The person-centred approach views the client as their own best authority on their own experience, and it views the client as being fully capable of fulfilling their own potential for growth. Person-centred therapy began formally with Carl Rogers in the 1930's an 1940's. Rogers affirmed individual personal experience as the basis and standard for living and therapeutic effect, He considered that individuals have within themselves vast resources for self-directed behaviour. These resources can be tapped if a definable climate of facilitative psychological attitudes can be provided. 

Roger's consider's that there are three conditions that must be present in order for a climate to be conducive to growth and therapeutic change. The core conditions are:-

1. Unconditional positive regard (UPR) - this means that the Therapist accepts the client unconditionally and non-judgementally. The client is free to explore all thoughts and feelings, positive or negative, without danger of rejection or condemnation. Crucially, the client is free to explore and to express without having to do anything in particular or meet any particular standards of behaviour to 'earn' positive regard from the Therapist.


2. Empathic understanding - means that the Therapist accurately understands the client's thoughts, feelings, and the meanings from the client's own perspective. When the Therapist perceives what the world is like from the client's point of view, it demonstrates not only that that view has value, but also that the client is being accepted.


3. Congruence - means that the Therapist is authentic and genuine. The Therapist does not present an aloof professional front, but is present and transparent to the client. There is no air of authority or hidden knowledge, and the client does not have to speculate about what the Therapist is 'really like'.

   In essence, as persons are accepted and prized, they tend to develop a more caring attitude toward themselves. As persons are empathetically heard, it becomes possible for them to listen more accurately to the flow of inner feelings and experience. As a person understands and prizes himself or herself, the self becomes more real, more genuine. These tendencies, the reciprocal of the therapist's attitude, enable the person to be a more effective growth-enhancer for him or herself.

   Together, the three core conditions outlines above are believed to enable the client to develop and grow in their own way - to strengthen and expand their own identify and to become the person that they 'really' are independently of the pressures of others to act or think in particular ways.

   Person-centred theory takes these core conditions as both necessary and sufficient for therapeutic movement to occur, i.e. that if these core conditions are provided by the Therapist, then the client will experience therapeutic change. Notably, person-centred theory suggest that there is nothing essentially unique about the counselling relationship and that in fact healthy relationships with significant others may well provide the core conditions and thus be therapeutic in themselves, although normally in a transient and short-lived sort of way, rather than consistently and continually.