I think the basic intention of every psychotherapist is to provide the best environment for his or her client and, to that end, psychotherapists use what seems to be appropriate and effective. Nonetheless, there needs to be a foundation, or base, from which to begin. This foundation provides the general principles we utilize in our work and suggests techniques that might be effective.
In general, I use a person-centered approach which is a type of humanistic psychotherapy with existential influences. The person-centered approach was developed by Carl Rogers (1951, 1961, 1980) over a period of several decades, and it represented a substantial break from both psychoanalysis and behavioral psychologies.
The essence of person-centered psychotherapy is an assumption that each person has an inherent impulse toward growth and that each person has the capacity for self-direction. There is a focus on the inherent worth and dignity of each person; this is not a deficit model, but a model that emphasizes that people have great giftedness that they are not always in touch with.
For Rogers (1951) every human being is born with innate capacities and potentialities that can be fulfilled if the environment is conducive to that. The goal of life, then, is for the individual to self-actualize, to become that person they were meant to be, or created to be. Rogers believed that actualizing tendency characterized all creatures, not just human beings, but that only human beings have the awareness to be self-actualizing.
However, most people do not become fully self-actualized, or fully functioning persons, as Rogers indicated (Rogers, 1961). In his understanding, such people are self-directed, open to experience, and increasingly able to recognize who they are and make that a reality. They make use of their full potential, or fulfill their genetic blueprint, as Rogers thought of it.
One of the main things that interferes with t...