Humanistic therapy is a mental health approach that emphasizes the importance of being your true self in order to lead the most fulfilling life.
It’s based on the principle that everyone has their own unique way of looking at the world. This view can impact your choices and actions.
Humanistic therapy also involves a core belief that people are good at heart and capable of making the right choices for themselves. If you don’t hold yourself in high regard, it’s harder to develop your full potential.
Read on to learn more about humanistic therapy, including how it works and tips for finding a therapist.
Humanistic therapy involves better understanding your world view and developing true self-acceptance.
This is accomplished partially through the development of unconditional positive regard, both from others and from yourself. When you believe that others only respect you if you act a certain way, it’s easy to fall into the trap of constantly feeling like you aren’t enough.
This feeling of worthlessness, in turn, can negatively impact how you view both yourself and the world around you. Remember, according to the underlying principles of humanistic therapy, how you view yourself and the world around you has a big impact on your thoughts and actions.
Humanistic therapy can help you to both develop self-acceptance and overcome criticism or disapproval from others by offering a safe space to work toward personal growth. There are ways of doing this, which we’ll go over later.
Humanistic therapy differs from more traditional approaches, such as psychoanalysis or behavioral therapy.
To start, humanistic therapy tends to focus more on your current day-to-day life. This is very different from other approaches that tend to focus on your past experiences, including those you might not be aware of.
Similarly, humanistic therapy also focuses more on helping the individual as a whole, rather than treating a specific diagnosis. A humanistic therapist will often do this through active listening. This means that they’ll listen carefully to your words, making sure they fully understand what you’re saying. They may stop you to ask follow-up questions.
Humanistic therapists work from the idea that you are the expert in your difficulties. They’ll support the direction you take each session, trusting you to know what you need to talk about in order to work through the things bringing you to therapy.
Humanistic therapies include a number of approaches. Three of the most common are Gestalt therapy, client-centered therapy, and existential therapy.
Gestalt therapy
In Gestalt therapy, your personal experiences are key, along with describing what you’re going through in your own words. It’s based on an underlying theory that unresolved conflicts with others — including family members or romantic partners — lead to distress.
Gestalt therapy provides a state of “safe emergency” where you can explore, in the present moment, the things bothering you. For example, you might explore the belief that your opinions don’t matter to your partner.
Therapists help create the “here and now” atmosphere by asking what you’re currently aware of or how certain emotions make you feel. You might use a range of techniques to do this, including:
- role-playing
- exaggerating a behavior
- reenacting a scenario
For example, you might be asked to visualize a person you’re having a conflict with sitting in an empty chair across from you. Then, you’ll carry out a conversation as if the person were actually sitting there.
Client-centered therapy
Also known as person-centered therapy and Rogerian therapy, this approach is considered the main type of humanistic therapy.
It’s based on the idea that absorbing criticism or disapproval from others can distort the way you see yourself. This blocks personal growth and prevents you from living a fulfilling life, which in turn leads to mental distress.
As the name suggests, it also places a lot of focus on developing a strong client-therapist relationship.
A client-centered therapist will unconditionally accept you, even if they disagree with some aspect of your behavior. Feeling accepted in therapy, no matter what you share, can help you avoid holding back out of fear of disapproval.
You’ll guide the direction of therapy while your therapist listens without judgement.
Existential therapy
Existential therapy draws more from philosophy than most other approaches to mental health treatment. The goal of this approach is to help you understand how your existence — the concept of you as a whole person — affects your unique worldview.
Existential therapists help you understand and explore the meaning you give to things that happen in your life. With their guidance, you’ll learn to accept responsibility for choices you make and realize the freedom you have to make changes that will give your life greater meaning.
Like other humanistic approaches, existential therapy is mainly concerned with the issues you currently face, rather than things from your past. But it does consider how your thoughts — conscious or unconscious — impact your mental health and goals.
Humanistic therapy is worth a shot if you’re looking for ways to make your life more fulfilling, regardless of whether you have an underlying mental health condition. It’s also worth considering if you’ve previously had trouble building a rapport with therapists.
A 2002 review of 86 studies found that humanistic therapies were effective at helping people make lasting change over time. People in humanistic therapy showed more change than people in no therapy at all, according to the review.
People in other types of therapy showed similar amounts of change, suggesting it’s more about finding a type of therapy that you enjoy and will commit to doing.
In addition, a 2013 review of existing research suggests that client-centered approaches can be helpful for:
However, it wasn’t quite as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy for addressing anxiety and panic disorder.
Whether a humanistic approach fits your needs can depend on what you want to get out of therapy. Humanistic therapies typically don’t make diagnosis a priority and may not work toward specific treatment goals.
If you have specific symptoms or behaviors you’d like to address or are seeking therapy with a clear goal for diagnosis and treatment, you might find a different approach more helpful. On the other hand, it may be a good fit if you’re simply feeling “stuck” or in a rut.
Keep in mind that other types of therapy often incorporate aspects of humanistic therapy, such as unconditional acceptance and active listening.
It’s not always easy to find the right therapist. When looking for a humanistic therapist, start by considering what you’d like to work on. This can be a specific issue or a more abstract concept.
Also think about any traits you’d like in a therapist. Would you prefer to work with a therapist of your own gender? The therapist-client bond is particularly important in humanistic therapy, so you’ll want to make sure the therapist is one you’ll feel comfortable with.
When looking for a therapist, you also want to take note of how much each potential therapist charges per session. Some therapists take insurance, but others don’t. And some may offer a sliding scale program that allows you to pay what you can.
Learn more about how to find affordable therapy.
Humanistic therapy is a type of mental health treatment that centers around your unique experience and perspective. Humanistic therapists offer empathy, genuine concern for you and your experience, and unconditional positive regard.
While it might not be the best option for getting a concrete mental health diagnosis, it can be a good option if you’re simply looking for ways to lead a more meaningful life.
Learning Objectives
- Describe how cognitive and cognitive-behavioral therapy are used as treatment methods
Cognitive therapy is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on how a person’s thoughts lead to feelings of distress. The idea behind cognitive therapy is that how you think determines how you feel and act. Cognitive therapists help their clients change dysfunctional thoughts in order to relieve distress. They help a client see how they misinterpret a situation (cognitive distortion). For example, a client may overgeneralize. Because Ray failed one test in his Psychology 101 course, he feels he is stupid and worthless. These thoughts then cause his mood to worsen. Therapists also help clients recognize when they blow things out of proportion. Because Ray failed his Psychology 101 test, he has concluded that he’s going to fail the entire course and probably flunk out of college altogether. These errors in thinking have contributed to Ray’s feelings of distress. His therapist will help him challenge these irrational beliefs, focus on their illogical basis, and correct them with more logical and rational thoughts and beliefs.
Cognitive therapy was developed by psychiatrist Aaron Beck in the 1960s. His initial focus was on depression and how a client’s self-defeating attitude served to maintain a depression despite positive factors in her life (Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979)(Figure 1). Through questioning, a cognitive therapist can help a client recognize dysfunctional ideas, challenge catastrophizing thoughts about themselves and their situations, and find a more positive way to view things (Beck, 2011).
One of the first forms of cognitive-behavior therapy was rational emotive therapy (RET), which was founded by Albert Ellis and grew out of his dislike of Freudian psychoanalysis (Daniel, n.d.). Behaviorists such as Joseph Wolpe also influenced Ellis’s therapeutic approach (National Association of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapists, 2009). During the 1980s and 1990s, cognitive and behavioral techniques were merged into cognitive-behavioral therapy. Pivotal to this merging was the successful development of treatments for panic disorder by David M. Clark in the UK and David H. Barlow in the U.S. Over time, cognitive-behavioral therapy came to be known not only as a therapy, but as an umbrella category for all cognitive-based psychotherapies.
Figure 1. Your emotional reactions are the result of your thoughts about the situation rather than the situation itself. For instance, if you consistently interpret events and emotions around the themes of loss and defeat, then you are likely to be depressed. Through therapy, you can learn more logical ways to interpret situations.
View a brief video in which Judith Beck, psychologist and daughter of Aaron Beck, talks about cognitive therapy and conducts a session with a client.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) helps clients examine how their thoughts affect their behavior. It aims to change cognitive distortions and self-defeating behaviors. For example, if it’s your first time meeting new people, you may have the automatic thought, “These people won’t like me because I have nothing interesting to share.” That thought itself is not what’s troublesome; the appraisal (or evaluation) that it might have merit is what’s troublesome. The goal of CBT is to help people make adaptive, instead of maladaptive, appraisals (e.g., “I do know interesting things!”). This technique of reappraisal, or cognitive restructuring, is a fundamental aspect of CBT. With cognitive restructuring, it is the therapist’s job to help point out when a person has an inaccurate or maladaptive thought, so that the patient can either eliminate it or modify it to be more adaptive. In essence, this approach is designed to change the way people think as well as how they act.
In total, hundreds of studies have shown the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral therapy in the treatment of numerous psychological disorders such as depression, PTSD, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, and substance abuse (Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy, n.d.). For example, CBT has been found to be effective in decreasing levels of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts in previously suicidal teenagers (Alavi, Sharifi, Ghanizadeh, & Dehbozorgi, 2013). Cognitive-behavioral therapy has also been effective in reducing PTSD in specific populations, such as transit workers (Lowinger & Rombom, 2012).
Cognitive-behavioral therapy aims to change cognitive distortions and self-defeating behaviors using techniques like the ABC model. With this model, there is an Action (sometimes called an activating event), the Belief about the event, and the Consequences of this belief. Let’s say, Jon and Joe both go to a party. Jon and Joe each have met a young woman at the party: Jon is talking with Megan most of the party, and Joe is talking with Amanda. At the end of the party, Jon asks Megan for her phone number and Joe asks Amanda. Megan tells Jon she would rather not give him her number, and Amanda tells Joe the same thing. Both Jon and Joe are surprised, as they thought things were going well. What can Jon and Joe tell themselves about why the women were not interested? Let’s say Jon tells himself he is a loser, or is ugly, or “has no game.” Jon then gets depressed and decides not to go to another party, which starts a cycle that keeps him depressed. Joe tells himself that he had bad breath, goes out and buys a new toothbrush, goes to another party, and meets someone new.
Jon’s belief about what happened results in a consequence of further depression, whereas Joe’s belief does not. Jon is internalizing the attribution or reason for the rebuffs, which triggers his depression. On the other hand, Joe is externalizing the cause, so his thinking does not contribute to feelings of depression. Cognitive-behavioral therapy examines specific maladaptive and automatic thoughts and cognitive distortions. Some examples of cognitive distortions are all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, and jumping to conclusions. In overgeneralization, someone takes a small situation and makes it huge—for example, instead of saying, “This particular woman was not interested in me,” the man says, “I am ugly, a loser, and no one is ever going to be interested in me.”
All or nothing thinking, which is a common type of cognitive distortion for people suffering from depression, reflects extremes. In other words, everything is black or white. After being turned down for a date, Jon begins to think, “No woman will ever go out with me. I’m going to be alone forever.” He begins to feel anxious and sad as he contemplates his future.
The third kind of distortion involves jumping to conclusions—assuming that people are thinking negatively about you or reacting negatively to you, even though there is no evidence. Consider the example of Savannah and Hillaire, who recently met at a party. They have a lot in common, and Savannah thinks they could become friends. She calls Hillaire to invite her for coffee. Since Hillaire doesn’t answer, Savannah leaves her a message. Several days go by and Savannah never hears back from her potential new friend. Maybe Hillaire never received the message because she lost her phone or she is too busy to return the phone call. But if Savannah believes that Hillaire didn’t like Savannah or didn’t want to be her friend, she is demonstrating the cognitive distortion of jumping to conclusions.
How effective is CBT? One client said this about his cognitive-behavioral therapy:
I have had many painful episodes of depression in my life, and this has had a negative effect on my career and has put considerable strain on my friends and family. The treatments I have received, such as taking antidepressants and psychodynamic counseling, have helped [me] to cope with the symptoms and to get some insights into the roots of my problems. CBT has been by far the most useful approach I have found in tackling these mood problems. It has raised my awareness of how my thoughts impact on my moods. How the way I think about myself, about others and about the world can lead me into depression. It is a practical approach, which does not dwell so much on childhood experiences, whilst acknowledging that it was then that these patterns were learned. It looks at what is happening now, and gives tools to manage these moods on a daily basis. (Martin, 2007, n.p.)
Watch this video clip for an overview of CBT:
You can view the transcript for “What is CBT? | Making Sense of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy” here (opens in new window).
cognitive-behavioral therapy: form of psychotherapy that aims to change cognitive distortions and self-defeating behaviors
cognitive therapy: form of psychotherapy that focuses on how a person’s thoughts lead to feelings of distress, with the aim of helping them change these irrational thoughts
rational emotive therapy (RET): form of cognitive-behavioral therapy
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