ADDIS ABABA UNIVERSITY

College of Educational and Behavioral Studies

SCHOOL OF PSYCHOLOGY

Advanced Counseling Theories and Practices

Summary on: Person-Centered Theory

Cognitive Behavior Theory

Existential Theory

Gestalt Theory Therapy

By: Kassahun Wondu---GES 9679/16

 Person-Centered Theory
Founder: Carl Rogers. Key figure: Natalie Rogers. This approach was developed during
the 1940s as a nondirective reaction against psychoanalysis. Based on a subjective view
of human experiencing, it places faith in and gives responsibility to the client in dealing
with problems and concerns.
He showed a questioning stance, a deep openness to change, and the courage to
forge into unknown territory both as a person and as a professional. In writing about his
early years, Rogers (1961) recalled his family atmosphere as characterized by close and
warm relationships but also by strict religious standards. Play was discouraged, and the
virtues of the Protestant ethic were extolled. His boyhood was somewhat lonely, and he
pursued scholarly interests instead of social ones. Rogers was an introverted person,
and he spent a lot of time
reading and engaging in imaginative activity and reflection.

View of human nature

Rogers firmly maintained that people are trustworthy, resourceful, capable of self-
understanding and self-direction, able to make constructive changes, and able to live
effective and productive lives.

Rogers maintained that three therapist attributes create a growth-promoting climate፡

(1) congruence (genuineness, or realness), (2) unconditional positive regard
(acceptance and caring), and (3) accurate empathic understanding (an ability to
deeply grasp the subjective world of another person).
The actualizing tendency, a directional process of striving toward realization,
fulfillment, autonomy, and self-determination. Individual has an inherent capacity to
move away from maladjustment and toward psychological health and growth.
The person-centered approach reject:
(1) the role of the therapist as the authority who knows best and
(2) the passive client who merely follows the beliefs of the therapist.

Causes of Symptoms
A feeling of basic helplessness, powerlessness, and an inability to make decisions or
effectively direct their own lives. Clients come to the counselor in a state of
incongruence i.e a discrepancy
exists between their self-perception and their experience in reality. This result in
anxiety and personal vulnerability, which can provide the necessary motivation to enter
therapy.

Assessment strategies

Person-centered therapists generally do not find traditional assessment and diagnosis

to be useful because these procedures encourage an external and expert perspective
on the client. What matters is not how the counselor assesses the client but the client’s
self-assessment.

Goals of Counseling
aims toward the client achieving a greater degree of independence and integration.
the goal is to assist clients in their growth process so clients can better cope with
problems as they identify them. Increased self-acceptance and self-esteem.
provide a climate conducive to helping the individual strive toward self-actualization
 Roles of the counselor and client
Rooted in their ways of being and attitudes. Therapists use themselves as an instrument
of change.
Encountering clients in a person-to-person way. Explore the full range of their
experience, feelings, beliefs, behavior. It is clients who heal themselves.

Nature and importance of counseling relationship

“Significant positive personality change does not occur except in a relationship”
This hypothesis is stated thusly:
1. Two persons are in psychological contact.
2. The client is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable or anxious.
3. The therapist is congruent (real or genuine) in the relationship.
4. The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard for the client.
5. The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client’s internal
frame of reference and endeavors to communicate this experience to the client.
6. The communication to the client of the therapist’s empathic understanding and
unconditional positive regard is to a minimal degree achieved.
Client–therapist relationship is characterized by equality.

Techniques and strategies

No techniques are basic to the practice of person-centered therapy.
Techniques are not attempts at “doing anything” to a client.
What is essential for clients’ progress is the therapist’s presence.
Listening, accepting, respecting, understanding, and responding must be honest
expressions by the therapist.

Strengths/ Limitations
Comprehensive review of the research on person-centered therapy: increased
understanding, greater self-exploration, and improved self-concepts.
Rogers’s basic hypothesis gave rise to a great deal of research and debate in the field of
psychotherapy,
Its impact on the field of human relations with diverse cultural groups
It has been incorporated in various countries and cultures.
Particularly appropriate for working with diverse client populations
MI is a culturally sensitive approach that can be effective across population domains,
including
gender, age, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.

There are some shortcomings;

Many clients want more structure than this approach provides.
Some clients seek professional help, because of certain cultural messages, it may be as
a last resort. Difficult to translate the core therapeutic conditions into actual practice in
certain cultures.
Extols the value of an internal locus of evaluation, may be viewed as being selfish in a
culture

Personal reflection
In my opinion, this theory seems great in that it tries to solve problem based on the will
and interest of the client as the goal is defined by the client. But the other version of the
theory, such as inability of therapist to offer professional help, assisting the client to do
anything in relation to their goal, contradict my personal values and belief systems.
I think which is also the stand of many Ethiopian people, because refusal to help and
being selfish are condemned and unacceptable by Ethiopian culture.
My question is how we can synchronize the two elements?

Cognitive behavioral theory (CBT)

Key figure: A. T. Beck founded cognitive therapy, which gives a primary role to thinking
as it influences behavior; Judith Beck continues to develop CBT.
Donald Meichenbaum is a prominent contributor to the development of cognitive
behavior therapy.

⇒Based on the assumption that human beings are born with a potential for both
View of human nature

⇒CBT encourages people accept themselves even though they will make mistakes.
rational, and irrational thinking. Mental schema.

⇒ We learn irrational beliefs from significant others during childhood and then re-create

⇒Early-indoctrinated irrational beliefs---keeps dysfunctional.

these irrational beliefs throughout our lifetime.

⇒Less emotionally reactive. Blame is at the core of most emotional disturbances.

⇒Transforming our desires and preferences into dogmatic.
⇒The A-B-C framework is central to CBT theory and practice.
⇒A (activating event) 􀂗 B (belief) C (emotional and behavioral consequence).
⇒Human beings are largely responsible for creating their own emotional reactions and

⇒Showing people how they can change their irrational beliefs.

disturbances.

⇒Cognitive restructuring-Restructuring involves helping clients learn to monitor their

self-talk, identify maladaptive self-talk, and substitute adaptive self-talk for their

⇒We have the capacity to significantly change our cognitions, emotions, and behaviors.
negative self-talk.

Causes of Symptoms
Feeling anxiety, depression, and shame
Blame is at the core of most emotional disturbances
Irrational beliefs, maladaptive schema, dysfunctional thoughts.

Assessment strategies
How they have incorporated many irrational absolute.
Hidden dogmatic “musts” and absolutist “shoulds.”
Perpetuating self-defeating beliefs.

Goals of Counseling
Re-educative process.
Have the general goal of teaching clients.
Lead toward the destination of clients minimizing their emotional disturbances.
Choosing realistic and self-enhancing therapeutic goals.
Teaching clients how to change their dysfunctional emotions and behaviors into healthy
ones.
Assist clients in the process of achieving unconditional self-acceptance and
unconditional other acceptance.
Roles of the counselor and client
Show clients how they have incorporated many irrational absolute “shoulds,” “oughts,”
and “musts.”
Disputes clients’ irrational beliefs
Teaching clients about the cognitive hypothesis of disturbance
Showing how rigid and extreme irrational beliefs lead to disturbed negative
consequences.
Clients effectively in the cognitive restructuring process.
Clients learn how to apply logical thought
Participate in experiential exercises.
carry out behavioral homework.

Nature and importance of counseling relationship

A warm relationship between therapist and client is not required.

Practitioners strive to unconditionally accept all clients and
Teach them to unconditionally accept others and themselves.
Much warmth and understanding can be counterproductive.
Accept their clients as imperfect beings who can be helped.
Therapists are often open and direct in disclosing their own beliefs and values.

Techniques and strategies

Starts with clients’ disturbed feelings.
Intensely explores these feelings in connection with thoughts and behaviors
cognitive, imagery, emotive, behavioral, and interpersonal.
Variety of techniques such as teaching, biblio-therapy, and behavior modification.
Tailor the techniques to the unique needs of each client
Quick and direct manner.
Heavily on thinking, disputing, debating, challenging, interpreting, explaining and
teaching.
• Doing cognitive homework, Bibliotherapy, Changing one’s language and
Psychoeducational.
• Rational emotive imagery, Using humor, Role playing Shame-attacking exercises.
Strengths/ Limitations
Strengths of CBT in working with individuals from diverse cultural, ethnic, and racial
backgrounds.
Clients are actively involved in learning skills.
Diversity effective.
Integrating assessment throughout therapy.
Interventions are tailored to the unique needs.
Inner resources and strengths of clients are activated.
Clients make changes that minimize stressors.
Limitation- its negative view of dependency.
Therapists avoid challenging the core cultural beliefs of clients
Limit its use in certain cultural aspects
Therapist failing to recognize
The role of the past in a client’s development.
Individualistic orientation.

Personal reflection
Important aspect of this therapy is that it involves teaching skills. It also equips the
client to minimize certain problems. When it comes to weakness, in my opinion, it is
difficult to understand the clients issue without considering their background,
experience and cultural perspective.
On the other hand, this theory challenge the core beliefs even if they are culturally
related. It is not important trying to change cultural beliefs according to my value and
belief system.

Existential Therapy
Key figures: Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, and Irvin Yalom.
Reacting against the tendency to view therapy as a system of well-defined techniques,
this model stresses building therapy on the basic conditions of human existence, such
as choice,
the freedom and responsibility to shape one’s life, and selfdetermination.
It focuses on the quality of the person-to-person therapeutic relationship.
VIKTOR FRANKL's experiences on concentration camp confirmed his views.

View of human nature

Base on understanding of what it means to be human.
The existential tradition.
Individual’s experience of being in the world alone and facing the anxiety of this
isolation.
Being a person implies that we are discovering and making sense of our existence.
The basic dimensions of the human condition:
(1) the capacity for self-awareness;
(2) freedom and responsibility;
(3) creating one’s identity and establishing meaningful relationships with others;
(4) the search for meaning, purpose, values, and goals;
(5) anxiety as a condition of living; and
(6) awareness of death and nonbeing
Existential therapists differentiate between normal and neurotic anxiety,

Causes of Symptoms
Neurotic anxiety- concrete things that is out of proportion to the situation.
It tends to immobilize the person.
 Assessment strategies
Avoiding responsibility
Identifying and clarifying their assumptions about the world.
Examining the source and authority of their present value system.
The ways in which they perceive and make sense of their existence.
Examining their values, beliefs, and assumptions to determine their validity.

Goals of Counseling
Living fully authentic lives, moving toward authenticity
Becoming what they are capable of being.
Face anxiety and engage in action
Four essential aims of existential-humanistic therapy:
(1) to help clients become more present to both themselves and others;
(2) to assist clients in identifying ways they block themselves from fuller presence;
(3) to challenge clients to assume responsibility for designing their present lives; and
(4) to encourage clients to choose more expanded ways of being in their daily lives.

Roles of the counselor and client

Existential therapists are primarily concerned with
understanding the subjective world of clients.
clients avoiding responsibility- invite clients to accept personal responsibility.
Deal with people who have-a restricted existence.
Encourages clients to take action.
Provide enough concrete direction for clients without taking the responsibility
away from them.
Clients must be active in the therapeutic process
They must decide what fears, guilt feelings, and anxieties they will explore.
Confronting ultimate concerns rather than coping with immediate problems.
Clients assume responsibility for their actions.

Nature and importance of counseling relationship

Existential therapists give central prominence to their relationship with the client.
Person-to-person encounter is the stimulus for positive change.
Attention is given to the client’s immediate, ongoing experience.
Viewed as a social microcosm.
The core of the therapeutic relationship is respect,
Grow by modeling authentic behavior.
The crucial role the presence of the therapist plays in the therapeutic relationship.

Techniques and strategies

It is not technique-oriented. But may incorporate many techniques from other models.
Prefer description, understanding, and exploration of the client’s subjective reality.
Set of assumptions and attitudes that guide their interventions with clients.
Therapists also be in contact with their own phenomenological world.

Strengths/ Limitations
Highly relevant in working in a multicultural context.
Helping clients of all cultures find meaning and harmony in their lives.
Its focus on universality, or the common ground that we all share.
The focus on subjective experience, or phenomenology.
Enables clients to examine the degree to which their behavior is being influenced
by social and cultural conditioning.

Excessively individualistic and that they ignore the social factors

Highly focused on the philosophical assumption of self-determination.
Many cultures it is not possible to talk about the self and self-determination apart.
Many clients expect a structured and problem-oriented approach to counseling

Personal reflection
The focus on subjective experience, or phenomenology and its focus on universality, or
the common ground that we all share are the very good point that I like from this
therapy.
In this theory the therapist do not take any responsibility which I disagree with that
because in addition to providing concrete direction it is better to take some form of
responsibility.
It is also excessively individualistic, which does not consider other factors like
social factors

Gestalt Therapy
Founders: Fritz and Laura Perls. Key figures: Miriam and Erving Polster.
An experiential therapy stressing awareness and integration; it grew as a reaction
against analytic therapy. It integrates the functioning of body and mind
Perls experiences with soldiers who were gassed on the front lines in World War I led to
his interest in mental functioning, which led him to Gestalt psychology .

View of human nature

It is existential, phenomenological and process-based approach.
Paternalistically.
The therapy involved two personal agendas:
1) Moving the client from environmental support to self-support.
2) Reintegrating the disowned parts of one’s personality.
Awareness and contact with environment.
Individuals have the capacity to self-regulate.
The more we work at becoming who or what we are not, the more we remain the same.
Paradoxical theory of change
Holism-cannot be separated into parts without losing its existence.
Here and Now- phenomenological inquiry.
Field theory- contextual
The figure formation process-how individuals organize experiences from moment to
moment.
Organismic self-regulation-equilibrium disturbing factors.
Unfinished business-figures that are not completed and resolved & unexpressed
feelings.
Contact boundary disturbances
Introjection Projection Retroflection Deflection Confluence
Blocks to energy- manifested by tension in some part of the body
Causes of Symptoms
No awareness about the present moment.
Incomplete figure.
Inauthencity and non-contact with reality.

Assessment strategies
Assessment for their awareness.
Attention for clients body language.
Asking clients to tell their story.
Continuum of expierence.

Goals of Counseling
Assisting the clients to attain greater awareness with greater choice.
This include knowing environment, knowing oneself, accepting oneself and making
contact.
Integrated functioning and acceptance of responsibility.

Roles of the counselor and client

Therapists play active role in assisting clients to have awareness.
Invite the clients in to active partnership where they can learn about themselves.
Functions as guide and catalyst.
Present experiments and share observations.
Create climate in which the clients are likely to try out new ways of being and behaving.
Paying attention to clients' body language.
Ask the client to use "I" statements.
Point out how certain qualifiers subtract from their effectiveness.
Clients are active participants who make their own interpretation and meaning.
They decide what will or will not do.
Nature and importance of counseling relationship
Involves process based person to person relationship (present-centered).
Quality relationship between therapist and client.
Demonstrates respect and acceptance.
Therapists are expected to encounter clients with honesty and immediate reactions.

Techniques and strategies

Experiments and clients hear the message.
Figure formation process.
Dialogue between the client and some significant person in client’s life.
Dramatizing the memory of some painful events.
Reliving particular profound early experiences in present.

Strengths/ Limitations
Culturally effective because it take the clients context into account.
Can be tailored to fit in the way an individual perceives and interprets his or her culture.
Effective in helping people integrate polarities with in themselves.
In cultures where indirect speech is norm, nonverbal behaviors are important.
The shortcomings of Gestalt Therapy include:
Lead to high level of intense feelings-problematic in relation to clients who have been
culturally conditioned to be emotionally reserved and to avoid openly expressing
feelings.
Expressing feelings openly can be considered as the sign of weakness and clients may
be reluctant.
Directly expressing emotions to people (parents) may be prohibited in some culture.

Personal reflection
As any other therapies Gestalt Therapy has several strength that include:
focus on awareness
present- centered
culturally oriented and so on
it also has certain weakness, in my opinion, that included in the limitation section of this
summary which I agree. For example, intensively expressed feelings are not confortable
for some clients.
Secondly, when it comes to my value and belief it is not good to express feelings on
people; elders, parents which is also true in Ethiopian tradition and culture.
Third, expressing feelings openly may cause guilty in some clients.

Thank you!