Finding Your Own Therapeutic Style

 Albert Ellis and Carl Rogers

By: THEODORE MILLON and

      Seth Grossman

      Carrie Millon

      Sarah Meagher

      Rowena Ramnath

Although Albert Ellis was originally trained as a psychoanalyst, he is an important figure in the history of the cognitive therapy movement. His transformation is striking, as it represents a philosophical shift from that which is deep and mysterious in human nature, namely the unconscious, to that which is more or less obvious, the rational process and errors of reasoning.

The movement Ellis founded is called rational-emotive therapy. According to Ellis, logical reasoning is the foundation of mental health. Psychopathology is the product of illogical inferences and other irrational beliefs.

From this, it follows that mental unhappiness, ineffectuality, and other disturbances can be eliminated when people learn how to maximize rational thinking. Correct your reasoning, and your emotions will follow.

The task of the therapist, then, is to identify errors in the reasoning process, showing patients that their difficulties result largely from distorted perceptions and erroneous beliefs. Not surprisingly, then, rational-emotive therapy tends to be more confrontive than supportive: The patient is doing something wrong, and this must be identified and exterminated. Patients’ mistakes are their disease.

Like other cognitive theorists, Ellis’s thinking does not generate a series of personality constructs, but instead addresses cognitive processes as they cut across most mental disorders.

Carl Rogers, perhaps the single most influential theorist on therapy from the 1960s through the 1970s, is opposite Ellis, both philosophically and in bedside manner. Whereas Ellis is confrontive and highly directive (you must show patients their errors), Rogers impressed patients as a kind grandfather, always listening and reflecting their own emotions as a gentle commentary, intended to make them feel understood rather than thrusting their mistakes into awareness.

According to Rogers, each person is innately right; that is, individuals possess their own innate sense of what is required for their own growth as a unique person. Healing emerges from the quality and character of the therapeutic relationship.

Rogers’ movement, therefore, became known as client-centered therapy. Growth could be facilitated through certain therapist attitudes, notably genuineness and authenticity. Rather than learn complicated techniques founded in some abstract theoretical model, therapists should “be themselves,” expressing their thoughts and feelings in a constructive way that honors the person, but without pretension or the cloak of professional authority.

For Rogers, “unconditional positive regard” was the key. Clients should be respected as beings of intrinsic worth and dignity, no matter how unappealing and destructive their behaviors might be.

However, Rogers also emphasized that clients must assume full responsibility for their own growth.

Through accurate empathy and positive regard, the therapist lays the foundation. Only the client can follow through.

References

Personality Disorders in Modern Life, second edition, 2000, 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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