ABSTRACT
Sanders (2013: 19–20) notes that many aspects of person-centred theory and how it is practised accord with newer approaches to working with people experiencing severe and enduring mental distress (‘psychosis’). Sanders compares the person-centred approach to recently developed theory and practice and states that (more or less word for word):
The actualising tendency and idea that humans have inherent organismic wisdom overlaps with the idea of encouraging clients to use self-coping strategies and the CBT technique of coping strategy enhancement (Tarrier et al. 1990). This accords with the process in person-centred therapy by which clients are freed of the constraints of their actualising tendencies to enable their natural abilities to manage their own recovery (see Point 9).
The actively acceptant non-judgemental position of person-centred therapists (see Points 19, 80) chimes with the work of (e.g.) Romme and Escher (2000) on accepting voices, hallucinations and other unusual ideation. In person-centred therapy, all experiences, behaviour, affect and ideation have meaning (see, for example, Points 36, 91 and 96). Person-centred therapists strive to empathically understand their clients’ experiences (see Points 20, 28 and 274 82). This in turn often reveals implicit meanings hitherto out of the client’s awareness.
There is no categorisation of experience or behaviour in person-centred therapy and thus no therapist-directed distinction between types or degrees of behaviour beyond those clients apply to themselves (see Point 32). This echoes (for example) Bentall (2003) who demonstrated the continuity between normal and abnormal experience. It also demonstrates how person-centred therapy has been a model of anti-stigmatising practice and has ceaselessly drawn attention to the clinical, social and cultural iatrogenic nature of diagnosis (see Point 37) for over seventy years (see, for example, Sanders 2005, 2006a; Shlien 1989).
Mosher (1999: 37) described the ‘treatment’ at the original Soteria House as ‘24 hour a day application of interpersonal phenomenologic interventions’. Since person-centred therapy is the premier phenomenological therapy method (see Point 4), Mosher’s description is more than a fair approximation to much contemporary person-centred practice.
Rogers (1959) was explicit in his definition of empathy, making a pointed distinction between the actual (client) and the reflected (therapist) experience (‘as if’ it were the client’s, without losing the ‘as if’). This is analogous to recent ideas in attachment theory, for example, the work of Fonagy (e.g. Allen et al. 2008) regarding ‘marked mirroring’. The person-centred therapeutic relationship as an integrated experience meets the criteria for the type of relationship deemed important for initiating and sustaining mentalising in clinical practice.
