Meanwhile Rogers, convinced that he himself was going insane, went home and told his wife that he had to get away at once. They were on the road within an hour and stayed away for 2 or 3 months on what they later referred to as their “runaway trip.” The early moments were rough going—Rogers felt himself incapable even of walking into a store to buy some beer—but Helen’s quiet assurance gradually relieved his terror. When they finally returned to Chicago he was past his crisis, but he was left with a feeling of utter worthlessness as a therapist and as a person. It was only after one of his colleagues offered to serve as his therapist that he was able to work through these feelings to a point where his fears diminished and his capacity to value himself increased. It is this traumatic experience, then, which made clear to him the importance of the therapist’s congruence in a therapeutic relationship.
This experience also probably illustrated for Rogers the process of an acute psychotic breakdown that he would describe in his 1959 paper. According to this account, a breakdown occurs when a significant event suddenly or obviously demonstrates the substantial
incongruence between an individual’s self and organismic experience.
Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest