Thought Walk

Rogers defined congruence as the consistency between a person's lived experience as an organism and their symbolization of that experience. For example, if a person is angry about something and subjectively realizes they are angry, that is congruence; conversely, if a person does not feel fear in a situation but only realizes afterwards that they were afraid, then they were incongruent in that situation.

Congruence is not just about "not role-playing a therapist," but includes the continuous aw

Once in a discussion, someone raised the question of how to keep the balance between the attention to “outcomes” and that to “process.”

My view is that when counselors place their primary focus on outcomes, what is most often sacrificed is precisely the outcome itself.

From a person-centered perspective, as long as the six necessary and sufficient conditions are met, counseling will naturally be effective. This premise requires the counselor to genuinely experience the three core conditions.

As a person-centered therapist, in therapy, I do have very clear goals. I deliberately choose to do certain things, and avoid doing certain things. It is a very disciplined practice, but the goals are for myself, not for the client. In therapy, I have very clear goals for myself. I aim to do three things simultaneously, at an inner level, as well as I can and as consistently as I can. First, to maintain awareness of myself—to notice how I actually am in the moment, and to allow myself to be as I

In many discussions about education and development, one often encounters demands that sound reasonable but are made far too lightly—for example, telling parents that they should first “get themselves sorted out,” or insisting that teachers must always understand their students, as if complex problems would simply resolve themselves once the right attitude is adopted.

Such claims frequently overlook a key fact: adults, too, live within concrete social conditions and have very real limits to wha

Some have observed that Rogers emphasized research from a subjective, phenomenological perspective while also attempting to integrate the “subjective” and the “objective.” Here I would like to clarify what I mean by Rogers’ stance of “bringing himself into the work.”

By this phrase, I am not referring to a theoretical viewpoint, but to something Rogers did as a person—consistently, over decades. Early in his career, he found that the assessment methods he had learned were of limited use in actu

Some people say they cannot understand how anyone can complain so intensely about the world they live in—a world they also cannot escape. If one is so dissatisfied, they ask, how can one go on living? For me, the reason I can go on living is, to a large extent, precisely because of complaining. Long live complaining. Complaining saves lives. Complaining makes life bearable; it may even make the world better. Complaining is meaningful; complaining is sacred. Ultimately, no matter how the structur