Take our Do I Need Therapy?

Find a therapist near me

Client-centered therapy is often caricatured as a therapist sitting, nodding, and smiling.

Carl Rogers saw the ability of people to listen to each other as fundamental to human relationships.

Empathy, genuineness, and unconditional regard are vital for therapeutic change.

Carl Rogers is probably one of the most well-known names in psychology of all time. His work is still often featured in introductory textbooks, even though he died almost 40 years ago in 1987. He is best remembered for developing client-centered therapy in the 1940s and 1950s. At the time, it was a radical new way of doing therapy because it turned the world of therapy on its head.

Therapy was no longer something that the therapist did to a patient; it was about creating a relationship that freed the client to be an active agent for their own change. This was a truly innovative approach that went against the grain of previous psychoanalytic or behavioral therapies, and to this day, it is an idea that permeates the helping professions.

Few therapists or psychologists today will not be influenced by Rogers and his idea that it was not so much what the therapist did to a client, but the way in which they related to a client. Specifically, he is remembered for proposing that empathy, genuineness, and unconditional regard are three of the conditions that are necessary and sufficient for therapeutic change.

Unfortunately, fewer psychologists and therapists study Rogers’s work in detail anymore, but instead get their understanding of his theories and ideas from textbooks written by authors who themselves got their understanding from another textbook, and like in the game of telephone, in which messages are whispered from person to person, Rogers’s work has become misunderstood, diluted, and misrepresented.

The most common misrepresentation is that of client-centered therapy itself, which is often caricatured as a therapist sitting nodding, smiling, and agreeing with a client, as if that was what unconditional positive regard, empathy, and genuineness looked like. Not surprisingly, many therapists think they need to do something more than this, not realizing that it is just a caricature and that good therapy, as Rogers discovered, is not about what you do but about how you do it.

Not surprisingly, the ability to provide unconditional, empathic, and genuine relationships for others is not something that comes easily. Part of the problem is that when we think about unconditional positive regard, empathy, and genuineness, they can be hard to imagine. The reason is that many of us rarely experience being in relationships that have these qualities to a high degree. Perhaps we have never experienced such a relationship. As such, it is possible to understand the words but not to relate to them more personally, such that we truly feel what such a deep empathic relationship could be like. It is like describing hot to someone who has only ever experienced cold.

For many of us, it may be easier to imagine the opposite. Imagine always feeling looked down upon, judged, not understood, manipulated, and so on. Such relationships are more common than ones that are unconditional, empathic, and genuine.

I would say from my years of experience working in the education of therapists, and from my own training as a therapist, that these are qualities that can take many years to hone and develop in oneself. It is not easy to unlearn the more familiar ways of relating to other people. In essence, becoming a client-centered therapist in the way described by Rogers is about becoming someone who is accepting, empathic, and genuine with others, not as an act for the duration of the therapy hour, or as a set of skills used from a manual, but as a person for whom this is their default setting. It is their way of being, to use Rogers's phrase.

Take our Do I Need Therapy?

Find a therapist near me

In this way, Rogers’s work is overlooked; his concepts can seem so familiar that it is possible to walk past them every day without noticing them, or think we know them when we do not, only seeing the caricature of the nodding, smiling therapist. It is almost 80 years on from when Rogers was first writing about these ideas, and so familiar have the words become in that time that the power of what they mean has been forgotten, or, as in the game of telephone, misrepresented.

Rogers saw the ability of people to truly listen to each other as fundamental to what therapy was and to the positive development of all human relationships. Sadly, many modern-day psychologists have gone back to the idea that therapy is about doing things to people and lost sight of the power of relationships. The idea of a way of being that Rogers talked about has, for many, become simply a way of doing.

But think about the power that unconditional positive regard, empathy, and genuineness bring to any relationship. Imagine listening to someone with no other intention than to understand them, to have no agenda for the person other than what they have for themselves, and to be like this consistently, regardless of what they say or do. When was the last time you truly listened to someone else in that way, or experienced being listened to like that?

Joseph, S. (2025). The Humanistic Psychology of Carl Rogers. Understanding the Person-Centered Approach. Oxford. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-humanistic-psychology-of-carl-rogers-9780197790601?cc=gb&lang=en&

Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change, Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21, 95–103.

© Psychology Today