Unul dintre pilonii formării în psihoterapie pe care o urmez este Carl Rogers și terapia centrată pe persoană. A fost și unul dintre reperele formării mele ca change strategist cu ani în urmă. Dar relația mea cu Rogers nu este doar profesională, ci și personală. De la el am preluat ideea aceasta simplă și totuși atât de greu de pus în practică: the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change. I believe that I have learned this from my clients as well as within my own experience, that we cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed. M-am întors des la ea, ca la o mantră și o promisiune față de mine.
Între timp, s-a mai adăugat un strat venit din rolul meu nou: acceptarea necondiționată a omului din fața mea și importanța relației cu clientul, înainte de toate. Le-am simțit, atât nevoia, cât și efectul lor, mai întâi în propria mea terapie, și apoi, treptat, în relațiile cu clienții mei.
Acum, când revin la cartea On Becoming a Person, mă opresc cel mai des asupra a două capitole scurte care mi-au devenit un fel de manifest tăcut, un reper la care aspir și, în același timp, o responsabilitate: cât din mine este cu adevărat acolo, prezent cu clientul meu?
Las textul în engleză pentru că simt că nu aș putea traduce fidel ceva ce simt mai mult decât înțeleg. Pentru mine, sunt printre cele mai umane și autentice descrieri ale relației terapeutice.
Revin curând și cu experiența clientului.
Experiența terapeutului
Therapy in its occurrence is a highly personal, subjective experience.
To the therapist, it is a new venture in relating.
He feels,
Here is this other person, my client. I’m a little afraid of him, afraid of the depths in him as I am a little afraid of the depths in myself. Yet as he speaks, I begin to feel a respect for him, to feel my kinship to him. I sense how frightening his world is for him, how tightly he tries to hold it in place.
I would like to sense his feelings, and I would like him to know that I understand his feelings. I would like him to know that I stand with him in his tight, constricted little world, and that I can look upon it relatively unafraid. Perhaps I can make it a safer world for him.
I would like my feelings in this relationship with him to be as clear and transparent as possible, so that they are a discernible reality for him, to which he can return again and again.
I would like to go with him on the fearful journey into himself, into the buried fear, and hate, and love which he has never been able to let flow in him.
I recognize that this is a very human and unpredictable journey for me, as well as for him, and that I may, without even knowing my fear, shrink away within myself, from some of the feelings he discovers.
To this extent I know I will be limited in my ability to help him. I realize that at times his own fears may make him perceive me as uncaring, as rejecting, as an intruder, as one who does not understand.
I want fully to accept these feelings in him, and yet I hope also that my own real feelings will show through so clearly that in time he cannot fail to perceive them.
Most of all I want him to encounter in me a real person. I do not need to be uneasy as to whether my own feelings are therapeutic.
What I am and what I feel are good enough to be a basis for therapy, if I can transparently be what I am and what I feel in relationship to him. Then perhaps he can be what he is, openly and without fear.
Carl Rogers – On becoming a person. A therapist’s view of psychotherapy
