Person-centred counselling is based on the understanding that all human beings are different, we all have different ways of perceiving the world, and that you are the expert on your own life. After all, you’ve lived every minute of it since you were born.
You are the person, you are at the centre of the work.
This makes person-centred counselling very flexible and adaptable. It’s based entirely around you as an individual – what you think and how you actually feel – not what some academic from 50 years ago expected you to think and feel.
This means our sessions will follow your lead – we’ll focus on what matters most to you and move at your pace.
Being a Person-Centred Counsellor
Person-centred counsellors are trained in helpful ways tobenot necessarily things to do.
You can bring whatever you want to discuss, think whatever you naturally think, and, most importantly, feel however you genuinely feel.
My job is to help you explore these experiences, behaviours, thoughts, and feelings without judgement.
There are three essential qualities a person-centred counsellor needs to be effective:
- Empathy– the ability and willingness to try and understand and feel what you feel as fully as possible, and communicate that understanding to you.
- Genuineness– being open and honest with what they’re saying and why, offering a genuine thought, feeling or input.
- Non-judgement– respecting the fact that everyone sees the world differently which means we’re in no position to judge.
Find out more about me.
Building on the Person-Centred Approach
Since it is flexible and adaptable, I often add and borrow from other approaches. I often bring in some neurobiology to help understand the body and nervous system, use some CBT and somatic exercises to give practical tools, reflect on the existential elements of the human experience, and delve into childhood experiences from a psychodynamic perspective.
But you don’t need to know all of the theory, only that I will continue to bring and offer what I think will be helpful to you. If it’s helpful, great! If not, we move on to other tools and techniques. Not everything will work for everyone and that’s fine. We’re all different.
Person-Centred Counselling and ‘Mental Illness’
Person-centred counsellors don’t focus on diagnosing ‘mental illness’ or ‘disorders’. While these labels can sometimes be helpful for understanding experiences, they can also suggest that there’s something fundamentally wrong with how you’re thinking, feeling, or behaving.
Instead, person-centred counsellors see that people naturally adapt to their experiences in order to survive. Sometimes these adaptations – which made perfect sense at the time – become less helpful in current circumstances or cause distress.
The work of counselling is to explore these experiences and patterns together, helping you gain greater understanding, meaning, and perspective, whether or not you have any formal diagnosis.
Research shows that person-centred counselling can be effective for people across a wide range of experiences and diagnoses.
Find out more about how I work with mental health diagnoses.