My interest in humanistic-experiential therapy really grows out of a deep curiosity about other people's experience, a curiosity stimulated by my father's emotional guardedness and my youthful desire to write fiction. In addition, my Mother and Grandmother were avid followers of Jungian psychology, and so psychology, particularly esoteric psychology, was a hot topic in my family's home when I was growing up. When I was 17, at the suggestion of my creative writing teacher, I read Karen Horney's Our Inner Conflicts (1945) and had what can only be described as a conversion experience: I decided I wanted to be a psychotherapist, so I could understand and help people.

However, my road to Process-Experiential psychotherapy had many twists and turns. As an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the late 1960's I practically majored in humanistic approaches to psychology, studying with Bert Kaplan, Frank Barron, and most importantly, Ted Sarbin. I read Norman O. Brown (who was also at Santa Cruz), Soren Kierkegaard, William James, Arthur Koestler, Joseph Campbell, and Jerome Frank. I wrote a senior thesis on metaphors for death and rebirth in radical personal change processes.

However, toward the end of my undergraduate studies I also became interested in psychotherapy research and what was then called "social behaviorism" (McLaughlin, 1971) or "behavioral self-management" (Thoresen & Mahoney, 1974), that is, the humanistic end of behaviorism. (About the time this approach evolved into cognitive therapy, I became disillusioned with it, because all my clients turned out to have unfinished business from their childhoods!) I then returned to my humanistic roots during my graduate studies at UCLA, where I received training in Client-Centered therapy from Jerry Goodman, a student of Carl Rogers. Goodman also encouraged my interest in therapy process research, and I began a 25-year exploration of clients' experiences during therapy sessions. In spite of these interests, much of my clinical training was psychodynamic.

Then, in 1977, I heard Laura Rice and Les Greenberg present their work on Evocative Unfolding and Two Chair work at a meeting of the Society for Psychotherapy Research in Madison, Wisconsin. It was an electrifying experience. I immediately began incorporating experiential tasks into my work as a therapist, later adding Gendlin's Experiential Focusing method and Empty Chair work. Thus, by the time I completed my Ph.D., I was an eclectic therapist who conceptualized clients in psychodynamic terms and preferred a combination of psychodynamic interpretation and experiential tasks. During my early years at the University of Toledo, I also continued studying client in-session experiences and began developing qualitative research methods to represent these more sensitively.

In 1985, while on a sabbatical year in England, I was giving a conference workshop on qualitative therapy research when a psychodynamically-oriented audience member confronted me with a contradiction: He noted that in therapy I interpreted my clients, but in my research I attempted to stay as close as possible to the client's experience. Why didn't I interpret my client's data psychodynamically? The very thought scandalized me, and this intervention had the opposite effect to that intended by the questioner: I realized that understanding the client's internal experiences was a more fundamental value for me than the thrill of coming up with clever interpretations for my clients. I felt that I would be effective as a therapist and researcher!) if I were more deeply and consistently grounded in a particular therapeutic tradition and theoretical approach that centered itself in the client's immediate, lived experience.

In England, I had worked with David Shapiro's psychotherapy research team at the University of Sheffield, learning how to carry out complex process-outcome therapy research. Upon on my return from England in 1985, I was inspired to try my hand at an outcome study of an experiential therapy of depression. As a result I began working with Laura Rice and Les Greenberg to develop the marker-guided integration of Client-Centered and Gestalt treatments that we eventually came to call Process-Experiential therapy. First, however, Laura Rice helped me cure myself of my habit of interpreting my clients: She pointed out that no matter how clever my interpretations were, the insights developed by my clients were never quite what I had hypothesized; instead, my clients' eventual self-understandings always made more sense and fit their idiosyncratic experiences better than what I had originally offered. Why not get out of my clients' way and let them go ahead and develop their own self-understandings?

My previous work with the Unfolding and Two Chair work tasks had been self-taught; I now began a series of regular visits to Toronto to receive proper supervision and training on these tasks, as well as to develop the treatment model with Laura and Les. As we developed it, I took it back to Toledo to apply in the Toledo Experiential Therapy of Depression Project, the first study of PE therapy with a clinically-distressed client population. We decided to write a book about the therapy model that was emerging, which eventually turned out to be Facilitating Emotional Change (1993). At first, I felt very much like a junior partner, sometimes mediating between Laura's more conservative Client-Centered approach and Les's more radical Gestalt approach. They had the theory and the experience, but I was doing the depression study, had spent a long time doing research on client's in-session experiences, and was good at organizing ideas. Thus, as we progressed, I began to make contributions to the structure of the therapy, developing the treatment principles described earlier in this chapter, formulating the array of therapist responses (see Chapter 5), and other elements. The book was completed during a sabbatical year at York University in 1992-93, during which I worked intensively with Laura and Les, and went through their therapist training process. I'll never forget the day that Les and I came up with the name for the therapy, while eating at the Japanese fast food restaurant at York University. We needed a way to distinguish this therapy from Mahrer's (1983, 1989) and Gendlin's (1996) approaches, both of which were called "experiential therapy." Since the most distinctive element of our approach was its process orientation, it seemed logical, once we thought of it, to call it "process-experiential."

After that, I continued regular visits to Toronto to learn and share new developments. Every time I went, I learned something new! Having finished the depression study, my students and I developed and did research on a PE therapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Problems that my therapists had learning PE therapy for that study led me and my colleague Ken Davis to examine the training process to see what worked and how we could improve it, and that work has in turn led to this book.

Today, I continue to learn from my clients (who have always been my main teachers of therapy), and also from the discipline of trying to teach my own students about PE therapy. The things I enjoy most about PE therapy are the opportunities it provides for getting inside another human being's head; the combination of relational and task-focused elements; and the excitement of helping to develop something new. The difficulties I'm still working on as a PE therapist are feeling that it's up to me to make something happen; getting caught up in clients' hopelessness; and dealing with clients who have great difficulty accessing their internal experience.