U
“Unconditional Positive Regard”; Understanding; Uses of Therapy.
“Unconditional Positive Regard”
Carl Rogers, regarded by some as “the most influential psychologist in American history”, coined this term as one of his “core conditions” in his essay The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change (1957). Unconditional Positive Regard (or UPR) suggests that the therapist should aspire to love their clients unconditionally in a way that, often, they have not experienced in other relationships, where love, praise or validation were offered with the price tags of being well-behaved, agreeable or high achieving.
Initially this seems an impossible reach: surely we can’t think well of everybody! (Rogers agreed it was an aim rather than an absolute.) But actually, I’ve found over time, it’s easier than one would think. Everyone has positive attributes (the only exception to this, in fairness, was never my client because he was being the Prime Minister during a pandemic). And negative or challenging attributes are all there for a reason and are for me to try and understand and support rather than reject.
Understanding
As suggested in Truth (see T, last week), therapy is not about understanding ‘the facts’ of a situation but about getting closer to what the client made of an experience, or means by a word, or responds to a stimulus. The essential question – sometimes explicit, often implied – is “What does that mean for you?”
Ullah and Ulrika both lost teddy bears on bus trips with their parents when they were six. Same story, same context, same age, same stage in life, surely the same meaning: right? Wrong. The meaning Ullah made of it was “accidents happen, we can always repair” and he scarcely remembers it beyond his parents teasing him years later about how upset he was at the time. But for Ulrika the meaning she took from it was “Everything is lost in the end”: all relationships, whether with people or inanimate objects, end in loss.
Neither are wrong. They are understanding their experience.
The next stage of understanding, sometimes, is to say “Ok, so why would you have felt that way?” Not to criticise or minimise it, but, again, to understand. On some level it was vital for that child to take those inferences from that experience and probably inevitable. But why? How had their experience of life taught them that this response was the best?
Judging a client’s response to things that have happened to them is never valuable. Understanding it always is.
Uses of Therapy
The most obvious question to ask a client in a first session is “What do you want from therapy?” In practice it is almost always a guideline question at best, with an answer which is likely to be very general and change many times. The most accurate answer a client can give, usually, would probably be “Well, I think I need this but I don’t really know yet”.
Not knowing is fine. Indeed, not knowing, and the fear which that engenders, is often at the centre of the problem anyway. Most people I encounter in therapy are pretty bright, self-aware, articulate and successful in various spheres of their lives. If understanding stuff was the issue, they wouldn’t need me.
Therapy is different for everyone, and so is the uses they make of it. These might include a place to: process trauma and tragedy; understand their thoughts and feelings; talk without being judged; feel without being overwhelmed; express anger without punishment; allow sadness without pity; reconnect with the childhood they never finished; prepare themselves for the adulthood they haven’t started; practice relationship; survive risk; tolerate vulnerability; find comfort; survive embarrassment; say the unsayable; re-tell their story; be themselves.
Trust me. That’s a pretty short list.
Next Week: V
Validation; Value Judgments; Variation