Disclaimer

The brief clinical examples below are real in the sense that they are drawn from lived practice experience, but all identifying details (age, gender, context, timing, and personal data) have been altered or blended to protect confidentiality. Any resemblance to a specific person is coincidental. More about disclaimer

Why I Keep Returning to Rogers

Some books don’t just inform you they quietly re-train your nervous system.

For me, "On Becoming a Person" is one of those books. It doesn’t read like a technique manual. It reads more like someone sitting across from you, describing in plain language what it actually costs to meet another human being without trying to manage them, fix them, or win them (Rogers, 1961).

Rogers’ work keeps pulling me back to a deceptively simple discipline: be real, be warm, be accurate. Not as a set of tricks to deploy, but as a way of being with. The more I sit with clients, the more I realise how demanding that simplicity is.

There is one line that still lands in my chest like a small hammer blow every time I reread it:

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change.” (Rogers, 1961, p. 18)

On paper, it looks like something you might see on a postcard. In the room, when I try to live it, I discover that it is not sentimental at all. It’s structural. Acceptance changes the conditions; the organism can finally move.

The Core of the Book (As It Lands in Me)

1. Congruence The Therapist as a Real Person

Rogers returns again and again to congruence the therapist being inwardly aligned rather than putting on a professional mask (Rogers, 1957). He doesn’t mean dumping my entire inner life into the session. He means that what I present outwardly is not wildly different from what is happening inwardly.

I notice congruence most clearly in my own body. When I start drifting into performance trying to be “the good trainee,” trying to sound clever my shoulders creep up, my breath gets shallow, and my listening becomes narrow and strategic. I’m not really "with" the client; I’m trying to manage how I appear.

When I return to congruence, the sensations change. My chest softens. My jaw loosens. There is more space behind my eyes. I am still aware of assessment pressures, time, supervision, but I am no longer acting a role. I am a person, with this client, in this hour.

That isn’t self-indulgence. It is ethical. If therapy is offered through a relationship, then bringing a false self into the room is a kind of quiet deception. Congruence is the line between using a role and offering a relationship.

2. Unconditional Positive Regard Warmth Without Collusion

Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR) is one of those phrases that gets domesticated very quickly. It can sound like “being nice” or “never challenging the client.” That is not how it lands in me when I read Rogers.

UPR, as I experience it, is a sturdy, unsentimental kind of warmth (Rogers, 1957). It is the decision to hold the person in regard even when I cannot endorse what they are doing. In practice, it sounds like things such as:

“I’m not judging you and I also can’t support you harming yourself.”

“I can care about you without agreeing with everything you do.”

UPR is not permission, and it is not passivity. It is a way of saying: "Your worth is not on trial in this room, even if we need to look very honestly at your behaviour". That distinction matters for me as a trainee. Without it, I either become a scolding superego or a frightened cheerleader. UPR lets me stay in the middle: firm about safety, soft about shame.

3. Empathy Accuracy That Feels Like Being Found

Rogers’ empathy is not a vague “I know how you feel.” It is a disciplined attempt to sense the client’s inner world and reflect it back in words that feel recognisable from the inside (Rogers, 1961).

I notice when it is accurate because something shifts in the room. The client’s face softens. Their speech slows. Their story becomes slightly more coherent, less defended. It is as if their nervous system says: "finally, someone is with me inside this, not just looking at me from outside".

This is where Rogers feels quietly radical, especially in a culture obsessed with tools and outcomes. He suggests that deep, precise understanding is not the prelude to the “real” work it "is" the work. Empathy is not the warm-up act; it is an intervention.

As a trainee, this is both reassuring and exposing. I can’t hide behind technique. The quality of my presence actually matters.

Three Practice Vignettes (With My Own Reactions Left In)

Vignette 1: Anxiety as a Control Ritual

A client spent most sessions speaking very fast, jumping between topics, scanning my face for signs of approval. I could feel a corresponding pressure inside me: a faint buzzing behind my eyes, a tightness around my jaw, the urge to organise, summarise, “make sense” so that we both felt safer.

In earlier months of training, I might have reached quickly for psychoeducation or breathing exercises. This time, influenced by Rogers, I stayed with the process. I listened to the "effort" they were making to stay in control. Then I reflected it:

“As you speak, it feels like you’re working very hard not to get it wrong with me.”

Their shoulders dropped. The pace slowed. They looked at the floor and said, very quietly:

“If I don’t control it, I’ll fall apart.”

What moved the session forward was not a new technique, but a sentence that named the fear underneath the performance. It was the Rogers paradox in miniature: once the controlling part was seen and accepted as protective, there was a tiny bit more space around it for genuine feeling.

Vignette 2: Grief Disguised as Numbness

Another client described a major loss in a flat, almost report-like tone. The content was objectively devastating. The delivery felt like reading out a shopping list. Inside myself I noticed an odd combination: warmth spreading across my chest, and a heaviness at the back of my throat, as if emotion was nearby but held.

Instead of pushing for tears or “deeper feeling,” I tried a small, congruent reflection:

“As you tell me this, it feels very flat almost as if the feeling is behind glass.”

They blinked, stared at their hands and said:

“If I start crying, I won’t stop.”

Rogers helps me trust that the task here is not to “get them crying” so I feel like a good therapist. The task is to provide enough safety that the nervous system can afford to loosen its grip. Over time, in that relationship, the grief did appear not as a dramatic breakdown, but as small, tolerable waves.

The change was subtle: they began to say “I miss them” instead of “it happened.” The glass thinned. Empathy and UPR had done something that confrontation could not.

Vignette 3: Anger Protecting Shame

A third client arrived in sessions angry, mocking, provocative. Almost everything I said was tested, dismissed or twisted. Inside, my stomach tightened. Another part of me wanted to retaliate, to prove myself, to become very clever and analytic.

Remembering Rogers, I tried to step back from the content and look for the function of the anger. I said:

“It feels like anger is doing a really important job for you right now.”

There was a silence that felt longer than the clock suggested. Then they said:

“If I’m not angry, I’m nothing.”

Underneath the heat was a more fragile layer: shame, and beneath that a longing to be respected. Because I didn’t attack the anger or withdraw from it, the client could begin to feel it as a protector rather than an identity. The room cooled slightly. We could work.

Here, Rogers’ conditions were not “nice therapist moves.” They were structural supports that allowed a highly defended person to risk being seen without humiliation (Rogers, 1957).

Where Rogers Sits Among Freud and Jung (In My Head, at Least)

As a trainee, I find it helpful to imagine Freud, Jung and Rogers sitting at a small internal roundtable. They are very different dinner guests.

Freud Repetition, Conflict and the Unworked-Through

Freud’s voice in my internal supervision is often the one that says: "pay attention to what is repeating". His idea of the “compulsion to repeat” describes how people re-create painful situations, not because they are irrational, but because something unresolved is still pushing for mastery or symbolisation (Freud, 1920).

He points out that in analysis, the patient may “repeat rather than remember,” acting out fragments of the past in the present relationship. This can override the pleasure principle: people return to what hurts because, at some level, it is familiar and therefore manageable (Freud, 1920, p. 18).

Clinical takeaway for me: when a client keeps walking into the same relational catastrophe, it may be less useful to ask “Why are you doing this?” and more helpful to wonder, “What is your psyche trying, in a distorted way, to complete here?” Rogers then shapes "how" I ask that question gently, without shaming but Freud stops me from dismissing the repetition as simple poor judgement.

Jung The Psyche as Patterned, Symbolic and Larger Than Biography

Jung’s contribution, as I experience it, is to insist that not everything inside us began with our personal history. He distinguishes between the personal unconscious (complexes formed by individual experience) and the collective unconscious, whose contents are archetypes deep patterns of human experience that show up across cultures (Jung, 1959, 2010).

Sometimes, in session, a client’s reaction feels wildly disproportionate to the immediate trigger. A small disappointment evokes a cavernous despair; a minor disagreement evokes apocalyptic rage. Jung helps me hold that something more than “this week’s event” may be activated: the abandoned child, the humiliated hero, the scapegoat.

Clinical takeaway for me: calling something archetypal is not an excuse to float away into myth. It is a way of respecting depth and taking seriously that some of what moves in the room is bigger than either of us. Rogers then pulls this back into relationship: whatever archetype is active, how can I meet the person in front of me safely?

Rogers Change Through Relationship, Not Just Interpretation

Rogers’ voice cuts in whenever I become too fascinated with theory. Where Freud leans into interpretation and Jung into symbolic amplification, Rogers keeps asking: "What is the relational climate right now?" Are the necessary and sufficient conditions congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding present in a tangible way (Rogers, 1957)?

Rogers doesn’t deny the unconscious; he simply refuses to make the therapist the final authority over it. The client’s organismic valuing process their felt sense of what is right or wrong for them is central (Rogers, 1961). My job is less to announce the truth and more to create conditions where their own truth can safely emerge.

Clinical takeaway for me: my power in the room is not in being clever or analytic. It lies in whether I can be present enough, and honest enough, that the client can begin to relate differently to themselves.

A Simple Synthesis I Actually Use

On tired evenings, I sometimes reduce all of this to a quiet inner check-in:

1. Rogers asks: "Am I being real, warm and accurate right now or am I acting?" (Rogers, 1957),  (Rogers, 1961).
2. Freud asks: "What seems to be repeating here, and what might that repetition be doing?" (Freud, 1920).
3. Jung asks: "Does this feel larger than the immediate story and if so, what pattern or image might hold it?" (Jung, 1959/2010).

I don’t say this out loud to clients. It functions more like an inner orientation. It stops me from grabbing at tools too quickly. It also reminds me of the moral risk: any theory Freudian, Jungian, Rogerian can become a way of avoiding responsibility if I use it to explain away real harm or to excuse my own mistakes.

Naming a pattern is not the same as owning its consequences. Depth language is not a free pass.

Closing Reflection: Becoming a Person as an Ethical Act

For me, On Becoming a Person is not a cosy book. It is a demanding one. Each page asks, in slightly different words, whether I am willing to show up without too much armour not boundary less, not confessional, but genuinely present.

Rogers’ paradox keeps circling back:

When I accept what is true, change becomes possible. (Rogers, 1961, p. 18)

The more I sit with clients, the more I see that this applies in both directions. When a client feels that their experience however messy is accepted as real in the room, something in them relaxes and can move. When I accept my own limits and imperfections as a trainee, instead of hiding them behind technique, I become slightly more available, slightly less defended, and slightly more capable of real relationship.

In that sense, “becoming a person” is not just a personal project. It is an ethical one. The more honestly I can inhabit my own humanity, the less I need to use clients to prove anything and the more I can offer them what Rogers keeps describing: a relationship in which it is safe enough to become more truthfully who they already are.

References

1. Freud, S. (1920) *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*. Trans. J. Strachey. Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
2. Jung, C.G. (1959/2010) *Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster*. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Extracted from *The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious*, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1).
3. Rogers, C.R. (1957) ‘The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change’, *Journal of Consulting Psychology*, 21(2), pp. 95–103.
4. Rogers, C.R. (1961) *On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy*. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.