About Counselling
Therapeutic counselling is a way of helping individuals and couples, through talking. It is possible to improve emotional, psychological and even physical wellbeing by working with a suitably qualified and experienced person who will listen without judging or offering solutions.
Being able to talk about emotions, fears, or other strong feelings can often help to reduce the intensity of those feelings making them more manageable. Talking about whatever is keeping you stuck, confused or overwhelmed, for example, can help identify the route ahead that was previously hard to see.
About Person-Centred Counselling
Established and grew from the work of Carl Rogers an American psychologist in the 1950’s. It is part of a group of therapeutic approaches known as humanistic therapies. Person-centred therapy focuses on the client as the expert of themself, not the counsellor. This applies equally to couple clients. Effective therapy relies on the quality of the relationship between the therapist and the client. Person-centred therapists work with the client and their natural and instinctive process to recover and heal.
Person-centred counselling has a flexibility that focuses on the individual client and his or her subjective experience or reality. Therefore what is true for that person is indeed true and forms the basis of the therapy. Our past, whatever that has been affects and shapes our life, now and in the future. Sometimes it can be helpful to explore the origins of a particular behaviour, emotional reaction, repeated event or unhealthy relationship. This understanding can bring a freedom to alter, or not any future behaviours, reactions or choices.
Person-centred counselling also has the ability to challenge individuals and couples to accept responsibility for his or her own life and to learn to trust in the personal strengths and resources that each person has available to them. The growth of self-awareness and self-acceptance is something many individuals experience as part of person-centred counselling.
The client, not the counsellor leads person-centred counselling sessions. The counsellor is responsible for the creation of a ‘growth-producing’ relationship and environment.
Key to this are the 'Core Conditions'
- being genuine or congruent
- offering unconditional positive regard and total acceptance of the client
- a deep empathic understanding of the clients experience and reality