27/04/2026
Embodying the Change We Hope to See
A reflective article for the online event on the future of the person-centred approach 26.4.26
by Patricia Foster
The theme of this conference asks something very real of the person-centred community: how can we
embody the change we hope to see in the wider world?
For me, this is an important question because it asks not only what we believe, but how we are with one another when things become difficult , when there is hurt, tension, disagreement, misunderstanding, exclusion, or silence. It asks whether the values we speak about so often are truly alive in our communal life, or whether they sometimes remain more visible in our theory than in our relationships. What comes especially to mind for me is Eugene Gendlin’s understanding that human experiencing is
always more intricate than the concepts and language already available to us. Very often, what matters most in human life is not yet fully formed, not yet clearly speakable, and sometimes not yet culturally permitted to be spoken. If that is so, then some of the ruptures within our own communities may not arise only from differences in theory or opinion, but also because we do not yet have the language, or
the relational space, to speak from the lived edge of what is actually there.
This matters deeply, because the person-centred tradition was never only about what happens in the therapy space. Carl Rogers did not keep the core conditions safely inside therapy. He understood empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard as ways of meeting people more broadly, in education, in groups, in conflict, and in public life. He trusted that genuine encounter could be transformative, not only for clients, but for relationships, communities, and even divided societies. So perhaps one of the questions for us now is whether something of that wider courage has been lost. Have we kept the language, but become more cautious in living it?
Tending Our Own Garden
How do we recognise and soothe the fault-lines within the person-centred community?
Perhaps the first thing is to recognise that these fault-lines are not only theoretical. They are also deeply human. They involve hurt, disappointment, rivalry, exclusion, fear of speaking plainly, fear of not belonging, and all the large and small silences that shape life in a community.
They may also be intensified by the way our professional world is now organised. The increasing
emphasis on qualifications, accreditation, regulation, and defensible standards may be necessary in many ways, but it can also have a shadow side. We can become so concerned with legitimacy, recognition, and professional safety that our relational capacities begin to narrow. We may become
more careful, but less open; more correct, but less present; more qualified, but not always more able to meet one another humanly.
From a Gendlinian perspective, conflict often persists when people can speak only from fixed positions, inherited concepts, or professional identities. Something more implicit, more vulnerable, and more alive remains outside the conversation. So tending our own garden may mean more than trying to soothe wounds after they appear. It may also mean asking whether our professional cultures sometimes reward compliance more than encounter, and certainty more than living process.
Rogers is foundational here, because he understood that growth depends on a climate. If there is not enough safety, enough trust, enough freedom to be real, then people move toward defensiveness rather than openness. Winnicott adds something important as well: under pressure, both people and
communities can become organised around compliance rather than aliveness. A field can look ethical, orderly, and professional, while inwardly losing touch with what is most real. So perhaps tending our own garden means creating spaces where people can speak more truthfully, without immediate retreat
into role, theory, or self protection.
From Rupture to Repair
Which relational practices transform disagreement into creative growth?
Repair is not simply agreement, and it is not the quick restoration of harmony. Gendlin’s phrase
“carrying forward” is so important here. Sometimes growth comes not by resolving tension too quickly, but by staying with what is unclear, unfinished, or difficult until a more exact and living meaning begins to emerge.
Rogers reminds us that congruence is not performance, politeness, or sounding reasonable. It is the willingness to be real in relationship. And that is demanding. It means not hiding behind our professional roles. It means allowing ourselves to be present as persons. Jessica Benjamin’s work on mutual recognition helps here too: repair becomes possible when neither side is reduced to the one who
knows, while the other becomes the one who is managed, judged, or explained. Something creative
happens only when both remain humanly present to one another.
So the practices that transform disagreement are not simply techniques. They include listening that can bear complexity, language that is not already closed, and an openness to being changed by encounter. Rogers trusted relationship deeply, but not sentimentally. He knew that real encounter asks something
of us. Truth and healing are not always comfortable. They ask us to stay present long enough for
something new to happen.
Microcosm → Model
When we get our house in order, what actionable principles can we offer a divided world?
This question becomes stronger if we ask first: what are we already modelling? If our own communities are marked by taboo, splitting, sanctioned language, moral positioning, or tribal
loyalties, then we are already offering the wider world a model , just perhaps not the one we hope to offer. What would be credible is not perfection, but a lived example of how people can remain in dialogue across difference. Buber helps us here. Real dialogue means meeting the other as a person, not merely as a role, category, or opponent. And Rogers, in his work beyond therapy, showed that he believed this kind of meeting mattered in conflict situations, in education, and in social life as well. If we want to offer something to a divided world, then perhaps it is not only our theory we offer, but our willingness to practise these values where things are tense, uncertain, and emotionally charged. Bion reminds us that
what cannot be thought in groups gets enacted. So if we cannot think our tensions together, we will live them out unconsciously. To become a genuine microcosm of something better would mean becoming more able to bear difference without fragmentation, more able to stay in process without rushing toward certainty, and more able to let human and social reality enter our shared life.
Congruence in Action
How can we align our public voice with the way we actually treat one another?
This may be the most challenging question of all. We often speak of congruence as if it were simple, but in lived reality it is not simple at all. Professional roles, ethical systems, institutional anxieties, and fear of getting things wrong can all make full honesty difficult.
Of course ethics matter. Protection matters. Boundaries matter. But ethics can be lived in different ways. They can function as a living, relational responsibility , or they can become procedural, defensive, and anxiety-managing. When that happens, ethics may protect us from risk, but also distance us from encounter. We may begin to speak in ways that are professionally acceptable but relationally thinner. And this does not affect only the therapy room. It affects our relations with colleagues, organisations,
and the wider world. We do not step outside our environment when we enter therapy. We are shaped by the same cultures of fear, speed, liability, institutional caution, political tension, and social fragmentation as everyone else. These forces enter us, and then they enter our relationships. If we do not reflect on that, we may imagine that we are acting ethically when in fact we are also acting defensively. Donna Orange helps us here by reminding us that ethics must remain relational and responsive, not merely procedural. And Menzies Lyth helps us see that institutions can use rules and systems to defend against anxiety. In that sense, silence is not always neutrality. Sometimes it is also a defence against the difficulty of being in real contact. This matters especially when realities that shape everyday human life are treated as if they belong to
some other field. But our clients do not live outside history, and neither do we. War, racism, poverty, displacement, collective trauma, public violence, and social fear all enter the room because they enter people’s bodies, relationships, and daily lives. Rogers did not shrink from the wider human world. He moved toward it. So if our public voice avoids the realities that shape the people we work with, then our
congruence becomes selective.
If the person-centred approach is to have a future, then our standards must support relationship, not replace it. The challenge is not to choose between professionalism and relationship, but to ensure that
professionalism does not become the thing that slowly drains relationship of its depth, risk, and
humanity.
A Closing Thought
So perhaps the deeper question running through all four is this: can the person-centred community
become a place where what is implicit, difficult, and not yet fully speakable is met with enough presence, trust, and openness that something new can emerge? If we can, then we are not only discussing dialogue. We are embodying it. But perhaps it is also time for a more honest inner dialogue about what prevents our official psychotherapy organisations from naming realities that competent international bodies are already being forced to confront. In the UK, official organisational statements have often remained cautious and general in their language, while stronger moral naming has appeared more
readily in hosted or member-authored pieces than in the institution’s own formal voice.
The British Psychological Society’s official October 2023 statement used the phrase “continued catastrophic violence,” while BACP’s January 2024 response referred to the “horrific events in Israel and Gaza”; yet stronger language, including the word genocide, appears in BPS-hosted and BACP-hosted
author pieces rather than in those official statements. I note, too, a further institutional defence: the suggestion that an organisation’s role is somehow purely psychological, and therefore separate from the naming of public realities. But the psychological is never
separate from the social, historical, and moral worlds in which people live. What enters the therapy space also enters our bodies, our relationships, and our institutions. If our organisations hide behind a purely psychological function, they risk confusing professional restraint with moral evasion, and caution with a closing of the eyes. If we cannot say the word, even when the world’s institutions are already struggling over it, what does that say about our courage, our congruence, and our willingness to keep our eyes open? Perhaps the real challenge before us is not only to heal our divisions, but to become a community in which more of
human experiencing can be truthfully spoken, more of reality can be faced, and more of what is
unbearable can be carried together without retreat into silence…
the Author
Patricia Foster is a Coordinator, Focusing Trainer, and Therapist with The International Focusing
Institute (New York). She offers training in Focusing for groups and individuals, and provides person-
centred and Focusing-oriented therapy. Her work integrates experiential philosophy with practical skills that help people listen more deeply to their own lived experiencing….
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
