Who Sets the Direction? Non-Directivity, Influence and the Ethics of Therapy
I have taught person-centred counselling to many master of counselling students, and one of the things I support them to get their heads around is the difference between being directive and non-directive. This isn’t always easy because directivity is not always obvious.
Non-directivity is central to person-centred therapy. The therapist is not supposed to decide what the client should talk about, what their experience means, what they ought to change, or where they should eventually arrive. Instead, the therapist attempts to understand the client’s experience from within the client’s frame of reference and trusts the client’s capacity to find their own direction (Merry & Brodley, 2002; Rogers, 1951).
Students can have very different reactions to this. Some love the idea of non-directivity, some find it frustrating and feel they should be doing more and some believe they are already being non-directive, but then start noticing just how easily a question or a (well-intended) reflection can steer a conversation.
I think learning to recognise that difference matters even if you have no intention of practising exclusively as a person-centred therapist (I certainly do not). My own work includes approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and parts-based work, where I may be considerably more active. There are also times when greater therapist direction is appropriate or necessary. Risk and safety work may require us to ask particular questions, provide information, develop plans or take actions that we would not ordinarily take. Psychoeducation, skills teaching and some structured therapeutic approaches also involve an explicit degree of therapist direction.
The point is not that directivity is wrong or bad. The problem is becoming directive without knowing that we are doing it, without being clear about why we are doing it, or because we have decided that we know where the client ought to go.
That is why I think person-centred training offers something valuable even for counsellors who later work from other therapeutic orientations or draw on a range of approaches. It makes us examine who is determining the direction of therapy. This becomes more complicated once we recognise that therapists can’t avoid influencing clients altogether.
Influence is unavoidable
There has been a long debate in the person-centred literature about whether genuine non-directivity is even possible. Kahn (1999) argued that therapists inevitably bring their personal and theoretical assumptions into the therapeutic encounter. Merry and Brodley (2002) accepted that therapists inevitably influence clients but argued that this does not make non-directivity meaningless. Rather, non-directivity concerns the therapist’s intention not to determine what the client should think, feel, decide or become. Lundh (2012) similarly conceptualises directivity and non-directivity as dimensions of therapeutic relating rather than a simple either/or distinction.
Which brings us to the point that influence is unavoidable. Every response changes the conversation. A reflection foregrounds something, a question directs attention, a summary decides what gets gathered together as significant. Silence can create space, but it can also communicate expectation. Immediacy shifts attention to the relationship. Even choosing not to respond to something influences whether it is likely to remain in focus.
So “I don’t give advice” is a low bar for non-directive practice.
The subtle directivity of microskills
Reflections of feeling and content
Reflections can feel neutral because they stay close to the client’s words, but they are selective. If a client speaks about anger, fear, relief and guilt, and I repeatedly reflect anger, I am helping organise the session around anger. Research also suggests reflections are not therapeutic merely because they are reflections; timing, accuracy and responsiveness matter (Elliott et al., 2023).
Try instead to reflect back more thoroughly and accurately: “There’s relief in finally saying no, and some guilt alongside it. Have I got that right?”
Questions
Questions are especially good at disguising direction. “Why don’t you set a boundary?” is straight out advice disguised as a question. Even open questions contain assumptions about what deserves attention. Person-centred therapists describe weighing whether questions follow the client’s process or redirect it (Renger, 2023).
Before asking a question, try asking yourself: Why this question, now?
Instead of something like “Do you think this comes from your relationship with your mother?”, try: “What feels important about that to you?”
Summaries
Summaries can position the counsellor as the final editor because we decide what gets included. A summary can subtly privilege one version of the client’s experience over another because the counsellor decides what belongs together, what seems important, what gets left out, and sometimes what appears to explain what. For example, if a client has spent twenty minutes talking about resentment, guilt, relief and uncertainty about leaving a relationship, a summary such as, “It sounds like you know you need to leave, but guilt is holding you back” flattens their experience and misses important nuance, as well as implying the client already knows what they need to do. This is ethically problematic as it may seem like we are guiding the client to this particular outcome, limiting their own autonomy. A less directive summary might hold the competing parts of the experience without deciding which one is more true.
Try instead summarising in a way that gives the client room to correct, expand or reorganise the meaning for themselves, for example, something like “Part of you wants to leave, and another part is frightened about what leaving might cost. There also seems to be some relief when you imagine having more space. What have I missed?”
Silence
Silence gives the client space to think, feel and decide what comes next. Used well, it can communicate that the counsellor is not rushing to fill the space, solve the problem or pull the client away from an emerging experience. A counsellor can also use silence strategically, even unconsciously, because they are hoping the client will say more, become emotional, “go deeper”, or move towards material the counsellor considers important. In that case, the silence has become a form of pressure. The counsellor may not have spoken, but they are still trying to shape what happens next. All of these can be valid therapeutic choices to make in the moment, but it helps both client and therapist if these choices are intentional and in service of our client.
Try staying present and observing what the client is doing with the silence. If you are unsure, you can make the process explicit: “I’m aware there’s been a bit of space here. I don’t want to rush you. What’s happening for you right now?”
Immediacy
Immediacy involves bringing attention to something that is happening in the therapeutic relationship or in the present moment between counsellor and client. While it can be a powerful way of noticing relational patterns as they occur rather than only talking about them abstractly it is also inherently somewhat directive.
The moment I say, “I noticed something changed between us just then,” I am directing the client’s attention from what they were sharing to the interaction between us. That may be clinically useful, but it is still counsellor-initiated.
The greater risk is moving too quickly from observation to interpretation. “You looked away because you’re uncomfortable with me” observes, interprets and explains the client’s experience in one move, leaving little room for the client to make their own meaning.
A less directive use of immediacy separates what I notice from what I think it means, for example “I noticed when we started talking about this, you looked down and things became a little still between us. What’s happening for you?”
Other ways of keeping immediacy open include describing observable changes rather than assigning motives, owning your experience rather than presenting it as objective fact, inviting the client to disagree or offer a different meaning and then being willing to return to the client’s original direction if the observation is not useful to them
Immediacy gives us a particularly clear example of the difference between influence and imposition. We inevitably influence the conversation by drawing attention to the relationship. Ethical use depends on whether we open something for exploration or tell the client what the moment means.
An ethical test for influence
There is no perfectly neutral position in therapy, and I hope we understand how this would be a fundamentally flawed aim to begin with. A more useful aim is to become increasingly aware of when and how we are steering.
I come back to one question:
Am I helping the client discover something, or am I trying to get them to arrive where I think they should?
And a few others:
Is this the client’s goal, or mine?
What am I implicitly defining as important?
Am I becoming more directive because the work requires structure, or because I am uncomfortable with uncertainty?
Could I offer this in a way that leaves the client freer to accept, reject or reshape it?
Non-directivity does not require passivity, and ethical practice does not require avoiding every directive intervention. It requires humility about the power built into the therapist role and attention to whose direction is actually being followed.
What does this look like in supervision?
Counselling supervision is a useful place to examine our directivity because it is often easier to notice in retrospect than while we are sitting with a client. Clinical and professional supervision gives us space to slow down particular moments in a session and become curious about why we chose one intervention rather than another, what we hoped would happen next, and how our own assumptions may have influenced the direction of the work (Bernard & Goodyear, 2019).
For example, you might bring a moment to supervision where you asked several questions, offered advice, introduced a particular interpretation, or found yourself strongly wanting the client to make a particular decision.
Some useful supervision questions are:
What was I hoping would happen when I said that?
Was I following the client's direction or introducing my own?
What was making me want to move the conversation?
Was greater directivity clinically or ethically necessary here?
Could I have offered the same intervention while leaving the client more choice?
What might have happened if I had not intervened?
This is one of the reasons reflective counselling supervision matters. The goal is not to become completely non-directive. It is to become more able to recognise when we are directing, why we are doing it, and whether that level of influence serves the client.
We are running a supervision group for early career counsellors.. If you’re interested, click here to learn more.
References
Bernard, J. M., & Goodyear, R. K. (2019). Fundamentals of clinical supervision (6th ed.). Pearson.
Elliott, R., Bohart, A. C., Larson, D., Muntigl, P., & Smoliak, O. (2023). Empathic reflections by themselves are not effective: Meta-analysis and qualitative synthesis. Psychotherapy Research, 33(7), 957–973. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2023.2218981
Kahn, E. (1999). A critique of nondirectivity in the person-centered approach. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 39(4), 94–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167899394006
Lundh, L.-G. (2012). Nondirectivity as a therapeutic stance, and dimension of therapeutic relating. Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies, 11(3), 225–239. https://doi.org/10.1080/14779757.2012.700284
Merry, T., & Brodley, B. T. (2002). The nondirective attitude in client-centered therapy: A response to Kahn. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 42(2), 66–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167802422006
Renger, S. (2023). Therapists’ views on the use of questions in person-centred therapy. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 51(2), 238–250. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2021.1900536
Swift, J. K., Callahan, J. L., Cooper, M., & Parkin, S. R. (2018). The impact of accommodating client preference in psychotherapy: A meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 74(11), 1924–1937. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.22680
Tryon, G. S., Birch, S. E., & Verkuilen, J. (2018). Meta-analyses of the relation of goal consensus and collaboration to psychotherapy outcome. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 372–383. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000170