Philosophy of Person Centred Department

Person Centred Department

The Person Centred Approach is perhaps the first, truly ‘relational’ therapy and the most widely known and practiced approach within the counselling field in the UK. The founder of the approach, Carl Rogers, 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 therapist is a crucial aspect of the approach and a major emphasis within the training.) The approach has always been ‘radical’ in that it strives to address power inequalities between counsellor and client and puts forward the challenging contention that at core, each person has the capacity for health, growth and creativity. It is as a consequence of social, economic, cultural, religious and parental influences that we may learn to inhibit our natural, organismic drive to satisfy these capacities. In this way we may lose touch, to a greater or lesser extent, with our ability as a whole organism to know what is good for us, our ‘organismic valuing process’.Within a genuine, accepting and empathic relationship, people have the potential to reconnect with this and recognise for themselves, what is hurting and what is healing. Rogers was the first person to really try to de-mystify the therapy relationship and open it up to scrutiny through recording 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 variables identified by Rogers, along with client variables, are the most important predictors of beneficial outcome. The approach is richly supported by both process and outcome research studies as well as by the findings of recent research in the fields of child development and neuroscience. The Person Centred Department offers full training to qualification in counselling and in psychotherapy. Training groups begin at different times in the year to support students to progress at their own pace. We also provide a vibrant programme of workshops and seminars by national and international leaders in the field. The ‘Certificate’ year, can also be taken as a ‘stand alone’ year, suitable for anyone seeking to build on their understanding and practice of counselling skills.