ABSTRACT
For person-centred practitioners, dealing with anxiety and panic is not about managing a set of experiences but rather of genuinely and unconditionally accepting the anxious person and responding to them with empathic understanding. As a result, rather than simply learning to manage or suppress anxious behaviour, in the course of person-centred therapy clients are likely to ®nd that whatever is behind the anxiety or panic emerges into awareness and along with them the experiences that have been denied to awareness in order to protect and preserve the person's self-structure. There is then a readjustment in the self-concept in the direction of fuller functioning. This is not necessarily an easy or comfortable process.
