As a result, Rogers gradually developed an approach to therapy that emphasizes "unconditional positive regard." Ideally, a client-centered therapist is able to express a sense of complete acceptance and respect toward the client. The therapist does not associate positive regard with implicit conditions of worth that the client must satisfy. In other words, client-centered therapy attempts gradually to reverse a habit that has come to undermine the client's sense of self-worth. It is a habit that we all, to differing degrees, develop as parents and society teach us to relinquish self-acceptance in favor of the conditional love or appreciation of others. Eventually, the habit becomes so ingrained that it can jeopardize our own feelings of self-esteem.
Client-centered therapy encourages a client to grow in several ways:
1. by feeling comfortable enough in the company of the therapist to express feelings freely and openly
2. by coming to recognize his own feelings of incongruence, of being divided against himself, often due to experiences that have encouraged a negative or insecure sense of self-worth
3. by perceiving that the therapist is an integrated, accepting person, able to convey acceptance and warmth toward the client
4. by reintegrating a sense of self, freeing himself from the distortions of self-worth brought about by love that has strings attached
AN EXAMPLE
Melissa Adams is twenty-eight years old, the district manager of a large pharmaceuticals marketing division in the Midwest. She is slender, immaculately dressed, and—as Dr. Feldman could see immediately—rigid and very uptight about herself.
Melissa came to see Dr. Feldman, a clinical psychologist, because of a growing sense of estrangement toward her husband and tension and anxiety at work. She described her upbringing in an extremely rigid, judgmental atmosphere in which her self-worth was implicitly tied to her parents' conditions of achievement. She was apparently encouraged by her parents, who realized Melissa was a bright child, to skip a grade and then to complete her undergraduate work in three years by attending summer school each summer. Her parents were very proud of her.