Carl Rogers developed a hypothesis that when certain conditions* in a relationship exist then therapeutic personality change takes place. What was he pointing towards? What was he inviting us to investigate?

When you practice as a person-centred therapist you consciously engage in a discipline and process of developing your capacity to be present and aware with life as it unfolds right now in front of you. You learn to rest in awareness in trust of life, rather than compulsively acting from fear or tension. You do not need for anything in particular to happen or not happen. You act when necessary to meet the actual requirements of the present moment in recognition that you are part of life and contribute to it. You recognise that there are consequences to every action and non-action and you accept those consequences and are willing to stay open and learn.

This approach to therapy has been described as radical and revolutionary. It is radical insofar as it is an approach which is based in acceptance of life the way it is. It is radical in that when we practise, we are not trying to change anything at all. We are not buying into a belief that we are the ones who know best what life should be or should not be. We observe that life, by its very nature, is change at this material level of existence. It is a well known saying that the only thing that is certain is that everything changes. If we recognise this then we know that change happens by itself, if we let it, if we let go. The key is that we are not outside of life itself: we are part of life. There is nothing and no-one that can be excluded from this one whole. We are part of it whether we like it or not, and what we do, how we think, how we behave, how we feel, how we relate to how we feel, the way we understand what is going on, has effects that we cannot escape; what we do, our attitudes, our motivations, our agenda’s, our wishes, our deep desires and not so deep ones, all affect everything. So as a practitioner we take full responsibility for the part we play in the unfolding of life. We are open. We listen. We act, best we can, in the present. We listen. We are willing to learn and we are willing to let go.

Now, I like a method. Without a method how do you go about organising yourself in relation to life? Remember that science is a method for investigating life and how it works. As a species we have designed all sorts of methods for achieving various things or for investigating something. Carl Rogers designed a method for approaching relating in a way that was consistent with his observations about life: that it is always up to something, it is going in a direction by itself, a direction of exploring and fulfilling its potentials naturally in connection with all of the rest of life. Rogers observed in his work with people that, under certain relational conditions*, where people were heard and could hear themselves with acceptance they let go of the past and arrived more in the present. In doing so they were able to know what was required in this moment rather than rely on an external source for guidance. Rogers described this by saying that the ‘organism tends to actualise’. He also described this tendency at the universal level as the Formative Tendency: the whole Universe, of which each individual is a part, is going in a direction which is natural to itself.

Now, mostly human beings want things to be in one way and not another; humans like some aspects of life and do not like other aspects of life. Humans have preferences and largely each human being is trying to get life to go in the direction they want life to go in according to their own (limited) understanding of life and their judgements about how life should or should not be. Humans tend to see themselves as separate from the rest of life and try to impose a direction, as if from the outside, according to the individual’s own particular agendas. This imposing a direction on life as if from the outside puts us into conflict with life itself. This conflict with life Rogers calls ‘incongruence’ and it gives rise to our tension and dis-ease. We fight with life, try to avoid life, and collapse in the face of what life brings to us. Life lived this way is especially hard work, however, it is the way we learn about how life works. We can learn to cooperate with life, to align ourselves with life going in its natural direction. We can cultivate an accepting attitude towards what is happening in the present; we can cultivate our awareness and learn to be present actually where we are. We can learn to live in the present. We can practise letting go. We can learn to relax. We can learn to be here.

This is the practice of the therapist. What we then have is an alive situation with a therapist working with themselves in every moment, bringing an accepting attitude to everything that is arising and working with that. The client gets to meet life through relating with the therapist. The therapist gets to meet life through relating with the client. Both have work to do. From my point of view the work that the therapist is doing, if they practice the conditions of Unconditional Positive Regard and Congruence, is a spiritual practice by virtue of the practising of being present and aware.

* The conditions that Rogers described that he hypothesised that if present sufficiently and for enough of the time are these:

• Psychological Contact (connection)

• Client is in a state of incongruence (conflict, confined, restricted, conditioned, conditional)

• Therapist is in a state of congruence (aware, not in conflict with the flow of life as it is happening in the present, allowing, alert, awake, accepting, free to be with what is and free to act spontaneously in the present, non-defensive, intuitive, naturally creative.). This describes the therapist’s capacity to be with life as it is. This is the practice of the therapist and they fulfil this condition to a greater or lesser extent).

• Therapist Unconditional Positive Regard (unconditional with respect to life, inclusive, allowing all to be there, not resisting, holding on to or judging: not dividing life up. Aware.). This is the practice of the therapist. The therapist is dedicated to developing this capacity within themselves so that more and more can be included in their awareness (they more and more let go of the need to defend against life). The therapist has no personal agenda, or rather they are dedicated to becoming aware of any personal agenda that exists in their mind. Relationship is a practice.

• Therapist Empathic Understanding (Perceiving and accurately understanding the client’s living world – their experience, the sense they make of it and their reactions to it).

• Client experiences being received by the therapist; the client experiences being understood and like the therapist gets them. More than that, even aspects of themselves that they barely are aware of, are somehow being received by the therapist – and it’s okay!