Real Contact

According to Carl Rogers, we all possess a self-actualising tendency: an innate drive towards growth and becoming more fully ourselves. The therapeutic process is, in many ways, about expressing ourselves from a place of authenticity rather than conformity. Whilst many people grow up seeking approval in order to feel accepted, psychotherapy offers the possibility of discovering acceptance within oneself. In the safety of the therapeutic relationship, people begin to define themselves on their own terms and explore new ways of being.

The healing power of relationship

As a psychotherapist, I often walk the fine line between identifying with what a client brings whilst also honouring the uniqueness of their experience. It is a balancing act that requires entering another person’s world without losing sight of the fact that their experience is ultimately their own.

Rogers believed that empathy, genuineness and unconditional positive regard create the conditions in which people feel deeply accepted. As he wrote, to be loved in therapy has “its deepest and most general meaning… that of being deeply understood and deeply accepted.” It is through this experience that self-acceptance begins to emerge and a person’s sense of isolation can gradually lessen.

Humanistic and existential thinkers have long suggested that we do not become ourselves in isolation, but through relationship. Peter F. Schmid (2001) captures this beautifully:

“…the other is the power which liberates the I from oneself. The foundation of self-confidence is not the reflection on oneself but the relationship to the other… The self is born in the relationship to another person.” (pp. 53–54)

The therapeutic relationship offers one such encounter. It provides a space where one person is invited to communicate their thoughts, feelings and experiences, whilst the other seeks to understand them with openness and empathy.

Authentic encounter and growth

The relational theorist Judith Jordan (1991) describes moments of genuine connection in therapy as times when:

“One is both affecting the other and being affected by the other; one extends oneself out to the other and is also receptive to the impact of the other. There is openness to influence, emotional availability, and a constant changing pattern of responding to and affecting the other’s state.” (p. 82)

This kind of mutual presence can only develop when clients feel free to define their experience without fear of judgement, and when therapists are willing to show up as genuine human beings rather than distant experts.

The Gestalt therapists Erving and Miriam Polster perhaps express this most eloquently:

“Contact is not just togetherness or joining. It can only happen between separate beings… At the moment of union, one’s fullest sense of his own person is swept along into a new creation. I am no longer only me, but me and thee make we.” (Gestalt Therapy Integrated, 1973, p. 99)

To me, this captures something essential about psychotherapy. Growth does not occur through techniques alone, but through the experience of an authentic relationship. It is within this encounter that we begin to discover who we are and, perhaps more importantly, that we can become more fully ourselves in the presence of another.

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Laing, R. D. (1977). Self and Others (2^nd Edn.,). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Mearns, D. & Cooper, M. (2005). Working at Relational Depth in Counselling and Psychotherapy. London: Sage.

Polster, E. & Polster, M. (1973). Gestalt Therapy Integrated: Contours of Theory and Practice. New York Random House.

Rogers, C. (1961): On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Schmid, P. F. (2001). Acknowledgement: the art of responding. Dialogical and ethical perspectives on the challenge of unconditional relationships in therapy and beyond. In Bozarth, D. J. & Wilkins, P. (Ed.): Roger’s Therapeutic Conditions: Evolution, Theory and Practice, pp.49-64.