What is Humanistic Counseling & Therapy

Humanistic counseling is a response that grows from a need.

Non-Humanistic Attitudes

Historically, humanistic counseling was considered part of the “third wave” of psychology, after behaviorism and psychoanalysis. The humanists were concerned that these older approaches were less helpful than they could be because they were:

Deterministic & Pessimistic – Freudians believed that people were basically stuck with themselves as they are, with very limited scope for actual change. The best hope was to be able to accept one’s neuroses, through the ministration of the therapists’ interpretations. Behaviorists believed people could be conditioned to change — by exactly following precise behavioral scripts created by the expert behaviorist.

Authoritarian & Pathologizing – These older approaches center the work on the supposed authority and expertise of the professional, rather than the strengths, creativity and potentialities of the person seeking help. This turns the person into an object of study and manipulation by the therapist. The therapist diagnoses the “patient” and explains what’s “sick” or “wrong” with them. The “patient” then becomes the passive recipient of a quasi-medical “treatment.”

All of this is what the humanists found inhumane. The need being addressed by humanism, then, was how to center the person seeking help as the agent of change.

Humanistic Attitudes

Humanists take a very different approach, based on several attitudes and philosophical assumptions that are really not native to the earlier approaches:

All people have dignity, worth, and are to be treated with an egalitarian respect.
All people have needs, and we best understand ourselves and others through appreciating these needs — including what it is like when they are not met — than to describe people as “sick”.
People do, in fact, have the capacity to grow and change, and will tend to do so under favorable conditions.
People are best understood as wholes, rather than a collection of parts. It is only when we attempt to grasp the persons’ thoughts, feelings and behaviors as one complex interactive process — including interactions between the organism and the environment as well as within the organism — that we can hope to genuinely understand.
Only the person has direct access to their own experience, giving them potential expertise regarding themselves that far exceeds any supposed knowledge of the therapist.

Immediately, then, the relationship between the person and the helper is changed.

Instead of the person going to a helper’s office to be given some thing that they don’t have, they join with the therapist as a team to collectively understand a process. Think of the Wizard of Oz: The wizard can’t give the tin man a heart, or the scarecrow a brain, or the lion courage: they already have these things. (Though they initially don’t see this.) What the therapist “gives” is an authentic process of understanding and acceptance. Therapy, in this view, is not about inserting something alien into the person; instead, it’s about gradually revealing what’s already there, and/or gradually creating something new.

Instead of the analyst sitting behind and out-of-view of the reclining, isolated “patient,” the two sit facing each other in mutual respect and regard.

There are no behaviorist clipboards with graphs and measurements of the “patient” from the outside. There are, strictly speaking, no formal medical diagnoses in humanism.

Essentially, the person seeking help isn’t evaluated, categorized, and instructed, but understood. There is no sense of “scoring” the person, but instead of appreciating and accepting them. A very different sort of relationship indeed.

Abraham Maslow’s View of Needs

Abraham Maslow was perhaps the key early psychological humanist. From his writings we can derive three distinct areas of need:

Safety Needs. This includes the needs for food, clothing, shelter, and whatever protections are required for physical bodily integrity. In the absence of these things, we may be subject to deprivation, exposure or even death, and may feel things like anxiety, fear or terror.
Attachment Needs. Humans (perhaps all mammals), have an innate need for connection, belonging, and support. In the absence of this experience we may feel lonely, isolated, abandoned, sad and uncared for. When an important attachment is severed, we can feel devastated, inconsolable, and broken.
Identity Needs. Besides belonging, humans yearn to grow, improve, and gain skill, competence and independence — to test their abilities against the world, to understand their own likes and dislikes, and to differentiate and distinguish themselves in some fashion. In the absence of these experiences, we can feel misunderstood, unheard/unseen, unimportant, ashamed, invisible, and “like a failure.”

In the tradition I’m trained in, I take it that most people come to therapy because, in some way shape or form, there are needs from one or more of the above categories that remain unmet — and perhaps even unexplored.

The Person-Centered Hypothesis

Carl Rogers, who articulated the first humanistic psychotherapy, stood for a hypothesis (he didn’t call it a belief, he wanted it scientifically testable):

Under the right conditions, over time, people will tend to grow (in competence, confidence, maturity, acceptance, understanding & support of self and connection with others), to do better for themselves, and to feel better.

This innate capacity for growth has gone under many names. Rogers called it the “Actualizing Tendency.” I just call it the “Growth Tendency.” Much of Rogers’ work was devoted to articulating what the ideal conditions are for activating this tendency, and how to implement humanistic attitudes, both inside and outside of “therapy.”

Rogers was a giant of psychotherapy research. He and his colleagues, students and theoretical descendants have published voluminously on the evidence that the Person-Centered hypotheses is true: That, under the right conditions, people will grow, change, do and feel better.

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” — Carl Rogers

Okay, but what does all of this actually look like? What might I expect in a session with a humanistic therapist? See my next post (coming soon!): What is Experiential Therapy?