Dip/BA (Hons) in Person Centred Counselling

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.

• by a genuineness and transparency, in which I am my real feelings.
• by a warm acceptance of and prizing of the other person as a separate individual.
• by a sensitive ability to see his world and himself as he sees them.

Then the other individual in the relationship: will experience and understand aspects of himself which previously he has repressed; will find himself becoming better integrated, more able to function effectively; will become more similar to the person he would like to be; will be more self-directing and self-confident; will become more of a person, more unique and more self expressive; will be more understanding, more acceptant of others; will be able to cope with the problems of life more adequately and more comfortably’. (Carl Rogers (1967) o­n Becoming a Person, p. 37-38).

Rogers believed that this was true when speaking of any relationship. Our training is designed to help students develop the capacity for this quality of relationship with their future clients. In this way the course mirrors the counselling relationship.

There is much debate in the Person Centred community as to what constitutes ‘real Person Centredness’. Person Centred Practitioners inhabit a broad spectrum of positions between a classic, Rogerian approach to a much broader model, embracing ideas that have developed since Rogers. As a department, we resist fixing ourselves to any point o­n this spectrum, as we firmly believe that being truly Person Centred means staying fluid and open to new perspectives whilst staying firmly anchored in the Core tenets of Rogerian Philosophy, Theory and Practice.

As tutors in the Person Centred Counselling Department, we continue to ask ourselves what are the training opportunities we think may bring forth the kinds of qualities that a student counsellor needs in order to come into the human encounter described by Carl Rogers. What do we need to know, and need to be, to be available to engage in an empathic process, to be congruent, and to hold the client, genuinely, with unconditional positive regard? What guides will a Person Centred counsellor need in order to be fully present for each client in an ethical and professional way. Further, what conceptual and theoretical input will be needed to support this facilitative process, and to engage in a dialogue with other counsellors and professionals from different orientations.

We believe that the training of a Person Centred Counsellor is many faceted. In order for each student to discover the resources they already have within themselves to be a Person Centred counsellor they need a variety of training opportunities. Our training offers students the opportunity to address who they are, how they think and feel about themselves and others, and how they might facilitate or impede the creation of the healing relationship Rogers describes as the medium of change.

For further information please email Sylvia Vargas or call her on 020 8832 3076.