Carl Rogers's Nondirective Approach To Psychotherapy

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The psychotherapies that I most support are a hybrid of two therapies, Carl Rogers’ nondirective Person/Client-Centered Approach and Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Approach. To put it simply, I call it the Person-Centered Cognitive Approach to psychotherapy. A collaboration of these two approaches is what I feel to be the most effective way to help clients achieve homeostasis and growth. I believe the client/therapist relationship is important, and this is why I support the Roger’s Person-Centered therapy and feel it is effective. If the client/therapist relationship is agreeable the atmosphere of the therapeutic relationship will allow for the client to open up, trust the therapist, and allow them to aid the client to move in a constructive direction (Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy). Beck’s Cognitive Therapy also puts great emphasis on a collaborative therapeutic relation, but the reason I support this approach opposed to behavioral approaches is because it says we are what we think (Corsini & Wedding, 2008), and in order for us to be able to change we have to become aware and evaluate our thoughts (Rosner, 2012). Carl Rogers founded the Person-Centered Approach on the idea that client/therapist relationships can only be successful if the therapist’s attitude toward the client is being built on three core conditions: Congruence which is being real and authentic, Unconditional Positive Regard which is being accepting and nonjudgmental of the client, and Empathy which is sensing feelings as well as personal meanings clients are experiencing (Corsini & Wedding, 2008). Other concepts of the Person-Centered Approach include: importance of self-awareness, self- actualization and growth, belief that humans are self-determining ... ... middle of paper ... ...g of the program, halfway through the program, and the end of the program. The evaluation is done three times so the client as well as the therapist can see the progress made, or not made, as they go through the program. Doing the evaluation three times instead of at the beginning and the end of the program may signal the client and therapist that one intervention may not be working and therefore they would have the last third of the program to either revise the intervention or try another intervention. This evaluation/ inventory scale would be a hybrid of BAI: The Beck Anxiety Inventory and the CBOCI: Clark-Beck Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory (Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy); the combination of these two scales would accurately screen for obsessive-compulsive overeating symptoms and measure the intensity of emotional cues which trigger overeating.

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