111 The Person-Centered Journal, Volume 5 Issue 2. 1998 Printed in the U.S.A. All rights reserved. THE SIX NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT CONDITIONS APPLIED TO WORKING WITH LESBIAN, GAY, AND BISEXUAL CLIENTS Dominic Davies Nottingham, England ABSTRACT. The six necessary and sufficient conditions (Rogers, 1957) are offered as a conceptual framework for therapy with lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals. “Gay affirmative the represents a special range of psychological knowledge which challenges the traditional view that homosexual desire and fixed homosexual orientations are pathological. INTRODUCTION The Person-Centered Approach (PCA) has been used with a great many different populations, and this work has been variously recorded. One area of neglect, however, is the value of working from a Person-Centered perspective with lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients. There is such a dearth of material published that I believe it is helpful to return to the most fundamental tenets of the Person-Centered Approach - the six necessary and sufficient conditions (Rogers, 1957, 1990) and see how these may be relevant to working with lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients. My aim is to demonstrate how tenets of gay affirmative therapy can be integrated with the six conditions and what persona] work practitioners of the PCA need to do in order to be able to work affirmatively with lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients. Perhaps it would be helpful to begin this paper with a definition of “gay affirmative therapy,” as its very name may be seen as problematic. Some people may feel the therapeutic approach applies only to gay men, as lesbians and bisexual people are not included in the title. I use “gay affirmative” as a convenient contraction and mean to include all people who have a same-sex attraction. The “affirmative” part of the name is also problematic. Who or what is being affirmed? Could it not be experienced as patronizing by clients to have the therapist “affirm” their sexuality? Even the word “therapy” itself may be unhelpful, in that it can imply a distinct and specific therapeutic approach. Maylon (1982, p. 69) describes gay affirmative therapy Thus: Gay affirmative psychotherapy is not an independent system of psychotherapy. Rather it represents a special range of psychological knowledge which challenges the traditional view that homosexual desire and fixed homosexual orientations are pathological. Gay affirmative therapy uses traditional psychotherapeutic methods, but proceeds from a non-traditional perspective. This approach regards homophobia, as opposed to homosexuality, as a major pathological variable in the development of certain symptomatic conditions among gay men. My intention in this article is to contribute to the debate around working with different populations from within the Person-Centered Approach (PCA). I hope that by returning to the fundamentals’ of the Approach I can play a part in developing the PCA, as well the application of the PCA to the relatively new field of working affirmatively with lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients. I have begun from the assumption that Rogers’ hypothesis regarding the six conditions is correct and that: No other conditions are necessary. If these six conditions exist, and continue over a period of time, this is sufficient. (Rogers, 1957, 1990, p. 221). However, I am of the opinion that to work consistently and successfully with lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients, the therapist has to do a considerable amount of re-education and re-evaluation of his/her attitudes, beliefs, values and knowledge. Rogers himself indicated that therapists needed such training when he said: It seems desirable that the student should have a broad experiential knowledge of the human being in his cultural setting . . .Such knowledge needs to be supplemented by experiences of living with or dealing with individuals who have been the product of cultural influences very different from those which have molded the student. (Rogers, 1951, p. 437)