Person-centred therapy, founded by Carl Rogers, offers shamanic work a way of being with people that does not take their power away. Its trust in each person’s own drive to grow, its core conditions of empathy, genuineness and acceptance, and its refusal to advise or interpret are at the heart of how Therapeutic Shamanism is practised.
Who was Carl Rogers, and what is person-centred therapy? #
Carl Rogers was one of the pioneers of humanistic psychotherapy, and the founder of the person-centred approach. His approach was different from the psychoanalysis before it, in which the therapist was the expert: “Rather than the therapist directing the therapy by using interpretative methods, Rogers believed that the therapist and the client should meet as equals. In person-centred therapy, the therapist follows the client’s lead, and helps the client to uncover their own solutions.”1
“Unlike Freud, who believed that people were inherently selfish until socialised, Rogers believed that people were inherently good.”2 See Why does Therapeutic Shamanism bring shamanism and psychotherapy together?
What is the actualising tendency? #
A drive in every living thing to become what it can be. Rogers saw it as “a life-force, and a drive in all creatures to make the very best of their existence and reach their full potential.” Rogers, who grew up on a farm, illustrated it with potatoes. “The potato is innately its own expert at being the healthy potato plant that it was meant to be. All it needs is the right environment to grow in.” The same is true of people: “The client is the expert at growing and blossoming into who they were meant to be.”3
Rogers told the story himself. Potatoes stored in a dark cellar would still send out pale sprouts towards a distant window: “under the most adverse circumstances, they were striving to become. Life would not give up, even if it could not flourish.”4 For a shamanic practitioner, this trust is a foundation: “we need to work in ways that create the conditions to help people find their own power.”5
What are the core conditions? #
The qualities of relationship that Rogers found allow people to grow. In A Way of Being he names genuineness, in which the therapist is open and transparent to the client; acceptance or caring, which he had called unconditional positive regard, in which the therapist “prizes the client in a total rather than a conditional way”; and empathy, in which the therapist “senses accurately the feelings and personal meanings that the client is experiencing”.6
Critics had expected person-centred work to make people selfish. Instead, “far from becoming more selfish, in being treated with compassion and respect, and in learning to trust their inner-nature, people became more compassionate, less judgemental, more co-operative and empathic.”7 Therapeutic Shamanism works with an expanded set of these conditions. See What is Therapeutic Shamanism?
Why does this matter so much for shamanic practitioners? #
Because shamanism can easily be practised from a position of power over people. Think of an owl who sets itself up as the expert and pushes a young sparrow, unsure whether it is ready to fly, off a cliff. In his twenties Paul Francis saw many shamanic practitioners disempowering the people they meant to help, and he returned to shamanism only once he had learnt “how to practise it in a more person-centred and empowering way”. That is why the principles of the person-centred approach are also at the heart of his work and of Therapeutic Shamanism.8
“This is why Therapeutic Shamanism draws so heavily from the practices of Person-Centred counselling, because the Person-Centred approach is rooted in the principle of respecting other people’s autonomy.” In this, it is rooted in “what turns out to be an ancient hunter-gatherer way of being.”9 See How does animism understand power and hierarchy?
What are conditions of worth? #
The conditions we have to meet to be accepted. Rogers “referred to ‘conditions of worthConditions of worth. Carl Rogers’s term for the conditions placed on love and acceptance in childhood, internalised as conditions of self-worth: the wonky stories of the middle-world self that override the Soul’s original instructions. More about this’. These are the conditions that we must meet in order for other people to accept us”. In meeting them, we learn to police ourselves, and to send away the parts of us that are not accepted. “Rogers said that doing this opens a gap up between our real-self, and what he called the self-concept”. The self-concept “is also sometimes referred to as the ‘persona'”, the mask we wear.10 For Therapeutic Shamanism, this is a large part of how soul loss happens in modern life. See What are child, orphan, fort-holder and protector parts?
