Carl Rogers is well known for his three conditions of unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence, but less well understood is what these look like in practice. Rogers was not proposing a passive sort of therapy in which the therapist smiles, nods, and agrees with whatever the client has said.

In this post, I will correct common misunderstandings about Rogers's approach to therapy and show that, in practice, it involves a much more active and challenging approach than is often thought.

First, it has a clear theoretical rationale. In person-centered therapy, unconditional positive regard is understood to be the healing factor. This is because in Rogers’s theory, it is hypothesized that people’s problems arise from their introjections of conditions of worth—all the 'oughts' and 'shoulds' a person learns early in life about how they need to be to please other people. This results in people having conditional self-regard; they have learned only to value themselves to the extent to which they live up to other people’s expectations. Healthy living, on the other hand, comes about when we learn to value ourselves for who we are and through setting our expectations for ourselves. For this reason, experiencing unconditional positive regard from a therapist can begin to reverse this prior conditioning.

Unconditional positive regard is, however, a hugely misunderstood concept that is often conflated with “liking” someone, but it is not about liking. Positive regard refers to the........

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