CARL ROGERS REFLECTIVE LISTENING DOWNLOAD

In it, the party who needs to vent realizes that the listener or mediator is there for them. I have called my approach the Non-Directive Empathic Listening method. But he continually interrupted their thoughts to offer these empathic reflections. What I noticed is that Carl Rogers had no trouble getting people into this deep thinking. At first people begin to speak very quickly as they share those things that they know well, but in time they speak slower with an increasing number and depth of these pauses. Most often, the individual looks downwards when they have entered this deep moment of reflection. When a person begins to really feel understood, she goes into her own world and breaks eye contact with the mediator or therapist. Instead, Carl felt compelled to actively reflect what his clients where feeling. Rogers was not afraid of silence, but he rarely used it to advantage. It is not that Carl Rogers was incapable of respecting pauses. I did the same by not interrupting their pauses and through an empathic countenance encouraging them to take their time to think and to share as they were ready to do so. Rogers constantly interrupted his clients to show them that he was accompanying them in their journey into the deepest recesses of their thinking. Rogers shows empathy through his empathic reflections.

And I realized that my students were right all along. I tried to read everything Rogers I could get my hands on. I grew increasingly tired of these remarks, so I decided to go beyond Client-Centered Therapy and began to listen to the various recordings of therapeutic interviews between Carl Rogers and his clients. “I am a therapist,” was a typical comment, “And I find it really difficult to transition to this new approach.” This was the case again with my students in mid-2020. And then embraced it with much excitement. Many individuals in the helping professionals at first reacted with unbelief and resistance to the method. Over the years I had received numerous comments about how unique the listening approach was. Among the students we had participants who were psychologists and therapists. My job was to train and form mediators using the PDM approach. In mid-2020 I was invited by the Fundación Creo Familia (a play on words on creating and believing in family) to be the director of their mediation efforts. I retired as an emeritus academic of the University of California in 2014 and continued to offer workshops and seminars after returning to Chile, the country of my birth. The first being especially useful to deal with our own conflicts while the second, perfect for listening to the parties who were seeking mediation. I explained that Rogers taught two different types of listening: active listening and empathic listening. For the next 17 years I would credit Carl Rogers for the listening approach in my books, articles, and workshops.

CARL ROGERS REFLECTIVE LISTENING DOWNLOAD

The idea was to underscore the fact that they were there to speak to each other with minimal interference from the third party (for those who are interested, the methodology is detailed in the third edition of my book, Party-Directed Mediation: Facilitating Dialogue Between Individuals, a free download as a public service of the University of California).Īround 2003, I read Carl Rogers’ seminal work, Client-Centered Therapy, which had a profound effect on my listening approach. In essence, it involves pre-caucuses with the parties and eventually bringing them together into a joint session where the mediator sits thirteen or so feet away. I developed what at that time was a somewhat controversial approach, Party-Directed Mediation (PDM). In the 1990s I began mediating deep-seated interpersonal conflicts. I want to thank Clare Fowler for her excitement and willingness to encourage me to write this paper months ago, when I was first seeking to publish my findings. It is based on a happy misunderstanding of Carl Rogers. In this paper I will share how I found out that the listening approach I have used for almost two decades was completely unique.

Carl rogers reflective listening