THE 7 STAGES OF PROCESS
describe the common positions a client can exist on within their therapeutic journey. In the earliest of the seven stages the client is highly INCONGRUENT and ruled by CONDITIONS OF WORTH that causes them to distort or even deny the intuitive cues that are transmitted by their ORGANISMIC VALUING PROCESS.
In these early stages, the client sees their experiences as mostly black and white, good or bad and they have trouble accepting the opinions and actions of others that they perceive as being in opposition to their own. They also tend to blame external objects for the negative consequences they experience and lack a sense of their own culpability within these situations. Their INCONGRUENCE can be so severe that even gentle exploration and evaluation of their psychological process can cause a shut down of participation by them in a bid to eliminate the threat to the integrity of their carefully balanced, self protecting web of internal guiding principles. This makes the very early parts of the seven stages an incredibly challenging experience for clients and can cause them to leave the therapeutic relationship, indeed it’s thought that many individuals within the early stages may not even seek a therapeutic intervention. For the clients that do engage however, patient and conscientious adoption of the CORE CONDITIONS can begin to move clients onward towards the middle of the 7 stages.
The middle stages are where clients begin to accept that the thoughts and beliefs they have aren't simply the black and white objective facts that they previously assumed, and they begin to embark on a therapeutic path to explore themselves and their relationships. The work done in these stages begins to detangle the roots of their INCONGRUENCE and reduces the scope and intensity of their internal conflicts, which creates a positive feedback loop where they become increasingly able to responsively listen to, and trust the guidance of their internal ORGANISMIC VALUING PROCESS.
This activity leads them to the latter and most CONGRUENT portion of the 7 stages, where the client feel safe to experience and explore their own internal and external cognitive processes, their relationships and their emotions - responsively and authentically from moment to moment. This is a state where THE ACTUALIZING TENDENCY is fully engaged and the client is embarking on their quest for SELF ACTUALIZATION, where the individual exists in a state of free and flowing potential, and with the awareness, skills and wisdom to become a fully functioning human being.