BA (Hons) Diploma in Person Centred Counselling

Middlesex University

Head of Department: Peter Pearce

Metanoia's Person Centred Counselling programme is BACP Accredited and offered as a Diploma with optional BA (Hons) - validated by Middlesex University. The course offers students the opportunity to acquire training to practitioner level in what is perhaps the most widely known and practised approach in the counselling field. The training is intended to equip students with a set of relational competencies which have application across the ever broadening range of settings in which counselling and psychotherapy is being practised.

The training is focused upon both personal and professional development, so in addition to striving for theoretical clarity and practice excellence, there is a strong emphasis upon personal awareness and development. The Person Centred Approach has a fifty year plus history, developing as a response to the reductionist and deterministic approaches of existing schools of therapy. The founder of the approach, Carl Rogers, felt that in reducing people to their component parts other approaches missed something fundamental about the experience of being human. He also felt that it was neither possible nor helpful to try to be the expert of another person’s experience. The approach therefore seeks a holistic view and entails both counsellor and client striving to make real human contact. Thus the ‘self’ of the counsellor is a crucial aspect of the approach and hence a major emphasis within the training.

The Person Centred Approach is a thriving and developing body of theory and practice and has always been ‘radical’ in that it opposed power inequalities between counsellor and client, hiding behind professional roles, and put forward the challenging idea that within a safe, accepting and empathic relationship, people have the potential to recognise for themselves both, what is hurting and what is healing for them. Rogers was the first person to really try to de-mystify the therapy relationship and open it up to scrutiny through taping (initially using wax disk) and painstaking research analysis of the necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutic change. There is now very widespread agreement across the range of schools of counselling and psychotherapy that the relationship between therapist and client, along with client variables, is the most important predictor of beneficial outcome. The programme aims to equip students with sufficient awareness of other prevalent models of ‘mental health’ and ‘crises in living’ that constructive communication and dialogue may be facilitated

The Metanoia Diploma in Person Centred Counselling is:

Accredited by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP)

Offered as a BA (Hons) in Counselling validated by Middlesex University.