Competency 1: Self-Awareness of One’s Own Assumptions, Values, and Biases

As mentioned earlier, it is incumbent on person-centered therapists to raise their consciousness about the assumptions they hold and constantly assess their effects on clients, especially clients sufficiently different from them in some meaningful way. By the early 1950s, Rogers encouraged therapists to be aware of their own assumptions and values. One of Rogers’s colleagues, Nicholas Hobbs (1951), stated:

One of the cardinal principles in client-centered therapy is that the individual must be helped to work out his own value system, with a minimal imposition of the value system of the therapist. . . . This value, which affirms the individual’s right to choose his own values, is believed to be therapeutically helpful. (p. 292)

Rogers took the position (1977) that clients deserve a “respectful hearing” of all attitudes and feelings, no matter how “extreme” or “unrealistic” (p. 113). To the degree that person-centered therapists embrace these sentiments, they are likely to reassess periodically their own values and assumptions and to make appropriate accommodations in the way they respond to the unique values and needs of clients’ individual differences. The person-centered approach has been criticized for reflecting Rogers’s and many Americans’ values of independence, individualism, and self-determination. This position may conflict with persons who embrace collectivist views or who are strongly influenced by family values and expectations. To work effectively with such individuals, personcentered therapists would do well to suspend or set aside their own values and be receptive to the powerful influence and merits of their clients’ family structure and values and culture. For example, in Deaf culture enormous pressure is often exerted on deaf children (and later on adults) to embrace sign language as opposed to spoken language. While this stance may run counter to the values of a hearing personcentered therapist, an understanding of this strongly held position and subsequent modifications in the therapist’s assumptions about it are appropriate and desirable.

Competency 2: Understanding the Worldview of the Culturally Different Client

All therapists would serve their clients by learning as much as possible about the worldviews of their clients, whether cultural, those that emerge as a result of the client’s experience (e.g., sexual orientation, poverty), or those that result from the client’s need to cope with a difficult condition (e.g., blindness). The sensitive person-centered therapist would seek to understand what it is like to live as a gay, quadriplegic, or low-income person while refraining from stereotyped views and instead recognizing that persons within a subgroup have diverse experiences and attitudes. Rogers (1951) believed that “the only way to understand another culture is to assume the frame of reference of that culture” (p. 494). MacDougall (2002) commented that Rogers “promoted counselor acquisition of knowledge of clients in their cultural settings, knowledge of cultural anthropology or sociology with actual experiences of living with or dealing with culturally diverse clients” (p. 52).