Person Centered Psychotherapy

Carl R. Rogers developed a profound practice and understanding of psychotherapy. Rogers’ essential insight is that certain qualities of the relationship between therapist and client (or person and person) can be learned and practiced to create an optimal interpersonal climate for personal growth, development, and healing. In this course, we will be learning through our own experience, reflection, and practice. Participants will learn to enhance possibilities for their own change.

We will practice utilizing our whole potential as an instrument of change for our client’s benefit.

“This program is very much needed.”

We will rediscover our personal strengths in efficiency, skill, and wisdom. Person-Centered Approaches to Psychotherapy may feel just right to you.

You may be of the opinion that Person-Centered Psychotherapy is elementary, is easy, is limited in effectiveness.

We invite you to inspire your therapy practice again.  Take the opportunity through a clean perspective and guidance from long-time pros.

“I am impressed with the calm and ease of the course leaders,” “very much present, listening and participating.”  “They are quite different in style from each other which enhances the learning,” an “excellent integration of the theoretical and experiential.”

Continuing Education Units: 16 Units for Psychologists, Marriage and Family Therapists, Licensed Clinical Social Workers, and Registered Nurses; and National Board for Certified Counselors.

This program is done in partnership between The Chicago Counseling Associates and Center for Studies of the Person-CSP.

* This course follows and is coordinated with the Carl Rogers Conference.

FROM A PARTICIPANT’S JOURNAL:

“

Throughout this person-centered training, I’m repeatedly returning to that only in such a group of empathic attitudes and genuine responding does it become possible for me to be congruent, to say to myself and to the group the things that I’m really thinking.  And when I am less defensive, I am freer to accept others, too.  It’s a heady thing, this feeling of permission to be yourself with others.  I think I’ve only felt this with those very close to me and it doesn’t happen every day.  It’s invigorating and exciting and is bringing up an awful lot.

It’s not just me; we’re all touched by our trainers’ encouragement around finding definitions that make sense to us, as well as dismissing the parts of Rogers’s theory that aren’t (for lack of a better term) congruent with our worldview.

More and more, it’s clear to me that one of the more important things distinguishing this training from my experience of school and agency work is that we are treated like people with resources within us rather than boxes to be filled with information.  I’ve enjoyed several skills-based trainings, and really liked the feeling of getting better at a specific therapeutic style, but this way of learning feels…more important.  Little by little, I am stopping to notice whether I’m treating myself and others as people, too.

Course Objectives

The faculty is striving that students gain clarity with the PCA as a psychotherapeutic approach:

• To describe the basic concepts of Person Centered Approaches and its application to psychotherapy, education and organization consultation.
• To distinguish the application of Person Centered Approaches from other, more directive approaches to behavioral change.
• To apply and experience listening at a depth.
• To discuss and understand the six essential conditions for therapeutic change.
• To experience and practice receiving Empathy, Unconditional Positive Regard, and Congruence.
• To explain the nature of the self in its application within the theory of the Person Centered Approach.
• To experience Person Centered Psychotherapy in small and large groups.

Course Outline

• Clarify student and faculty objectives
• History of the Approach
• Who was Carl Rogers—the man, his practice, his ideas
• Faculty stories and experience with PCA
• Participant practice, a demonstration

The course is approved for all mental health professionals including, psychologists, counselors, psychotherapists and nurses.  The 16 Units for Continuing Education will be offered by The Chicago Counseling Associates, which is APA approved. APA is an approved provider for most boards if not for all of them.  If participants have doubts they should check with their licensing board whether APA is approved to provide CE for their state.