Once in a discussion, someone raised the question of how to keep the balance between the attention to “outcomes” and that to “process.”
My view is that when counselors place their primary focus on outcomes, what is most often sacrificed is precisely the outcome itself.
From a person-centered perspective, as long as the six necessary and sufficient conditions are met, counseling will naturally be effective. This premise requires the counselor to genuinely experience the three core conditions. Within this process, there is no requirement to deliberately focus on “outcomes,” regardless of how those outcomes are defined.
In his 1959 paper on the conditions of therapy, Rogers made a point of noting that, after considerable reflection, he chose—when describing the fourth and fifth conditions, namely the counselor’s unconditional positive regard for the client and empathic understanding—to emphasize only the counselor’s inner experience of these conditions, rather than the counselor’s intentional effort to express them. This is because, in the counselor’s authentic inner functioning, these experiences are likely to be conveyed naturally through tone of voice, facial expression, and other subtle channels. As long as they are received by the client, therapeutic change will occur; it does not depend on whether the counselor is attempting to “express” them.
