Person-centred therapy supports Rank’s idea that the therapeutic situation consists of experiencing the present (Raskin & Rogers 1989, p. 161). Within that context, person-centred therapists rely on empathic reflecting to facilitate the process of experiencing. It is the preferred technique in person-centred therapy. The therapist attempts to “capture an integrated message,” trying to articulate as much as possible what the person is expressing and feeling. The therapist’s role is to retrain or re-educate the person’s attentive capacity, by focusing especially on feelings, precluding the use of other dimensions (Anderson 1974, p.40).
Tomlinson and Whitney (1970) put it this way: the therapist must understand what the grieved person says and feels, including surface and implicit meaning, and express that understanding to the person (p. 464). Although the words “reflection” and “reflecting” did not appear in the particular citations I found, they are words used to refer to the kind of response described here. Grieved persons are facilitated by joint processing of the person’s experiencing, in which the therapist works both with the person and slightly ahead of the “person’s ability to organize” the material (Anderson 1974, p.136).
Similarly, the grieved person’s awareness may expand when the therapist rephrases statements which may be on the borderline of the grieved person’s consciousness (Rogers 1965, p. 108). Gendlin (1974) says person-centred responding must be the baseline for all other responding, and he requires “exact specificity,” as opposed to approximations of what the grieved person said. He asks therapists to always, without exception, ask the person to go inside to find out if what the therapist expressed is identical to what the person feels, rather than an approximation.
This helps persons hold on to their feelings. If therapists do this, they are free to do anything they wish (pp. 214-216). Gendlin’s experiential therapy is based on the same kind of reflection used in person-centred therapy. Reflecting also helps the therapist facilitate the grieved person’s discovery of meanings, without resorting to interpretation (Raskin & Rogers 1989, p. 159). When the therapist responds to the grieved person’s internal frame of reference, grieved persons tend to express more from that place.
When grieved persons focus on the felt sense of a dilemma, instead of trying to solve the problem, they became aware of new possibilities for resolution. When advice is given, the grieved person will not become aware of the best options to resolve a problem (Tomlinson & Whitney 1970, p. 459). The basic concept involved in openness to experience is the process of assimilation. This involves assimilating self-relevant experience. This process allows the bereft persons person to answer fundamental questions about self, such as who one is or how one feels.
It is an extremely complex process, involving ” gestalts of changing experience. ” It cannot be analysed with rational, linear or uni-dimensional constructs (Pearson 1974, pp. 147-148). Beck’s Cognitive Therapy: A Rational Approach to Grief In this part of the paper it will be necessary to investigate the possibility of a rational approach to help facilitate a set of emotional reactions related to bereavement. This discussion will be helpful in determining how counsellor can or could influence the grief process. I will be referring to works of Albert Ellis, Robert Harper and Aaron Beck.
The former two are the founders of rational cognitive therapy. Grief is an emotional process, as we have seen. According to Ellis and Harper (1961) our emotions form a process which is influenced “by and influences three other processes, namely: perceiving, thinking and acting (all four influence each other). Reading their book has shown me that they consider thinking to be the most important process behind the emotions. They even go as far as saying that “… truly rational thinking almost inevitably leads to pleasant emotions of varying degrees of intensity.
” (1961, p. 16) Thus they believe that thinking influences emotions to a great extent. Rational thinking, to them, means thinking that is sensible, efficient and non-self-defeating, which is thinking that evokes positive, pleasant emotions. Aaron Beck affirms these statements by saying that “… the common psychological disorders centre around certain aberrations in thinking. ” (1976, p. 213) Beck stresses the importance of thinking even more than do Ellis and Harper, who also talk about the role of acting and perceiving.
In Beck’s psychological model an emotion is preceded by a conscious “meaning” preceded by a stimulus. The stimulus is given a “meaning” through thought by the individual before the emotion follows. In his own words: The thesis that the special meaning of an event determines the emotional response forms the core of the cognitive model of emotions and emotional disorders. The meaning is encased in a cognition—a thought or an image. (Beck 1976, p. 52 ) There are differences between “public” and “private” meanings.
What is important is what meaning a particular event has for a person. Beck believes that in many cases when a person over-reacts to a particular event, it is due to the fact that “his misinterpretation comprises a web of incorrect meanings (which) he has attached to the situation. ” (Beck 1976, p. 49) In therapy sessions he let patients discover how their feelings were related to their thoughts. He says of the results: “Each of the patients was aware of having had a sequence of thoughts that intervened between the event and the unpleasant emotional reactions.
“(Beck 1976, p. 26) In this context he discusses automatic thoughts, which he characterizes as being specific and discrete, autonomous, plausible to the patient and idiosyncratic in content. So he makes the point that we are often not conscious of the fact that thoughts precede our emotions. Both Ellis and Harper on the one hand, and Beck on the other hand claim that much emotional pain can be eradicated through rational therapy. The method that Ellis and Harper use is that of looking for the irrational ideas that lie behind the emotions related to bereavement.
For instance, they argue that the irrational idea that basically causes anxiety is the idea that if something causes fear, the person ought to be obsessed with that and terribly upset about that thing. Beck emphasizes the automatic thoughts more as causing many anxieties. But all three believe that the erroneous thinking causes the anxiety. This is the first step, to find out which thoughts bring about certain emotions related to bereavement. After these facts have been determined, changes.