Counselling

 

“…counselling and psychotherapy enable clients to increase their insight and expertise in personal relationships”. (BACP 2022).

Counselling works within what’s known as the internal frame of reference of the client (the client’s viewpoint). Our counselling relationship would start with me listening to your concerns from your viewpoint.

My objectives within the counselling relationship are to enable free talk and exploration about what matters to you and whats important to you.  I ask checking and clarifying questions to get information and reflect back what I feel Ive heard, this can help toward insight and understanding of your problems. Gaining greater insight and understanding of your problems enables you to recognise just what causes them, and importantly feeling personally empowered to find ways of dealing with them. 

At some point in our lives we all wrestle with the old questions “Where is my life going?” Whats my goal in life?” “What am I striving for?” “What is my purpose?”  Each generation asks and answers these questions, but its up to each individual to ask and answer these in his/her own way to their own satisfaction and to recognise responsibility for their own individual choices.  In our counselling relationship I would be encouraging you to set personal goals to include a greater participation in the decisions you make about how you live your life, planning and action for overcoming obstacles and makng changes, overcoming and resolving personal and social problems, insight into self and those around you.

Carl Rogers (1986), a psychologist of over 30 years standing wrote that every person is an individual with qualities and possibilities making them capable of continual and positive personal development. His thoughts, writings and philosophies became known as Rogerian counselling. Basically, Rogerian counselling focuses on the processes and implications of change for clients and recommends that a therapists role should be to offer counselling that provides the following  ‘necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutic change’:

• Two persons are in psychological contact

• The first, the client is in a state of incongruence vulnerable and anxious

• The second, the counsellor, is congruent/integrated in the relationship

• The counsellor experiences unconditional regard for the client

• The counsellor experiences an empathic understanding of the client’s internal  frame of reference and endeavours to communicate this experience to the client

• The communication to the client of the counsellor’s empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard is achieved.

The above conditions are implemented by me in all Counselling sessions.  Humanistic counselling forms the basis of all aspects of my therapeutic work with my clients.