My Understanding of Person-Centred Counselling Essay

Words: 2817
Pages: 12

Write an essay of your own choice, e.g. “My understanding of person-centred counselling”. Relate and refer to your own life experience and/or your work context.

I am on a life-long path as a Skilled Helper (Egan) with some training in Integrative Psychotherapy. I am currently striving to integrate Carl Rogers’ ideas and practices into my existing knowledge framework whilst attempting to see previously identified phenomena through new eyes. My aim is to use this knowledge to influence my practice as co-creator of therapeutic relationships. My principal aims in this essay are to define some of the basic ideas of Rogers, to then describe how this links and informs his notions of a joint therapeutic endeavour through his Core
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He no longer trusted himself to judge correctly and can be said to have an External Locus of Evaluation. The harsh conditions of early relationships had created in him an unbalanced reliance on other people.

James’ view on the world became frustrated and distorted. He knew that honesty was valued and so were good school marks, but he somehow concluded that he simply wasn’t as loved and cherished as his brother, and no matter what he did he would not fundamentally be worth anything. His parents’ inconsistent style resulted in James not being able to connect with his achievements and celebrate the fruits of his intelligence. As an adult he had a constant drive to continue to achieve and yet his gains left him empty and unhappy. We might also look here to Martin Seligmann’s ideas of depression being “learned helplessness”: resulting from the absence of control over the outcome of punishments.

It was interesting that the adult James was still acting as though he was seeking his father’s approval. He was driving himself forward into more prestigious roles without any increase in satisfaction. Sigmund Freud saw this as “repetition compulsion” in which forgotten repressed traumas are acted out without self-awareness in an expression of the Pleasure Principle: to restore an earlier, happier time. Both Freud and Rogers, in some ways share the view that the client is motivated to self-heal: driven by a biological force. Freud said that an instinct is