that we can think about the person-centred approach—from where it started to where it is now—in terms of four ‘currents’. Like the different movements of water running through an ocean, these current flows into each other and intermingle; but at the same time they have some distinctive elements and can, at times, pull in different directions.

1. The Client-as-Expert

This is pretty much where Rogers started from, and is still seen by many—particularly of a ‘classical’ persuasion—as the defining (or even sole) stream of person-centred theory and practice. It’s the belief, as Carl Rogers puts it in 1961, that:

‘It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried…

Rogers work was a reaction to the more didactic, expert-led styles of counselling that were prevalent in his early years. He wanted to develop a ‘new’ form of psychotherapy and counselling that, instead of being directive, was non-directive: that trusted the client to be able to take the lead and find the answers that were right for them.

Central to this current, as it developed, was the concept of the actualising tendency. This is the idea that all of us have an inherent tendency—and ability—to maintain and enhance ourselves, and can do so given the right conditions (of empathy, acceptance, and congruence).

In recent years, however, there’s been some challenges to the concept of the client-as-expert. It is based, for instance, on an assumption that all wisdom and knowledge is ‘within’ the client, but contemporary philosophy and psychology have questioned the idea that the client—like any of us—is a self-enclosed, separate and distinct entity. Aren’t we all fundamentally relational beings (see Current #2, below)? Also, most developmental theorists and researchers, like the infamous Swiss psychologists Jean Piaget, would say that learning can happen from the ‘outside-in’ as well as the ‘inside-out’. If you go to a CPD workshop, for instance, it’s great to have space to brainstorm, discuss, and develop your own ideas; but isn’t there also a place for being directly taught things through, for instance, Powerpoint. We don’t want death-by-Powerpoint, but at the same time some degree of it can be really useful; so does learning—therapeutic or otherwise—always need to be just self-generated? Isn’t that a bit black-and-white?

2. Relational

So another current running through the person-centred approach is an emphasis on the importance of relationship. This is evident in Rogers’ ‘necessary and sufficient’ conditions which include empathy, unconditional acceptance, congruence, and contact—and it’s very clear in much of his later work, when he focuses on the healing power of relationships and of encounter in groups. For Rogers, and for most practitioners across the person-centred approach, it is not techniques or ‘interventions’ that really help someone, but the cultivation of an in-depth personal relationship. That’s been central to the work that Dave Mearns and I have done on relational depth: where the relational encounter is really brought to the fore.

From this relational perspective, the client—like all human beings—is seen, not so much a separate and distinct individual, but as part of a relational and communal network: we’re all in it together. And it’s when we find our togetherness with others that we thrive most fully. This links person-centred therapy to other approaches like interpersonal therapy and Bowlby’s attachment theory, that also put relating at the heart of healthy development.

Rogers’ focus on the client-as-expert draws from humanistic philosophy (for instance, the French eighteenth century thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau), whereas the relational elements are more associated with contemporary dialogical and ‘intersubjective’ philosophy—as, for instance, in the work of the twentieth century Austrian-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. Are we separate or are we inter-related? Peter Schmid, the late great person-centred writer, brought these two currents together brilliantly by showing how we could be both.

3. Experiential/Emotion-Focused

Rogers, as we’ve seen with Current #1, starts with the client, and from here he goes on to adopt a phenomenological perspective on both the person and on therapeutic work. Phenomenology, which Rogers takes in the 1940s from two psychologists, Snyggs and Combs, is a philosophical and psychological approach which emphasises experiencing as the starting point for understanding human beings and their psychological processes. Experiencing is our subjective, ever-changing, moment-by-moment ‘all that is going on’ that is potentially available to awareness. It’s our perceptions and our senses, our desires and meanings. Experiencing is my sense, right now, of a slight chill on my shoulders as winter creeps in, the darkening light in the room, and my feeling of excitement and engagement as I write this.

Rogers model of psychological distress is all about how we get estranged from our experiencing. We come to see ourselves as fixed ‘selves’, with particular qualities and characteristics (based on what we have been told are ‘good’ characteristics) and so we get alienated from that natural flow. That’s a problem, because that flow of experiencing has, as we saw in Current #1, an actualising direction: it is towards maintaining and enhancing ourselves. So, for instance, if we deny the feelings of vulnerability or hurt that are part of that organismic experiencing, we don’t allow ourselves to strive for what we need: which, for instance, might be care or protection from others.

Eugene Gendlin, who was probably the most important of Rogers’ progeny, was particularly central to this experiential current. For Gendlin, it was this process of connecting with our bodily-felt experiencing, and allowing it to ‘carry forward’ (and carry us forward with it), that was the healing process. But, critically, Gendlin did not believe that clients would always know how to connect with, and unfurl, that experiencing in the most helpful way possible. So, in the development of ‘focusing’, Gendlin proposed methods that could help clients—or people more generally—create the environment in which their bodily felt senses, their embodied wisdom, could be carried forward.

Along with felt-senses, a core part of our experiencing is our emotions: our hurt, our fears… and also an enormous spectrum of affects like anger, shame, and joy. These emotions are often a particularly hidden part of our experiencing, because we have been taught that showing emotions is not ‘good’: to be people who others like (and to like ourselves), we shouldn’t have many of the feelings we have. But the problem is, we do have them, and they’re an important part of us; and the more we suppress them the more they can tend to resurface—and often in less controlled and more destructive ways. This emphasis on emotions have been particularly developed by the ‘emotion-focused therapy’ (EFT) branch of the person-centred approach.

We can see here that a focusing on experiencing and emotions (Current #3) emerges from a belief in clients’ (Current #1) self-righting and self-healing capacities: if we help clients to connect with their true, primary emotions, then they can find ways of sorting out their own problems. But here’s the question: how able are clients, actually, to connect with their own experiences and emotions and draw on them to improve things in their lives? This is where these current can start to part ways. From a Client-as-Expert position, clients know best: we don’t need to do anything to help them connect with their experiences and emotions other than what we always do, which is to empathise, accept, and be real. But those from an experiential and emotion-focused approach tend to believe that, actually, clients can sometimes do with a bit of help in getting in touch with their underlying emotions and that therefore there can be a place for therapists’ techniques and expertise. This isn’t about directing the content of what client’s say; but it is about adopting a more ‘process-directive’ stance: helping clients develop skills and techniques that can support them to connect with their deeper felt-senses and emotions.

4. Ethical/Political

Finally, there’s a way of ‘reading’ the person-centred approach which really brings to the fore it’s commitment to social justice, equality, and engaging with others in caring and community-spirited ways. This egalitarian spirit was, perhaps, what drove Rogers in the first place—he wanted clients to be treated as equals to their counsellors, rather than as lesser beings—and it is certainly there in his later work with groups and communities. Rogers, in this later life, was amazing in travelling to places like Northern Ireland and South Africa to try and help overcome political conflict (see, for instance, The Steel Shutter, which documents his work in Northern Ireland). It is clear here that Rogers saw the person-centred approach in much broader terms than just as a clinical practice: for him it was about transformation at a social and global level to a better, fairer world.

Our own pluralistic approach to person-centred therapy is one attempt to really follow through on this current in the person-centred approach (see blog here). For instance, in terms of therapeutic practice, we really prioritise engaging with clients in caring and respectful ways. This is likely to mean seeing the client as an expert in their own life (Current #1), and also focusing on relationships (Current #2) and experiences and emotions (Current #3); but these are all in service of a respectful, caring relationship—not ends in themselves. So, for instance, if a client really feels that they would benefit from therapist expertise, and we have expertise that might help, why not? Who are we to decide for the client what it is that they really need or want in therapy.

But the pluralistic approach also goes broader than that, and understands the therapeutic process as just one forum within which positive change can happen. There’s also change, for instance, at the social and economic level; and pluralism argues that tackling issues like racism, economic inequalities, and looming climate catastrophe can all be really important ways of helping clients. Here, there’s a focus on prizing of difference and diversity—within the client, across people, across communities and nations—which is much broader than therapeutic work alone. It is about creating a better world for us all.

Conclusion

From the dawning of Rogers’ work to the person-centred field today, we can watch these four currents mingling, merging, separating, pulling apart, and mingling again. No doubt, there are other currents that flow through the person-centred approach: for example, an existential current; or a current of creativity—as articulated, for instance, in the work of Natalie Rogers and the person-centred creative arts field today. None of these currents are the one, ‘true’ Rogerian perspective: Rogers, like all of us, said different things at different times and in subtly different ways. And, even if he did not, there’s new perspectives and directions coming into—and out of—the person-centred field all the time, that can only add to our richness, complexity, and depth.

***

A Chinese translation of this blog is available here.

The 'Actualising Tendency': A Directional Account

What is the ‘actualising tendency’? It’s something that is referred to throughout the person-centred and humanistic field. But what does it actually mean, does it make sense, and, perhaps most importantly, does it really ‘exist’?

Carl Rogers (1959, p. 196), in his classic monograph, defined it as the, ‘inherent tendency of the organism to develop all its capacities in ways which serve to maintain or enhance the organism.’ To be honest, I’ve studied and quoted that definition again and again over the last 30 years, but I’m still not entirely sure what it means. The problem for me is the term ‘capacities’—what actually are they? Similarly, when the Dictionary of person-centred psychology defines the actualising tendency as ‘the tendency in all forms of organic life to develop more complex organisation, the fulfilment of potential…’ (Merry & Tudor, 2002, p. 2), I’m left with the question, ‘What actually is this “potential”?’ Presumably it’s something we are born with. But was I born with the potential to become a professor, or a football player, or a sociopath? And, if so, why did I actualise some potentials and not others? I guess, for me, terms like ‘capacities’ and ‘potential’ just feel too vague and non-specific, and don’t seem to give us much concrete direction about how to engage most helpfully with our clients.

So does the ‘actualising tendency’ mean something about an inherent capacity to self-heal, or ‘self-right,’ as Bohart and Tallman (1999) put it? I think that is how it is most commonly understood. That is, we each, within us, have the capacity to sort ourselves out—to find the answers to our problems. If we get cut, our bodies form scabs to heal us; or send out antibodies to help us overcome an infection. In the same way, then, deep inside of us is a tendency towards psychological healing, maintenance, and growth. We know what is right for us: an amazing, organismic wisdom that can help us overcome even the most challenging of circumstances. Viewed in this way, the concept of the actualising tendency becomes a revolutionary and deeply democratising challenge to those approaches—like traditional psychoanalysis and behaviour therapy—that see expert knowledge and intervention as the source of psychological healing. Here, from this humanistic standpoint, we don’t need to depend on others, or look to our ‘betters’, to sort ourselves out. Rather, it’s we, ‘the people’, who are our own authorities in our own lives.

Progressive though it is, this understanding of the actualising tendency begs an obvious question: if we’ve got such a deep tendency towards healing and growth, how is it that people can get so f*%£ed up in their lives? Why, for instance, do people end up addicted to drugs, or battering themselves psychologically or physically, or chasing after money in a way that drives them to an early grave? Fortunately, from a self-righting perspective, there’s a pretty good answer to this: because, instead of trusting our own inner wisdom, we end up being guided by the outside world. So, for instance, we come to believe that the most important thing in life is to have a Rolex watch, or thousands of Facebook ‘friends’; and we come to ignore that own inner voice that is just wanting to have fun, or be creative, or lie in bed with our partners watching the rain against the window pane. In Rogerian terms, we develop an ‘external locus of evaluation’, instead of an ‘internal’ one.

There’s evidence in support of this position. For instance, we know that people feel happier and more satisfied when they achieve ‘intrinsic’ goals, as opposed to ‘extrinsic’ ones (Sheldon & Kasser, 1998). However, the idea that our actualising tendency gets scuppered by the outside world is problematic in several ways (Cooper, 2013). First, it tends to position the person as a ‘victim’ of their external circumstances, which isn’t consistent with the person-centred idea that we are all inherently agentic. Rollo May, the founder of existential therapy in the US, criticised Rogers for this, saying it was the ‘most devastating of all judgements’: that we are all essentially ‘sheep’ following whoever is ‘the shepherd’. Second, it’s based on a very individualistic view of human being: that we come into the world as a separate entity, divorced from those around us, and with an ability to return to an independent, individual self. For a lot of contemporary ‘postmodern’ thinkers, these individualistic assumptions are more a product of western, patriarchal culture than an ‘objective’ reality; and they would argue that human beings are always, inevitably, inter-mixed with others. So, from this standpoint, it really doesn’t make sense to pitch ‘the individual’ against ‘society’. Third, and perhaps most basically, is it really true that we always know what is right—social forces or not? If I get lost, for instance, sometimes I have a deep, intuitive feeling about where I need to go, and it’s absolutely spot on. But sometimes I don’t. And sometimes my deep intuitive feeling takes me in totally and utterly the wrong direction, while Google Maps is perfect at getting me there. So surely we do learn, sometimes, some very helpful and healing things from the outside world? As the developmental psychologist Piaget argued, growth and learning comes from both ‘assimilation’ (fitting the external world to what we already know) but also ‘accommodation’ (adapting our ways of seeing the world to what we learn from outside). So to only focus on ‘inner wisdom’, and not the wisdom of others or the outside world, would seem somewhat myopic.

Given these issues, I want to propose another way of thinking about the actualising tendency which, for me, helps to make sense of some of these problems. It’s based on some thinking and research that I did for my latest book, Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social change (Sage, 2019).

The book starts with the assumption, derived from existential philosophy, that human being is essentially directional. This is not entirely dissimilar from the idea of an actualising tendency—indeed, the actualising tendency has been described as directional. However, directionality isn’t defined, per se, in terms of pointing in a healing or necessarily growthful direction. Rather, it refers to the way that, as human beings, we are always ‘on-the-way-to-somewhere’: agentic and acting intelligibility (i.e., in the best ways we know how) towards different possibilities, rather than being sponge- or machine-like ‘things’. Of course, we can have many different directions; and what the framework goes on to suggest is that these directions fit together in a ‘hierarchical structure’: with our strongest, most fundamental directions at the top (for instance, for relatedness, self-worth, or meaning), and lower-order directions as the means by which we try and fulfil these higher-order desires. So, for instance, we might have a desire to find a good TV box set on Netflix (lower-order direction), so that we can spend time with our partner (higher-order direction), so that we can experience relatedness in our lives (highest-order direction).

This distinction between higher- and lower-order directions may be helpful in trying to make sense of the actualising tendency, because what I want to suggest is that, whilst our higher-order directions may be an expression of some inner, self-righting wisdom, our lower-order directions may not necessarily be. So the first part of this is that only we can know what we most fundamentally want and need in our lives: no one, for instance, can tell me that I need faith, or that the most important thing for me in my life is to be powerful and dominant. I know, deep inside, that what matters for me most is intimacy and love and social contribution. And even if I didn’t know it, it’s my right to set those highest-order directions for myself. But when it comes to lower-order directions, the means to get to where we want to be, there is maybe a lot more that we can learn from the world; and a lot more that we might get, intuitively, wrong. So, for instance, my desire to experience relatedness in my life: yup, definitely actualising. My desire to do that by watching TV with my partner: yup, probably so, although there might be better ways towards intimacy. My desire to sit through sit through six seasons of Gossip Girl … Hmm… ‘anti-actualising’ for sure, and this is where I could definitely do with some external guidance and advice.

This directional understanding of the actualising process has clear implications for how we might work with our clients. If all the wisdom is within the client, then the best thing we can do to help them is to really step back from any guidance, advice, or directions; and just allow their own self-righting force to come to the fore. In other words, classical non-directive client-centred therapy. But if we say that, at lower orders, people can get things wrong, then guidance, and directions, and specific therapeutic methods can also have a legitimate place. So, for instance, we might teach a client social skills, so that he or she can get the intimacy that they are yearning for. Or we help them to discover that the best way to overcome a phobia is by facing up to it, through exposure techniques. Here, we’re not telling the person what their highest-order directions are; but we’re helping them learn about the best ways to get there—on the assumption that that wisdom is not always inside. Of course, we can’t all offer these different methods, and the suggestion here is not that we should all become polymaths (or even integrative or eclectic) in how we think and practice. But it points towards the ‘pluralistic’ principle that we should all be as aware as possible of what we can, and cannot, offer clients; and have the knowledge and skills to refer on, as and where appropriate (Cooper & McLeod, 2011).

In summary, an understanding of human beings as self-healing is a great reminder of the incredible creativity and wisdom that clients can have in finding their own answers. But, as a complete model in itself, it can also be limited and lacking in nuance. Most importantly, perhaps, it can mean we overlook times in which clients could really, genuinely, do with some external guidance, to help them towards the things that they most deeply want. From a directional perspective, human beings are still conceptualised as agentic, intelligible beings. But there’s an acknowledgement that, while we may always be striving to do our best, that’s not always the best thing we can be doing. Sometimes, with the best will and reasons in the world, we end up doing things that really mess us up. Hence, while therapists need to really, deeply listen to what it is that clients want—and how it is that they think they can get there—it may also be important to recognise that, at least for some clients, the pathways towards getting there are not always ‘inside’: there’s a place for wisdom without, as well as wisdom within.

References

Bohart, A. C., & Tallman, K. (1999). How Clients Make Therapy Work: The Process of Active Self-Healing. Washington: American Psychological Association.

Cooper, M. (2013). The intrinsic foundations of extrinsic motivations and goals: Towards a unified humanistic theory of wellbeing. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 53(2), 153-171. doi: 10.1177/0022167812453768

Cooper, M., & McLeod, J. (2011). Pluralistic Counselling and Psychotherapy. London: Sage.

Merry, T., & Tudor, K. (2002). Dictionary of Person-Centred Psychology. London: Whurr Publishers.

Rogers, C. R. (1959). A theory of therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships as developed in the client-centered framework. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A Study of Science (Vol. 3, pp. 184-256). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Sheldon, K. M., & Kasser, T. (1998). Pursuing Personal Goals: Skills Enable Progress, but Not all Progress is Beneficial. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24(12), 1319-1331. doi: 10.1177/01461672982412006

[An edited version of this blog post was published as ‘Cooper, M. (2019). What does the 'actualising tendency' actually mean? Therapy Today, 30(7), 42-43’.]