I was a teenage Rogerian

Before I went to Boston I wrote the most heartfelt, shattered disclosure I have ever communicated. I wrote as though lost in an endless winter. It was honest and it was healing. I have never been so open in my life. And, having said it, I'm not sure it is still true.

This is a blog about Carl Rogers and his insights. It is also about deep changes in me.

I was barely eighteen when I became a telephone counsellor. They accepted me into the program, and I was the youngest ever to graduate in the State. I think you have to be 21 now. So I guess my record is likely to stand. And so at that impressionable age I became indoctrinated into the many ways of Rogerian therapy.

When Behaviourism was in full swing, it was in competition (commercially) with the Freudians.  At that time, a 'Third Force' emerged which was predominately championed by Carl Rogers. He was an astonishing pioneer of Client Centred Therapy, which is influential across many disciplines to this day.

Rogerian therapy placed the client at the centre of treatment. The practitioner was expected to facilitate the development of insight for the client. Rogers is celebrated for his empathy, for active listening, for mirrored repetition of what the client said. That's right. He has contributed some of the most annoying behaviors that counsellors of Western society have evidenced in the past forty years. Carl, more than anyone else in the history of counselling, has pissed people off.

How does that make you feel?

I wish I had never heard that phase and I would sell a kidney to be assured I'll never hear it again. It is the most abused, cliched, insincere and disrespectful non-phrase in the counselling dialogue. It is anathema to true listening and respectful behaviour. And Carl Rogers started it. I'm surprised I still love him, despite his sins. Perhaps I have unconditional positive regard for him.

I was taught to listen completely to people, to offer empathy and positive regard. I was taught cues to indicate listening, and I endured endless rounds of roleplay where I was expected to mirror statements back to people who weren't being themselves, parrot-fashion. So they knew I understood them (or who they were pretending to be). The idea was that by getting people to see how congruent and involved I was, they could gain insight into their own incongruent and undifferentiated lives.

It was an approach which sometimes changed the season for a client's psyche.

The Rogerian approach is actually pretty damned good. Well, I think so, anyway, but then I came to the Client Centred Approach a therapeutic virgin and it held me gently through the process. Lots of other people still use it faithfully, and it does seem to achieve results. My intention, though, is to tip you off within this post as to WHY it is good. And I believe a lot of people get that wrong. So let's briefly wander back past the insights of Freud and Fairbairn.

The talking cure. That was the intent of psychoanalysis. People talk about stuff and they gain insight into themselves. From that insight, they change and evolve and get better. Fairbairn extended the model to describe people as talking constantly about how they expected others to see them. The poor buggers couldn't see themselves because the mirror seemed flawed. ('Can't you see who I am?') What Rogers did was to sit a sycophant in front of the client and mirror back the perfect agreeable nodding friendliness of someone who sees me as I want to be seen.

People think that Rogers' genius was to bring love into the equation. Where Freud was making power-based assertions about sexual urges repressed into unconscious sublimation, and Skinner was co-ercing people into good behaviour usng a cattle-prod, Rogers offered unconditional positive regard. A little bit of love to soothe the soul and send someone out into the world just that little bit stronger. It is a nice, caring idea. And it doesn't work. Well, I don't think it does, ayway.

I have experienced a lot of Rogerian-based therapy over the years. Take a moment to reflect upon most of the 18 year olds you know, and whether their life experience would see them trained up as a counsellor. At 18 I had had enough crap to deal with that I got accepted into the training. I sometimes look back upon my life and wonder if God is a soap opera writer. A bad one. The evidence seems to fit the theory so far. Some day I hope to have words with the producer. Although maybe the problem has been in the direction. Too many windswept moors, too much snow.  Winter overkill.  In any case, lots of people have asked me how I feel about that.

In time I came to divide Rogerians up into craftspeople and artisans.

The craftspeople learned the skills and reproduced the behaviours. A bit like learning to be Michelangelo by churning out cheap copies of David. Lots of 'How does that make you feel?', and the obligatory glazed-eyed listening posture. Head on side. Wait for the encouraging throat-noise and, in a minute, something beginning: 'So what I'm hearing you say is...' Some of them are very good at it. But their empathy never reaches their eyes, and ultimately their unconditional positive regard is so very vomit-inducingly fake.

But oh, the artisans. Those people who get it. They look at me and I feel loved. They wait for me to tell them about me. And I do. I tell them what a wounded soul I am, with big dramas and big problems and a big history with pain that just won't go away. I tell them how the world ought to have been nicer to me, and how Charley was my brother and shoulda looked out for me a little bit. I coulda been a contender. And like that. And the artisan watches me with care and attention as though what I am saying seems true and I have every right to believe it.

And in that moment the way I see myself is being reflected back to me.

And in that moment I achieve insight.

And in that moment change begins.

You see, I believe that Carl Rogers' contribution to counselling is not the idea of unconditional positive regard. In my work there have been occasions when I have sat and listened to paedophiles. Some behaviour a sane person ought not to accept or encourage. In one of his books, I vividly recall Rogers talking about losing weight and saying that while a person doesn't admit what they're like they cannot change. Until a person looks themselves in the mirror and genuinely says: I am overweight, or I have sexual issues, or I am dysfunctionally in love... well, until they admit their problem, they're running away from reality and they cannot change. Carl then went on to say (and I wish I could find the passage!) that once a person does accept themselves through insight into what they're truly like, change is then inevitable.

Inevitable, people. Like the progress of seasons.

I look back over my pre-Boston blog post and I see someone who feels the universe has treated him unfairly. He loved Julieanne and always will and she was the only one for him. And at the time it was true. So off I went to Boston. And change was inevitable.

I've had more texts and I have had phone calls from Julieanne recently. She needed stuff and I sorted some of it for her. Her last text thanked me and said she was doing ok. And it struck me, reading it, that she was. She'll be all right. And so will I. Somehow, in some meaningful way that I don't understand, I have let her go. I love her deeply, but I am no longer 'in love' with her. Somehow, I'm waking from the dream.

Carl Rogers found a way to teach people how they might articulate their own truth. He did this by encouraging people to place the client at the centre of the therapeutic process, and by teaching therapists the skills to get out of the way of a person's natural tendency for self-insight and adaptive change.

I have adapted. I am changed. It was a privilege to have my heart broken. I don't think, having felt such love, that I will ever be the same again. Like the velveteen rabbit in the story, what is left of me is content to be as my experiences have made me. I'm richer for my poverty. And I can start to feel the season changing. There may well be another spring.

At its heart, Rogers' approach was a behavioural technique which commercialised Freud's greatest contribution to psychotherapy. This made the third force a movement which offered a creative tension to the discipline of psychology. It gave Psychoanalysts and Behaviourists something to think about - because the Rogerian system got results.

Rogers called for outcomes research which paved the way for the second wave of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, of which more next time.

In closing, then, I would have to say that my bower-bird habits as a therapist contain a big dollop of Rogerian approaches. I try to be congruent, to show my clients I am truly listening and that I have empathy for their situation. I try to ensure they achieve insight into their own circumstance.

But I do it because Fairbairn's housekeeper loved him.

And I do it because I'm not in love with Julieanne the way I was.

I was indeed a teenage Rogerian, and I have kept a firm hold on some of his approaches because they enable a heartfelt, shattered disclosure. Which is what we need, sometimes, if we are to achieve any level of contentment at all.