Counselling

Counselling is a talking therapy that involves a trained therapist listening to you and helping you find ways to overcome emotional difficulties in your life. There are different ways of offering counselling. The three most common types are psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioural therapy or 'CBT' and  'person-centred'. All three can be effective and it can often be a matter of personal choice in how you wish to work in therapy that guides the method that you choose. I work in the person-centred approach. Please read below if you would like to know more.

The Person-Centred Approach

The psychologist Carl Rogers pioneered the person-centred approach to counselling. He realised that many therapies involved a counsellor taking on the role of an expert, assuming that they knew what was 'wrong' and how to fix it, and would often result in telling people what to do without really listening closely to a person's experience. In contrast, person-centred therapy works on the principle that an individual is the expert on themselves and their life and each person has an enormous capacity for self-understanding and self-healing under the right conditions. A person-centred therapist aims to provide those conditions, understand what each person is going through as fully as they can and then help them find the solution for their distress. This is done in the context of a safe and non-judgemental therapeutic relationship. Person-centred therapy helps people to be the person that they truly are, to be accepting and compassionate towards themselves and to trust their own judgement.

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