A person who can grow, and three attitudes

Counseling is described as an approach to a personal problem through a democratic conversation, not through instruction or coercion. A personal problem is not something that has to be made public or opened for debate; it is a private concern of a particular person. When the aim of counseling is set only at solving a problem at the level of common sense, repeating or serious trouble can even be made worse. That limit helped make a more careful, scholarly approach necessary. One such approach, set out here with chapter 8 of a 2011 KOCW lecture by Cha Jung-sub, is person-centered counseling.

The person in this theory is taken as trustworthy, able to arrive at understanding, and moved both to exercise potential as far as it will go and, when the conditions around them allow, to set a direction and develop. That motive is called self-actualization. If an atmosphere of unconditional respect and trust is given, the client is expected to grow and to move toward self-actualization. Because the client can grow and develop, responsibility for the aims and the process is placed with the client. For counseling to work, the counselor’s attitude and the relationship between counselor and client are treated as more important than the counselor’s knowledge, theory, or technique.

Three attitudes are named: congruence, unconditional respect and acceptance, and accurate empathic understanding. Understanding the client’s phenomenological world is also treated as very important. The concept of the “self” is an integrative, overall idea a person holds in relation to characteristics formed in relationships with oneself and with others. The motive and tendency of self-actualization point to a potential to trust or understand the self. Psychological trouble is read as arising from the experience of a gap between the actual self and the ideal self. The ideal self is the self-concept tied to the characteristics a person most wants to have, or values most highly. When conditions are adequate, experiencing what one is experiencing as it is — not hiding it because it sits badly with an outside value standard — and taking it as part of oneself is called congruence between self-concept and experience.

The aim of change is to help a person become a more fully functioning person, and to help that person see a true self and accept it as it is. Unconditional respect and acceptance means the counselor should not judge the client by the counselor’s own value standard, because that is a way of going wrong. Accurate empathic understanding means feeling the client’s emotion as if it were one’s own, without falling so far into the feeling that objectivity is lost. Congruence, or genuineness, means that the counselor’s experience and the words used to describe it should match, and that feelings should be expressed more freely. That genuine way of coming toward the client is called the most important of the counselor’s attitudes. The method of contact, more than a variety of techniques, is what is said to help the client’s change along.

The counselor’s part, and a conversation that does not close too soon

Rogers sets the aim a little apart from older approaches: a person should be able to reach greater independence and integration. The therapeutic focus is the person, not only the problem now in hand. The work is not simply to solve that problem, but to help a growth process so that troubles being met now, and troubles that will be met later, can be faced more adequately. The client is helped to understand an internal frame of reference more accurately, so that a change of behavior can be for the better in both the inner and the outer world. The counselor’s part is to offer facilitating conditions in which the client can explore and respect a world of experience. Through that relationship, the process of attributing worth to the self can be renewed and strengthened. A person may then recover an internal center of evaluation, stay flexible, keep a finer differentiation, and take past and present experience into account together.

In conversation, the counselor is asked to look for a way of talking with the client that actually works. Responses that get in the way include advice given too early, teaching, too many questions, or a statement of the counselor’s own experience. Advice offered at the beginning is hard to fit, because the counselor does not yet know the client’s character well enough, and does not yet have the kind of influence that would make that advice land. Alternatives offered too soon are often set aside after a try or two. A counselor may also feel stuck when a judgmental attitude toward the client’s behavior creeps in, when the problem is judged to lie beyond the counselor’s range, or when a competitive tone enters the work.

A case is recalled of people who felt compassion for an offender who had grown up unloved, and who understood that this history had a part in a cruel crime. Later, the same person, seeing the families of those who had been harmed, sincerely regretted what had been done and turned to religion. Empathy and a genuine understanding are read here as having changed an attitude and a belief, and as a reminder that unconditional regard can help a person recognize a problem, work through it, and move toward growth and self-actualization. The counseling process itself is summed up as this: through the counselor’s unconditional respect and trust, the client comes to trust and respect the self, forms a more positive self-concept, and moves toward growth and self-actualization. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A Korean discussion of person-centered counseling and the counselor’s role, drawing on chapter 8 of Cha Jung-sub’s 2011 KOCW lecture.

Last updated: 14 November 2026