ABSTRACT
The session was due to begin but Carol had not arrived. Ginny was looking at the clock and wondering what may have happened. Of course, it was pointless speculating, she didn’t know and all she could do was wait. She hoped that it was simply a delay and that Carol was going to attend. She was aware that Carol had given herself a goal of writing about her feelings and she wondered whether that might have made things more difficult or problematic. But then, she also knew that she trusted her to do what she needed to do and whatever had happened during the week she would continue to offer her the warm acceptance that was so important in person-centred counselling. Unconditional positive regard – she pondered on what it meant for her. Her mind drifted into the idea, presented by Bozarth (Bozarth and Wilkins, 2001, p. xii) that ‘unconditional positive regard is the necessary and sufficient condition for constructive change as presented in Rogers’ theory of therapy’, and that ‘genuineness and empathic understanding are viewed as two contextual attitudes for the primary condition of change; i.e. unconditional positive regard’ (Bozarth, 2001, p. 173).
