Aims Traditionally in person‐centred therapy (PCT), clients are counselled for as long as required. It is a nondirective process. Recently, financial constraints have introduced time limits for therapy in health care, so it seemed appropriate to revisit the practice of PCT in the current UK context. The aim was to explore the concepts of learning and change within PCT and to consider whether learning is facilitated. Method Five experienced person‐centred therapists, who were involved in educating therapists, participated in semi‐structured interviews. Questions explored their views on learning and change in therapy, whether learning processes can be facilitated in PCT—both philosophically and practically—and the outcomes of PCT. Therapists were not specifically asked about time pressure, but rather it was left to see if it emerged as an issue. Results Ten major themes emerged: learning and change, goals, learning process, PCT process, issues on nondirectivity/directivity, questioning, outcomes, assessment and diagnosis, and other methods used. The issue of time pressure permeated many of these themes. Views were often contradictory reflecting the inconclusive views in the literature, particularly in relation to how clients learn and the relationship between change and learning. Discussion The issue of directivity seemed to cause cognitive dissonance, with participants wanting to be directive to deal with time pressures, but not wanting to be disloyal to Rogers' PCT principles. Processes of learning and change were acknowledged as important, but little clarity was obtained on their current application.

This study collated person-centred therapists' views on their use of questions in person-centred counselling. It asked whether the therapists considered that questions are useful and how they seek to implement them. Six experienced person-centred therapists were interviewed and their comments analysed using Thematic Analysis. Therapy transcripts by Rogers and Mearns were also analysed to obtain examples of their questioning techniques. Results suggested that these person-centred therapists ask questions regularly for many reasons including; to check their understanding or to clarify an issue for the client; to challenge the client; to enable the client's processing; and sometimes just out of curiosity. However generally, questions were used to represent the counsellor's way of being and subtly facilitate progress in the counselling relationship.

This study seeks clarity on the definition of the 'fully functioning' individual to enable clients to define their own therapeutic aims in humanistic therapy. The definition and use of therapeutic aims or goals is not common in humanistic therapy. However, the potential for utilising goal setting is discussed in the context of Rogers' ideas on selfdirected learning, which could be applied to humanistic therapy. A simple description of Rogers' notion of a fully functioning person would give the client a start point from which to define their own hopes for emotional growth, which could then engage goal-directed behaviour. As a result, humanistic therapy may be more efficient as clients focus their processing towards specified outcomes. Further, a clear sense of personal direction and self-efficacy may enable clients to manage their own therapeutic development on a self-therapy basis.Initially, a literature review was undertaken to collate existing descriptions of a fully functioning person or ideal humanistic outcomes. These were condensed into a list of items, which were then distributed to 35 therapists for ratification through a Delphi study. Group consensus was reached, and the resulting list was then simplified so that it could be easily understood by a sample of the general public. The final outcome was a list of 71 items describing a fully functioning individual in simple terms.

This study addressed the possibility of integrating learning theory into humanistic counseling. We consider that such an approach may enable client self-counseling either between sessions or after therapy has finished. Carl Rogers was a keen advocate of person-centered learning facilitation in the classroom and his principles of learning provide a natural start-point for a humanistic therapy based on learning theory. A variety of other learning processes also lend themselves to a learning based therapy such as establishing client learning goals based on self-efficacy, enabling the client to understand their own learning processes and blocks to learning, encouraging the client to access their own learning resources, and then enabling long-term learning. A case study was therefore designed to test some of these processes in a therapeutic setting. A White, British, middle-aged female was recruited for the case study. During the course of six sessions, the content of which was analyzed using thematic analysis, a selection of learning processes were applied to the humanistic therapeutic process. In summary, it was established that facilitated learning processes could provide a practically acceptable basis for humanistic counseling, and these processes are offered here as the foundation to a model of “therapeutic learning.”

This qualitative study considered whether the provision of a framework of potential goals based on Rogers’ idea of the fully functioning person would be of any benefit to therapy clients in their goal setting process. It also considered addressed whether client goal setting was methodologically acceptable to integrative therapists who used Rogers’ non-directive principles as the foundation to their approach. We provided a goal setting instrument to 9 therapists and 23 of their clients, enabling them to define therapy goals, and feedback on the process. The clients set their goals using the instruments, before having at least six sessions with their therapist. We then sought joint views on the process from the therapists through a questionnaire or an interview. The data from the responses were analyzed using Thematic Analysis. The majority of the therapists considered that guided goal setting using a description of the ‘fully functioning’ individual was helpful. In terms of the applicability of goal setting to an integrative approach based on non-directive, person-centered principles, the results were mixed and in some cases contrary to those expected. For example, some of the more directive therapists disliked guided goal setting processes, whilst the more non-directive therapists appreciated the approach.