Listen To Choose Trusting, Not Fixing.

Therapist Allison talks about Person-Centered Therapies philosophy which highlights the belief that healing naturally unfolds when there's a safe environment. Give this audio permission to soften our tendency to fix and bring forth our faith and trust in the human capacity to heal.

Transcript

Person-centered therapy is one of the only models that fully trusts human beings. It doesn't fix them. It doesn't analyze them to death. It doesn't reduce them to symptoms. And it doesn't assume that the therapist always knows best. It trusts that somewhere underneath the anxiety, The trauma, The shutdown, The overthinking, The people-pleasing, The perfectionism, There is still a real self in there trying to emerge. And honestly, I think that's beautiful. So today I want to talk about what person-centered therapy actually is, Why I connect with it so deeply, And what I think the magic moments are that happen inside of a person-centered session. If you've never experienced truly person-centered therapy before, It can almost feel hard to explain. Sometimes people think, Oh, So you just sit there and listen. And no, Not exactly. There's actually something incredibly intentional and powerful happening in the room. So person-centered therapy was created by Carl Rogers. And at the core of the theory is this belief that human beings naturally move toward growth when they are given the right conditions. And Rogers called this the actualizing tendency. Basically, The idea that people are not broken at their core. They are often wounded, Disconnected, Or dysregulated, Conditioned, Shamed, Scared, But they are not fundamentally broken at the core. Nobody is. And if you create enough safety, Empathy, And authenticity, People begin moving back toward themselves naturally. It's the natural process. And that idea changed me when I first learned about it. I'm a yoga teacher too, And this is where this concept first was born for me, In the yogic space. And this moves me so much because modern life teaches us the opposite. It teaches us that we need to optimize ourselves constantly, To fix ourselves, Improve, Be better, Be more productive, More desirable, More efficient, Just better, Better, Better. And person-centered therapy almost disrupts all of that and says, What if healing begins when someone finally stops performing? What if people change most deeply when they no longer feel like they have to earn worth in the room? And that's the heart of it for me. And honestly, I think that's why this therapy, This type of therapy can feel so emotional and so powerful because many people have never actually experienced unconditional positive regard before. And even thinking about it almost brings tears to my eyes, Right? There's just the power of not all the additional parts of the theory, But just the power of giving someone unconditional positive regard for an hour, Not their lifetime. We're not people pleasing them 24 hours a day, But just for the hour that they are wanting to talk about what's going on with them, What's vulnerable, What's making them feel broken. The person on the other side of the room is not poking and prodding and saying, This is where you're wrong. This is where you're wrong. This is the problem. This is the problem. And think about how many times we've experienced being on the other end of statements. They don't have to be verbal, But just the communication of the idea that I love you if you do this or that. I accept you when you do X, Y, Z. You're good when you blah, Blah, Blah. And we just so rarely get the idea that you are worthy of care simply because you exist. We don't get that sort of statement communicated to us even non-verbally. And being a receiver of that, That can be transformative. And so in this therapy, The therapist isn't trying to become some cold expert sitting above the client, Right? Of course not. The therapist is trying to become deeply present, Also real, Not toxic positivity. And that's not what this is either. And this word congruent, The congruence is one of my favorite parts of the theory because it means the therapist is authentic, Not hiding behind a clinical mask. There's this felt sense in this work where the therapist is almost saying, I'm here with you. I'm not above you, I'm by your side. And I think clients feel that, Especially people who have spent their whole lives feeling observed or managed, Corrected, Diagnosed, Misunderstood, All those things. Now, Obviously the therapist still remain having boundaries, Professionalism, All that, But there's a softness to person-centered therapy that can feel incredibly regulating to the nervous system. There's less pressure to do therapy correctly too. There's less pressure to perform, Less pressure to give the perfect insight, The perfect evidence-based response. And honestly, Some of the most powerful moments I've ever seen in therapy were, They certainly weren't happening when me as a therapist or, And I've really not heard of them when the therapist gives, From a textbook. It's usually from the sort of felt sense of energy happening when they really, The client really truly believes they can lay their guard down and they're really not going to be corrected or judged. They're going to be believed, Even if what they're saying might actually be wrong, But they're able to freely speak and be seen and be heard. And that's magic. That's one of the magic moments.