A difficult lesson to learn when first training to become a person-centred counsellor is how unhelpful it is to try and "help" your clients.
If by "help" you mean providing a therapeutic relationship that gives clients the safety and security to explore difficult areas, ultimately allowing them to work through obstacles, then yes, that is helpful.
However, if— as is very common at the start of training— "help" means offering practical suggestions or making subjective assertions about the situations clients raise, then no, that approach is not helpful.
It’s hard to let go of this instinct. It goes against everything we learn from friends, family, and society. How often have you heard advice like this:
"Well, if I were you, I would…"
"That happened to me once, so what I did was…"
"I read about this in an article once; what it said you should do is…"
How often did you find those responses helpful? Probably not very often. When these responses felt comforting, it was likely not because of the words but because it felt like someone was listening. Sitting with another person, shutting out the rest of the world, was the comforting element—not their specific responses.
In truth, those types of responses aren’t genuine listening, at least not in a person-centred therapy (PCT) sense. They operate from the listener’s frame of reference. Suppose I share that I am sad because my dog just died, and you tell me about your dog that died three years ago. Any fleeting sense of solidarity evaporates because my fresh grief feels diluted by someone else’s historical loss. Even if it’s an unconscious feeling, there’s a subtle awareness that before I came to you, I was grieving my dog, but now I am also thinking about yours.
Solution-providing is the worst of these responses because it is based on flawed assumptions:
- My problem and yours are not the same. They may have similarities, but those similarities are superficial at best.
- You may know how you felt about your problem, but you cannot possibly understand how I feel about mine.
- Your solution was tailored for your experience and is not universal. You cannot "cookie-cut" solutions.
- Your solution was forged through your unique processing of the experience—your thoughts, emotions, and richly symbolic and cognitive framework.
- Language complicates things further. Words carry different meanings, importance, and symbolism for you than they do for me.
Giving advice or solutions is, at best, unhelpful and, at worst, damaging to the therapeutic relationship. Clients who have spent their lives feeling unheard or talked at may feel invalidated yet again by having to absorb another opinion.
When you operate in a non-directive manner, you instinctively recognize that none of these responses are helpful. This realization can be a shock when you first begin training. You may encounter clients whose issues seem to have such "simple" solutions, and it’s tempting to think their lives could be made easier if only they considered "x" or "y."
This can leave you feeling powerless and frustrated, believing that if a client comes to you in a state of anxiety or incongruence, you must "do something." The mistake lies in thinking that action is the only form of doing and that just listening—providing the core conditions—is inaction. As you progress in your training, you learn that "doing nothing" (not providing solutions but working in a non-directive way) is, in fact, the only logical and effective approach.
Once you make this shift, it becomes impossible to unsee. I have now reached a point where I feel no anxiety about not offering solutions or advice. I simply go wherever the client wants to go, providing the safety and security of the core conditions.
Training in this way has another ramification: the gradual realization that many people in your life—friends, family, colleagues—do not listen well. It can be shocking to discover that people you once thought of as good listeners might be quite the opposite.
How do you deal with that?
I have concluded that it depends on the spirit in which their listening is offered. Friends and family are not counsellors. When they offer bad suggestions or bring up their own similar experiences, it isn’t necessarily poor listening—it might simply be their way of trying to connect. Often, it’s the only way they know how, whether through habit or societal convention.
I now look for what lies beneath their words. If a listener tells me about their dead dog to connect with my grief, I see it as background noise to a deeper connection. However, if they bring up their dog to redirect attention back to themselves, I recognize that this person might not be a safe choice for counsel. Over time, we develop a natural skill to identify who can and cannot offer meaningful, in-depth conversations. Training in the PCT approach strengthens that skill.