To help individuals, to help them meet their own needs and bring out their own potentialities, the professional helper must himself somehow have experienced this kind of regard and help from others. Such experiencing must somehow have enabled him to know consciously in fair measure who he is, what he is needs, how he relates to others, what facts and skills mean to him and how he integrates them in his practice. Such experiencing and understanding, in other words, make possible a health professional functioning in services aimed to enhance healthy functioning in the people being served.
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Laurie M. Gunter (1969) studied this question.