What Can Carl Rogers Teach Therapists About Trauma?

“Carl Rogers showed how people grow following adversity.”

This article by Dr. Stephen Joseph has been published in Psychology Today. It begins:

“KEY POINTS

• Posttraumatic growth refers to positive psychological changes following trauma.
• Carl Rogers described the process of breakdown and disorganization as leading to becoming more fully functioning.
• A client-centered approach to trauma challenges the trauma industry.

In recent years, there has been much written about posttraumatic growth. Posttraumatic growth is when people report positive psychological changes following trauma. The term posttraumatic growth was coined in 1995 by Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, two clinical researchers based then at the University of North Carolina. It was an important observation that added to an understanding of trauma that was previously restricted to posttraumatic stress.

Surely this was something we already knew? It was. The pioneers of posttraumatic growth have always acknowledged that it is an idea contained in many philosophical and spiritual writings.

And, as I discovered if one looks back to humanistic psychology, it can also be seen in the writings of Carl Rogers, the founder of client-centered therapy.

In a 2004 paper entitled ‘Client‐Centred Therapy, Post‐traumatic Stress Disorder and Post‐traumatic Growth,’ published in the British Psychological Society journal, Psychology and Psychotherapy, I described how Carl Rogers’s theory shows how growth arises out of adversity …”

You can read more from here.