Techniques of Humanistic Approach

Humanistic psychology emerged as a third force during the late 1950s in the United States as an alternative to the deterministic orientations of behaviorism and psychoanalysis It emphasizes on personal Worth of Individual, creative and active nature of human beings, self awareness, free will, their ability to reach full potentials if given opportunities and self-actualization

The humanistic perspective is not applied universally, perhaps because of its emphasis on the individual and its optimistic view of human potential.

Person-centered therapy, which is also known as client-centered, non-directive, or Rogerian therapy, is an approach to counseling and psychotherapy that places much of the responsibility for the treatment process on the client, with the therapist taking a nondirective role.

Rogers’s main contribution to the counseling field is that he opposed to administer techniques and gave the notion that the quality of the therapeutic relationship is the primary agent of growth in the client. (Coray,      ) According to Rogers, techniques do not function independently from the person to the counselor.

Techniques of Humanistic Approach:

In the person centered framework the techniques are:

1. Listening,
2. Accepting,
3. Respecting,
4. Understanding and
5. Responding.

The techniques must be an honest expression of the therapist, they cannot be used self-consciously. (Thorne, 1992)

Some other techniques of Humanistic Therapy are:

• Be Present:

William offman called it H-E, humanistic-existentialism, and he believed that the personal encounter between him and his client was important. Be Present was the essence of his approach. What the client was willing to do in the therapy moment would be an appliqué on that client’s life.

The humanistic therapist is present and in the moment, energetically and philosophically, with each client.

• Act Responsibly:

According to humanistic view, humanistic therapist is responsible to be honest and confront the client in a non-threatening yet unambiguous way. Rather than lecturing, the therapist presumes and encourages responsibility.

• Providing a stimulating environment:

In a humanistic sense, everything is a part of life: color, music, noise, and even unavoidable interruption. Everything that happens is seen as part of the therapy.

• Look for client code-words:

     

      Therapist looks at he client’s own remedy.

• Provides a safe environment:

In humanistic therapy, the client’s feelings of safety are paramount. It is often the case that a client’s reasons for being in therapy are at least influenced by feeling threatened, having a sense of fear of loosing a person, health, freedom, love.

Having them visualize a familiar safe place in their personal history can enhance a client’s safety.

For constructive personality change to occur, it is necessary that these conditions exist and continue over a period of time:

• Two persons are in psychological contact.
• The first, whom we shall term the client, is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable or anxious.
• The second person, whom we shall term the therapist, is congruent or integrated in the relationship.
• The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard for the client.
• The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client's internal frame of reference and endeavors to communicate this experience to the client.
• The communication to the client of the therapist's empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard is to a minimal degree achieved.
• No other conditions are necessary. If these six conditions exist, and continue over a period of time, this is sufficient. The process of constructive personality change will follow.

A Relationship:

The first condition specifies that a minimal relationship, a psychological contact, must exist.

All that is intended by this first condition is to specify that the two people are to some degree in contact, that each makes some perceived difference in the experiential field of the other. Probably it is sufficient if each makes some "subceived" difference, even though the individual may not be consciously aware of this impact. Thus it might be difficult to know whether a catatonic patient perceives a therapist's presence as making a difference to him–a difference of any kind–but it is almost certain that at some organic level he does sense this difference.

Except in such a difficult borderline situation as that just mentioned, it would be relatively easy to define this condition in operational terms and thus determine, from a hard-boiled research point of view, whether the condition does, or does not, exist. The simplest method of determination involves simply the awareness of both client and therapist. If each is aware of being in personal or psychological contact with the other, then this condition is met.

This first condition of therapeutic change is such a simple one that perhaps it should be labeled an assumption or a precondition in order to set it apart from those that follow.

Without it, however, the remaining items would have no meaning, and that is the reason for including it.

The State of the Client:

It was specified that it is necessary that the client be "in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable or anxious."

Incongruence is a basic construct in the theory we have been developing. It refers to a discrepancy between the actual experience of the organism and the self picture of the individual insofar as it represents that experience. Thus a student may experience, at a total or organismic level, a fear of the university and of examinations which are given on the third floor of a certain building, since these may demonstrate a fundamental inadequacy in him. Since such a fear of his inadequacy is decidedly at odds with his concept of himself, this experience is represented (distortedly) in his awareness as an unreasonable fear of climbing stairs in this building, or any building, and soon an unreasonable fear of crossing the open campus. Thus there is a fundamental discrepancy between the experienced meaning of the situation as it registers in his organism and the symbolic representation of that experience in awareness in such a way that it does not conflict with the picture he has of himself. In this case to admit a fear of inadequacy would contradict the picture he holds of himself; to admit incomprehensible fears does not contradict his self concept. ( Chodorkoff, B. 1954, pg.508-512).

Another instance would be the mother who develops vague illnesses whenever her only son makes plans to leave home. The actual desire is to hold on to her only source of satisfaction. To perceive this in awareness would be inconsistent with the picture she holds of herself as a good mother. Illness, however, is consistent with her self concept, and the experience is symbolized in this distorted fashion. Thus again there is a basic incongruence between the self as perceived (in this case as an ill mother needing attention) and the actual experience (in this case the desire to hold on to her son).

When the individual has no awareness of such incongruence in himself, then he is merely vulnerable to the possibility of anxiety and disorganization. Some experience might occur so suddenly or so obviously that the incongruence could not be denied. Therefore, the person is vulnerable to such a possibility. ( Chodorkoff, B. 1954, pg.508-512).

The Therapist's Genuineness in the Relationship:

The third condition is that the therapist should be, within the confines of this relationship, a congruent, genuine, integrated person. It means that within the relationship he is freely and deeply himself, with his actual experience accurately represented by his awareness of himself. It is the opposite of presenting a facade, either knowingly or unknowingly.

It is not necessary (nor is it possible) that the therapist be a paragon who exhibits this degree of integration, of wholeness, in every aspect of his life. It is sufficient that he is accurately himself in this hour of this relationship, that in this basic sense he is what he actually is, in this moment of time. ( Chodorkoff, B. 1954, pg.508-512).

It should be clear that this includes being himself even in ways which are not regarded as ideal for psychotherapy. His experience may be "I am afraid of this client" or "My attention is so focused on my own problems that I can scarcely listen to him." If the therapist is not denying these feelings to awareness, but is able freely to be them (as well as being his other feelings), then the condition we have stated is met.

It would take us too far afield to consider the puzzling matter as to the degree to which the therapist overtly communicates this reality in him to the client. Certainly the aim is not for the therapist to express or talk out his own feelings, but primarily that he should not be deceiving the client as to himself. ( Chodorkoff, B. 1954, pg.508-512).

Unconditional Positive Regard:

To the extent that the therapist finds himself experiencing a warm acceptance of each aspect of the client's experience as being a part of that client, he is experiencing unconditional positive regard.( Standal, S. 1954).

It means that there are no conditions of acceptance, no feeling of "I like you only if you are thus and so." It means a "prizing" of the person, as Dewey has used that term. It is at the opposite pole from a selective evaluating attitude–"You are bad in these ways, good in those." It involves as much feeling of acceptance for the client's expression of negative, "bad," painful, fearful, defensive, abnormal feelings as for his expression of "good," positive, mature, confident, social feelings, as much acceptance of ways in which he is inconsistent as of ways in which he is consistent. It means a caring for the client, but not in a possessive way or in such a way as simply to satisfy the therapist's own needs. It means a caring for the client as a separate person, with permission to have his own feelings, his own experiences. ( Standal, S. 1954). One client describes the therapist as "fostering my possession of my own experience . . . that [this] is my experience and that I am actually having it: thinking what I think, feeling what I feel, wanting what I want, fearing what I fear: no 'ifs,' 'buts,' or 'not really.'" This is the type of acceptance which is hypothesized as being necessary if personality change is to occur. ( Standal, S. 1954).

Like the two previous conditions, this fourth condition is a matter of degree, as immediately becomes apparent if we attempt to define it in terms of specific research operations. ((Fiedler. F, 1950 , pg.436-445))

To the extent that items expressive of unconditional positive regard are sorted as characteristic of the relationship by both the therapist and the observers, unconditional positive regard might be said to exist. Such items might include statements of this order: "I feel no revulsion at anything the client says": "I feel neither approval nor disapproval of the client and his statements–simply acceptance"; "I feel warmly toward the client–toward his weaknesses and problems as well as his potentialities"; "I am not inclined to pass judgment on what the client tells me"; "I like the client." ((Fiedler. F, 1950, pg.436-445))

Empathy:

The fifth condition is that the therapist is experiencing an accurate, empathic understanding of the client's awareness of his own experience. To sense the client's private world as if it were your own, but without ever losing the "as if" quality–this is empathy, and this seems essential to therapy. To sense the client's anger, fear, or confusion as if it were your own, yet without your own anger, fear, or confusion getting bound up in it, is the condition we are endeavoring to describe. ((Fiedler. F, 1950, pg.436-445)) When the client's world is this clear to the therapist, and he moves about in it freely, then he can both communicate his understanding of what is clearly known to the client and can also voice meanings in the client's experience of which the client is scarcely aware. As one client described this second aspect: "Every now and again, with me in a tangle of thought and feeling, screwed up in a web of mutually divergent lines of movement, with impulses from different parts of me, and me feeling the feeling of its being all too much and suchlike–then whomp, just like a sunbeam thrusting its way through cloudbanks and tangles of foliage to spread a circle of light on a tangle of forest paths, came some comment from you. ((Fiedler. F, 1950 , pg.436-445))

The Client's Perception of the Therapist:

The final condition as stated is that the client perceives, to a minimal degree, the acceptance and empathy which the therapist experiences for him. Unless some communication of these attitudes has been achieved, then such attitudes do not exist in the relationship as far as the client is concerned, and the therapeutic process could not, by our hypothesis, be initiated.

Since attitudes cannot be directly perceived, it might be somewhat more accurate to state that therapist behaviors and words are perceived by the client as meaning that to some degree the therapist accepts and understands him.