The Chief Executive Officer was proud of his family, enjoyed his children, but was unhappy with his wife, who he perceived to be bland, innocent, and overly-serious. He began an extra-marital affair with a woman he found far more interesting. The CEO's infidelity caused him sufficient distress to consult a psychotherapist.
According to psychologists Luann Linquist and Charles Negy, who reported the case, the CEO valued his family life and his wife too much to leave her, even though his lover wished he would marry her instead. The CEO was caught, quite unhappily, in the middle.
As the therapist listened, the CEO and his lover considered various plans. Linquist and Negy noted that many people hearing of the case will think of such charged concepts as: "adulterer, cheat, philanderer, and homewrecker."
Ultimately, the CEO fathered a child with the lover, and the lover moved away to raise the child with the help of her parents in another state. The wife, meanwhile, remained unaware of the whole matter (to the best of anyone's knowledge).
One key tradition in psychotherapy is to avoid judgmentalism. Carl Rogers founded Client-Centered Therapy in the mid-20th-century. Rogers emphasized that successful personality change required the therapist to maintain an attitude of "unconditional positive regard" -- a special kind of non-judgmental attitude. Rogers wrote that unconditional positive regard was present when therapists are:
...experiencing a warm acceptance of each aspect of the client's experience as being a part of that client... It means that there are no conditions of acceptance, no feeling of "I like you only if you are thus and so." It means a "prizing" of the person, as Dewey has used that term. It is at the opposite pole from a selective evaluating attitude -- "You are bad in these ways, good in those."
Given a questionnaire, Rogers said, the therapist would identify as "true for me" items such as: "I feel no revulsion at anything the client says," "I feel neither approval nor disapproval of the client and his statements -- simply acceptance," "I am not inclined to pass judgment on what the client tells me," and "I like the client."
I suspect that the CEO and lover felt accepted by their therapist at some level or they wouldn't have continued in therapy. In a study of successful therapy outcomes by Giorgi & Gallegos, one patient:
...expressed the confidence that she could say anything to her therapist without being judged...[another] said that therapists in general had the duty to listen non-judgmentally....
Yet in my post of last week, I noted that psychological work inevitably involves judgments of personality, either implicitly or explicitly, and even neutral statements by psychologists can readily be perceived as judgmental by others.
How do I reconcile the twin ideas that, first, judgment is common in discussing personality, and second, that many clients feel accepted by their therapists?
What clients perceive as non-judgmental, I suspect, actually is a set of complex, slightly positive judgments on the part of the therapist.
For example, the therapist/authors examining the CEO's dilemma were far from non-judgmental. Linquist and Negy took a page from the playbook of utilitarian ethics -- pragmatically weighing the benefits and harms to all those involved. In their judgment this kind of affair might be okay so long as one could minimize the harm it did to the marriage and to others with a stake in it. As they wrote, "For [the CEO], leading a double life was preferable to risking his family, finances, and good standing at his corporation...".
My argument here is that what often seems non-judgmental is more likely a complex set of calculations on the part of the therapist that, given the client and the client's situation, some group of decisions or outcomes may be the best that can be hoped for. Perhaps, though, Carl Rogers was correct that some kind of caring such as positive regard must accompany such calculations.
More on how and why we judge one another on my next post...
Notes. The marital case is summarized from the case of "Jerry," Linquist, L., & Negy, C. (2005). Maximizing the experiences of an extrarelational affair: An unconventional approach to a common social convention. JCLP/In session, 61, 1421-1428. The quotes from patients who experienced non-jugmental therapists are from p. 210 of Giorgi, A., & Gallegos, N. (2005). Living through some positive experiences of psychotherapy. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 36, 95-218. The quotes from Carl Rogers are from p. 98 of Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21, 95-103.
(c) Copyright 2008 John D. Mayer
