Nigel 
February 26th, 2010
The rawest form of this approach is often referred to as person-centred counselling. The guy who started it was Carl Rogers, a remarkably able therapist. He believed that we each already have the resources to solve our personal problems, and the counsellor shouldn’t interfere by telling the client what to do. In his book ‘On Becoming A Person’ he says this (I rephrase slightly) :
If the counsellor works at our relationship in such a way that I experience his genuineness, transparency, and warm acceptance of me as an individual, and in such a way that I realise he is sensitively seeing my world as I see it then I will become more of a person, understand myself better, function more effectively, gain confidence, be more understanding and accepting of myself and others, be more able to cope with life, and move closer to being who I want to be.
(The book was first published in 1961 and is still readily available.)
Rogers’ theory is: that’s all the counsellor does, although it has to be genuine. If it is then in my experience this really does make a difference. One problem is that even given this rare type of support I still may not be able to sort out the mess my head is in. Another problem is that many counsellors find they are unable to accept clients as they are. I’ve tried working with at least one student who I simply could not accept or prize as he was – and I failed to be of any real help.
Some counsellors confuse the need to be ‘professional’ with the need to show none of these feelings, and as a result their work is far less effective.
The founders of NLP (Richard Bandler and John Grinder) included Carl Rogers in a small group of highly effective counsellors they chose to study. They were ignoring how each therapist claimed to be achieving their results and instead observed with great care what each person was actually doing. Apparently Rogers was seen to be doing more than he said. For instance when clarifying for someone what their options were his body language indicated a preference – even though he was not aware of it.
Rogers’ basic approach, his underpinning attitude to each client, is incredibly powerful on its own. My own feeling, though, is that it should be the background against which other techniques can be used as and when appropriate.
On the other hand I’ve worked with two psycho-dynamic counsellors, and by far the most effective was the one showing very little emotion but having by far the greater training and experience in the method. She came across as caring but professional. Not cold. The other was warm and accepting but not all that helpful.
Conclusions
I aim to be genuine with everyone I meet. For instance if I have nothing good to say I keep quiet, and only when I identify something I believe is worth complimenting do I comment. I try to accept everyone warmly – we each have a hard battle to fight, we each make mistakes. This can be difficult, so I work at seeing the other person’s world through their eyes. I seem to enjoy life much more as a result.
I would prefer a counsellor to be able to communicate at least some of this to the client. But sometimes the nature of the problem requires an expert in some particular approach, and you may have to take what you can get.
An anecdote
Some time back I heard of an experienced senior medical doctor who was taken ill and admitted to hospital for tests. He describes his feelings and thoughts when his consultant surgeon sat down beside the bed and told him he had terminal cancer. I quote his approximate words from memory:
“At that moment the one thing I wanted more than anything else was human contact. I looked at him wishing he would grip my shoulder or hold my hand, but he just sat there. He was behaving in the professional way Doctors are trained to behave: don’t get emotionally involved, never touch the patient except for clear professional purposes.
“But I longed for him to reach out and make human contact. And in that instant I looked back at my entire career behaving professionally and knew that sometimes I should have stretched the boundaries.”
It means a lot to a homeless person when someone pauses, smiles, says hello, and makes even the faintest attempt to understand what it feels like to be homeless.