Rog (Rogerian Therapy): Home

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Notes:

Alternate Voice

This Rog module also exists using an automated female-sounding voice. You can find it here.

What is this?

Rogerian Therapy is a regular counselling modality, imported into PaulsRobot3 from its sister RoboCounsellor site. This client-Robot version is designed to hew as closely as possible to the client-practitioner original, although obviously a few changes needed to be made to fit it into the PaulsRobot paradigm.

Rogerian Therapy is a basic talk therapy. The client gets to talk about her topic while the practitioner listens attentively, then the practitioner reflects back the essence of what the client has just said, both the factual content and the emotional.

Best use is for heavy topics

This procedure is most effective for heavier topics, and not for routine annoyances. This Rog module is one of two ways of addressing the heaviest topics. The other way is to gently address the topic with Reach & Withdraw, as available in the Core or HeavyDuty modules.

How does it work?

Rogerian therapy is very simple. The basic attitude of the counsellor to the client as described in Carl Rogers' three core conditions (genuineness, unconditional acceptance, empathy) is central to many other counselling approaches. Of course a computer application is not human. However, somewhat surprisingly, these core conditions do have their counterparts in robocounselling.

Notes (continued):

Genuineness

Genuineness is the quality of the counsellor being real, transparent, and not trying to hide any of his personal thoughts or feelings from the client. The client expects (and gets) no personal reaction at all to her from Rog, good or bad, whatever she says or however she acts.

Unconditional acceptance

Similarly, the client cannot possibly pick up any criticism or hint of disapproval or lack of acceptance, as Rog is not a human being and the responses will always be neutral in tone.

Empathy

Lastly, of course Rog cannot feel with the client and see life from her internal frame of reference. However, the main reason for this empathy in a conventional session is so that the counsellor can reflect back the client's topic, in summarised form, both as to factual content and emotional content. And in this way the client is given perhaps a different view on her topic, and from this is able to see it more clearly.

If the client follows the procedure used in this module properly, she will continually get to review the details of her topic afresh, accomplishing the same goal.

Summary

There are obviously many aspects of human counselling missing from this automated approach. But there are many advantages too, including cost and convenience. Overall, Rog is really not bad at all, and much better at the job than you might at first think.