A joke told by my supervisor:
A client speaking to his Rogerian therapist says: “I am so depressed, I just don’t feel like is worth living.” The therapist replies: “I hear you saying that you are in pain and that you are not sure how you will ever feel better.” The client replies by saying: “I really feel I would be better off dead.” To which therapist comments: “You really are at your wits ends about what to do.” The client stands and moves to the window of the office and opening it up, the therapist says observes, “You are showing me how much pain you are in, how desperate you are.” The client then jumps out the window – the therapist says, “Splat.”
The therapeutic approach of Carl Rogers (1995a; 1995b) is one of empathy, listening, acceptance, and minimal intervention. For Rogers, person-centered therapy is based around two related concepts: reflective listening and unconditional acceptance. In this manner, the therapist is able to listen and reflect the client’s narrative in a space where the whole of their experience (affective, content, etc.) is unconditionally accepted by the therapist. This allows the client to become increasingly comfortable with aspects of themselves that may be threatening, shameful, scary, anxiety-causing, etc., which facilitates growth and eventual change. Rogers stated this process as follows:
“I can state the overall hypothesis in one sentence as follows. If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur” (Rogers, 1995a p 33, my emphasis).
Accordingly, two aspects of person-centered therapy are immediately clear. First is that the therapeutic moment is relational, involving an interaction with an “other” and second that this interaction is markedly different than most other types of relationships. While it is generally understood that the therapist’s unconditional acceptance of the client is what makes this relationship different than others, I would like to briefly argue that this is only a part of the story. Instead, I will make the case that it is the reflective listening of the therapist that provides the groundwork for a type of relationship that is therapeutic and helps the client to achieve a greater subjective sense of understanding.
I would like to begin by simply noting that the above quote is preceded by the word “if”. To me, this signifies that the type of relationship that Rogers is talking should not be taken for granted but should instead be seen as a goal that the therapist is working towards. Indeed, in addition to unconditionally accepting the client, Rogers also stressed the importance of having a genuine and real relationship with the client. Accordingly, it seems clear that he was aware that the idea of having a real, unconditionally accepting relationship is paradoxical. The “if” then puts the onus on the therapist to work to create a relationship with the client, where they become a companion who is both idealized (accepting) and real (genuine) to the client. It is worth noting that this is an extension of the typical therapeutic alliance, in that there is not only an alliance but it is of a certain type – idealized and real.
This paradoxical relationship is established through the use of reflective listening, whereby the therapist tries to sensitize him or herself to the phenomenological moment-to-moment experiencing of their client. Importantly, despite the mirroring connotations, reflective listening is not so much a matter of reflecting back a mirror image of the client as it is about altering it in subtle ways. In this manner, the therapist joins the client not only in the construction of their narrative but also helps to deepen and broaden out certain aspects of it, which the client may or may not have been aware of. Accordingly, the “real” quality of the therapist is revealed in their ability to be an “other” to the client who is able to express a full range of human thoughts and emotions in an integrated and comprehensive fashion
One way of seeing this process is through the metaphor of the therapist acting as a scaffold for the client’s subjective experiencing. Through reflective listening the therapist not only embraces the client’s subjectivity but in a manner deepens it by giving voice to other aspects of the client’s experience, which for whatever reason are not being stated. Clearly, the therapist is never able to mirror phenomenologically the experiences of the client but he works to co-construct with the client a richer subjective world. In this manner, the therapist scaffolds – or provides a structure, which both supports and extends the client’s experiencing. That this experience occurs in a space where they feel they will be accepted unconditionally helps to enable them to become more comfortable with their narrative.
What both limits and enables this process is the therapist’s inactivity within other spheres of the client’s experience (as illustrated by the joke above). By existing primarily as a scaffold for the client the therapist is able to maintain the illusion of being both unconditionally accepting and real. Through limiting their activity to reflective listening the therapist lessens their own subjective experiencing giving the illusion of an idealized other. In turn, the client becomes able to more fully develop the reflective qualities of subjective experiencing, which the therapist reflectively supports (via scaffolding). In this manner the client brings increasingly richer subjective experiences to the forefront that receive the support and validation of the therapist.
What differentiates the properties of reflexive listening from those of the therapeutic alliance is the manner in which they are used. For Rogers the increased reflective capacity of the subjective self became the main motivation for change. Accordingly, he was able to limit the activity of the therapist towards working on his or her own unconditional acceptance (no small task!). Other therapies, while stressing the importance of the alliance, augment it through increased interaction with the client. This speaks to the romantic and in my opinion endearing and permanent aspects of Rogers’ view of human growth as able to overcome the distance individual subjectivity.
References:
Rogers, C. R. (1995a). Client Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications, and Theory. Philadelphia, PA: Trans-Atlantic Publications.
Rogers, C. R. (1995b). On Becoming a Person. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.
