Revising the Person-Centered Approach
Pushing on the Envelope, but not very Hard
by
Book Details
About the Book
The person-centered approach to counseling, psychotherapy, and education is about openness to change. This book is about encouraging change in the person-centered approach. A good theory and practice has to be flexible enough to allow a new generation to put its own slants on it. This works seeks to question the jargon of the approach such as unconditional positive regard, nondirectiveness, and nonjudgmentalness. However, it also offers replacements to those terms. It is also about hoping other thinkers and practitioners in the discipline will present their own ideas and thoughts about what it means to be person-centered, while being within the domain of what has come to be called Rogerian.
About the Author
In 1983, after several years of superficially viewing the work of Carl Rogers, I began working on my Ph.D in counseling at the University of Georgia. I was fortunate to take a required course on theories of counseling and psychotherapy with Jerold Bozarth, Ph.D. He was solidly anchored in the person_centered approach introduced by Carl Rogers and his colleagues. Putting theories side by side, so to speak, I found I was most in sync with the person_centered approach. Studying under a person-centered theorist/practitioner who believed profoundly in the approach opened the door to further exploration.
I found the attitudinal qualities of empathy, acceptance, and genuineness therapeutic and healing for people.
However, I questioned such concepts as unconditional positive regard, nondirectiveness, and nonjudgmentalness. I felt adherents were being asked to be more than human. I have come to trust the real therapist who is accepting of positive, negative, and neutral regard, who understands there is a deliberate choice to maintaining the attitudinal qualities of this approach, and who realizes that he or she is indeed just like everybody else in being judgmental.
I choose to self_publish. I don’t want some editor rewriting the materials I put together as they assume what readers will like. The reader determines that. I only submit the material when it says what I want to say. I hope readers will like it, but they may not. Therefore my awkwardness and my smoothness will be available to the reader as it is available to me as a person. The reader gets the writer that I truly am, blemishes and thoughtfulness.