What is Person Centered Therapy

New Year’s week is a time to think of ways to improve ourselves and our lives in the months to come. Many individuals make resolutions and they promise to realize them every year. But somehow those aspirations tend to fade away after a few months. Person-centered therapy enhances humans’ personal growth toward self-actualization and deepens quality personal relationship. This article aims to explore the contribution to humans’ personal growth and healthy relationship.

Person-centered therapy believes in human’s positive qualities as being trustworthy and owning inner resources to pursue self-actualization and health. The therapeutic goals are to assist clients to be true to themselves and acquire their full potentials. Person-centered therapy emphasizes the qualities of the therapist and therapeutic relationship as the most powerful components to help clients grow. The counselor needs to maintain positive attitudes, to believe in individual’s potentials and motivation to become actualized, to accept one’s and others’ uniqueness and needs and to be trustworthy, warm, open and kind. Person-centered therapy reflects that pain and obstacles in life are necessary and can stimulate humans to grow. This therapy helps counselors; clients and humans pursue self-actualization and possess better human qualities, which can contribute to world peace.

Our personal beliefs play a huge role in how we view our own life. Your estimation of your successes and failures will depend entirely on the framework of your personal beliefs. Our beliefs provide a structured process through which we evaluate everything in our lives. As we learn and grow, many of our former beliefs will no longer serve us. The beliefs that we hold onto have outlived their usefulness and anything negative that gets in the way needs to be confronted.

Do you desire to do things differently this time? Let us look at some practical ways that can help you work on staying focused on the goals you have set.

  • Do not set too many large goals
  • Do not leave things uncompleted
  • Give yourself some daily time alone
  • Have a goal buddy
  • Learn how to avoid distractions
  • Learn how to remain focused and staying focused
  • Make a daily to do list
  • Multitasking is good but reduce it
  • You will need to start a daily ritual
  • You will need to visualize a goal

The expected result of person centered therapy include improved self-esteem; trust in one’s inner feelings and experiences as valuable sources of information for making decisions; increased ability to learn from (rather than repeating) mistakes; decreased defensiveness, guilt and insecurity; more positive and comfortable relationships with others; an increased capacity to experience and express feelings at the moment they occur and openness to new experiences and new ways of thinking about life.

Be prepared for the fact that the upcoming months will not be free of distractions by convincing yourself that checking your email, Facebook and Twitter every few minutes relaxes you, but the truth is that this bad habit is a huge distraction from the really important things and problems no matter how hard you work on your goals; but the most important thing is to stay within the routine you establish and do not attach yourself to the results.