If that sounds like something every psychotherapist ever has said to you at least a couple of times, consider it Rogers’ fault. For further information about your statutory rights, contact your local authority Trading Standards department or consumer advice centre (for example the Citizen's Advice Bureau if you are in the UK). Consequently, it’s the job of a psychotherapist to listen to his/her patient, rather than trying to fix him/her. This approach allowed him to develop his famous client-centered therapy, which he used to treat patients suffering from depression, anxiety, and phobias.

result from frustration of more basic impulses for love and security and belonging, which are in themselves desirable. Successful development makes us more flexible in relationships, more creative, and less open to suggestion and control.As each feeling we are ashamed of comes to the surface, we realize it will not kill us to allow it to exist. It is only lately that I have begun to lower my expectations and certain ideal notions of relationships in general. It has made a significant impact on the field of counseling and continues to be a valuable contribution to the helping professions.

His influential Counselling and Psychotherapy was published in 1942, and in 1945 he began a twelve-year posting at the University of Chicago, where he established a counseling center. In short, the counselor needs to help the client feel like they are fully understood on their own terms, not on some other terms that the counselor dictates.By this I mean that he does not simply accept the client when he is behaving in certain ways, and disapprove of him when he behaves in other ways. If we choose to utilize our scientific knowledge to free men, then it will demand that we live openly and frankly with the great paradox of the behavioral sciences. Because only in the first case the psychotherapist truly believes that the person sitting next to him is a person, someone in the process of becoming something, and not someone whose existence is already fixed. And understanding does mean – almost always – not judging, even if some things seem to you wrong or stupid. But invariably, these 'reasons' were not the real problem; there was in fact just one problem with all the people he saw: They were desperate to become their real selves, to be allowed to drop the false roles or masks with which they had approached life to date.