Person Center Therapy Approach

Mary comes to therapy with many issues. She is going through a divorce, she feels inadequate to enter the workforce, and she has entered a depressive state where she does not take care of herself or her children. Now that Mary wants to make a difference in her life she is seeking help to “feel better about herself as a person and to get her life back.” It would be up to a person center oriented therapist to not solve her problems, but to insist on her personal growth. Throughout Mary’s adult life she took care of others. She was a stay at home mother who raised four children and was a wife to an alcoholic, abusive husband. She is falling into a state of depression that has left her feeling hopeless and helpless. Mary has an increasing desire to have someone else love and understand her, but what she really needs is to love and understand herself. She has put so much of herself into helping other’s she is left feeling exhausted and incapable of taking care of herself let alone anyone else. She has depleted all of her emotional capabilities; therefore she has been left with lack of sleep, an unhealthy diet and weight, and an increasingly short temper with her children. However, Mary has a desire to enhance her livelihood, she wants to change her immediate state, and therefore she is seeking therapeutic help to become a fully functioning individual. In order to become a fully functioning individual she must become aware of her masked façade, which she developed through the process of socialization. Throughout her lifetime she has been socialized to fit specific gender roles and she has complied to a more traditional approach where her domineering husband made all the money while she stayed home with the kids. Now that her husband wants a divorce her role as a stay at home Mom is about to change. This can lead Mary feeling isolated and anxious and all she wants is someone to understand her predicament. She has not done it all on her own before and