Person-centred: the conditions, and nothing else
No agenda, no technique, no questions designed to get anywhere. The hardest session in this app, because everything you have been trained to do is unavailable.
What you are practising
- 1Reflect meaning at the edge of awareness rather than paraphrasing content
- 2Follow rather than lead, including when you can see where to go
- 3Distinguish congruence from disclosure
- 4Tolerate silence past your own discomfort
- 5Notice every impulse to be useful, and decline most of them
Briefing
Where you are
Session 9. Rosa’s mother died nineteen months ago. She was not present at the moment of death — she had gone home to shower at her brother’s insistence, and her mother died in the forty minutes she was away. She has never described those forty minutes and you have never asked.
The discipline
Everything you might do to move this along is off the table. No questions aimed at a target. No reframes. No normalising. No linking to the past. No suggestions. What is available is accurate empathic reflection, congruence, and unconditional positive regard that she can actually perceive.
The case
Rosa Delgado
34, she/her, primary school teacher, lives alone
Persistent grief nineteen months after her mother’s death, with insomnia and withdrawal.
Read the full case firstThe phases
- 1
Entering her world
Accurate reflection, at the edge.
- 2
The edge
Stay with what is nearly said. Do not go and get it.
- 3
Congruence
Your own experience, in the room, in her service.
- 4
Ending
End without tidying it up.