the.person.centre

Every therapist’s work is underpinned by particular theories about how people come to be, think and act as they are and as they do. But that’s not enough: it also needs to be consistent with her own way of living in, working in and being in the world, her way of making sense of life, and with her beliefs about what it actually means to be a person. Or, to put it more simply: the way I work is rooted in who I am.

The person-centred approach stems originally from the work of the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers in the middle-to-late twentieth century. Whereas the traditional problem-centred approach to counselling and psychotherapy views the therapist as the ‘expert’ in the client’s problems and therefore aims to take charge of the process of therapy, the person-centred therapist believes that the client himself is the expert, and sees herself as a collaborator and equal partner in the therapeutic relationship.

What all this means in practice is that a person-centred therapist has a genuine and deep faith in the capacity of every human being, given the right interpersonal conditions, to shape their own life and to move towards more fulfilling and satisfying ways of living and being in the world and in relationship.

And that, in turn, means that the role of the person-centred therapist is at the same time very simple, and extraordinarily complex. It's the therapist’s task to be fully and genuinely present in the therapeutic relationship, to accompany the client in his search to find more satisfying and fulfilling ways of living and to create the kind of safe, non-judgmental space and facilitative relationship within which the client can contact his own wisdom and potential for growth and can see and become who he truly is. In a nutshell, therapy is about facilitating the process of becoming more human - it's a journey, not a destination.

Two things to add, both of which have become increasingly important to my work over recent years. Firstly, we will spend a considerable amount of time focusing on the present moment - what you're aware of, what you're experiencing now, rather than you simply telling me about your life and what's troubling you in it. And secondly, because every body tells its own story, sometimes a quite different one from that told by our conscious minds, I'll encourage you at times to focus in on yours to help that process along.

Unlike many other forms of therapy, the person-centred approach makes no distinction between counselling and psychotherapy and the two terms are often used interchangeably. Because traditional psychotherapy is often associated with therapist-as-expert models, I prefer to simply use the word therapy to describe what I do.