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The History of person Centred Counselling

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The History of Person Centred Counselling Person Centred Counselling was developed by Carl R. Rogers (1902-1987), a leading American psychologist who was along with Abraham Maslow a major theorist of Humanistic Therapy which developed in the 1950. It is sometimes called the third force distinct from psychoanalyzes and behaviourism. It proposed that therapy could be simpler, warmer and more optimistic and that the client himself has the solution to his difficulties and can access this deeper …show more content…

As we grow and become aware of ourselves as being distinct from others, we start to look for approval and acceptance outside of ourselves. Our locus of evaluation shifts from being internal to becoming external. Children need positive regard from important others in their life in order to develop positive self regard. Our conceptual construction of ourselves and the world around us is made up of the experiences we have with important others, as well as the beliefs handed down through family and community. Often they impose on us conditions of worth, as for example parents who only acknowledge a child if he/she brings good grades from school. The child learns to connect its worth to successful test scores since this is what will gain the approval of parents. The more we have to strive to gain the approval of others the stronger these conditions of worth that have been imposed on us become and the more we become distrustful of our own organismic experiencing. Yet it is believed that this is counterproductive for the individual as Rogers believed that the organism will naturally move in the direction of growth and self actualization. He maintained that the greater the unconditional positive regard of parents and fewer conditions of worth a child grows up with the greater the psychological adjustment. “The human organism, it is argued , can essentially be relied upon to provide the individual with trustworthy messages, and this is

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