This week our tutor asked us to watch Carl Rogers have a counselling session with Gloria in the now-infamous Three Approaches to Psychotherapy from 1965 and give our feedback on it.
First of all, I must say that his body language was impeccable. He was leaning forward, showing interest throughout. He was always listening intently, nodding and verbally acknowledging everything Gloria says. I don’t think he took his eyes off of Gloria or moved his head to the side at all. His voice was calm and very slow and deliberate in its cadence; it made Gloria very relaxed, quite quickly. She even mentioned as much.
Carl reflected Gloria’s feelings back to her several times, and before paraphrasing her, he said that “I’ve heard you say” or “This is what I’ve heard”, and ended the sentence with a questioning inflection, as if he were asking her if what he heard was correct. And the one time he did get it wrong, she said so, and corrected him. Something as simple as your tone of voice can be a potent tool. Also, “I’d like to understand that” is a powerful phrase. In getting Gloria to expand on what she said and what she meant by it really helped her to clarify things in her own mind as well as allowing Carl to better understand things.
The image Carl had in his mind of the triangle consisting of people in general, her body and her mind, all not agreeing with each other, which he conveyed so eloquently to Gloria, really convinced me that he had grasped the situation. Judging by her response, I felt that his analogy convinced her that he had grasped her situation as well.
He sat with the silence in the room several times, allowing Gloria time to think and reflect, even after she told him that it made her a little uncomfortable. Sometimes I can see her telepathically attempting to make him say something and break the silence – and a couple of times he did start to say something or talk over her just as she was going to say something.
I felt that the phrase “What is it you wish I would say to you?” was so powerful. It made her, whether she realised it or not, answer her own question. Then after she had explained her answer, Carl remarked that she sounded so sure of herself, and she was surprised by that. She had basically answered her own question, expressed her true desires, but she didn’t want to act on her answer until the authority (in this case, Carl Rogers) told her she was allowed to.
Carl was not going to do this, he was not going to tell her what to do either way – she needed to realise that she should have an internal locus of evaluation, and that she is her own authority. This is further reinforced by him not asking questions about her daughter or her ex-husband, or her new man, the focus was on her, 100%. In fact, he didn’t ask that many questions, mainly because Gloria explained things very well in the first instance, but also because any other details were superfluous. He got right to the meat of Gloria’s problem very quickly.
A couple of times in the session I felt that Carl maybe felt how I feel sometimes in roleplays – really not knowing what to say next or how to avoid answering a direct question, but saying something like “that’s tough”, and going back a few beats and paraphrasing something the client had already gone over, but then again, the times Carl did do that, Gloria came back with a different thought. I feel like I need to watch those parts again to make sense of them.
I thought the comment he made about her being a “pretty nice daughter” was a bit too close for comfort. There was an amount of transference in this interaction, with Carl taking the place of her father, and Gloria being a “pretty nice daughter”, this much was clear. I thought it was not at all professional and wouldn’t be appropriate in these modern times, but it did really open her up about how her father expected her to be perfect and how he never really truly heard her. Juxtapose this with Carl repeating variations of “I hear you”, and then assuming the male parental role – it’s no wonder she opened up so much.
A few of my classmates didn’t think Carl did a good job in this counselling session and thought he was a bit creepy. Personally, I enjoyed watching it, and it was part of the inspiration for me to want to become a counsellor myself. The amount of change that I saw in Gloria in this half an hour convinced me that if he can do this in thirty minutes, then it’s possible for me to harness my natural empathy and relationship building ability, and learn how to affect such change, clarity and relief in others.
