Peter Hudson
Counselling & Psychotherapy
​
We all face times in our lives
when we struggle and talking
in a safe space about what
is going on and connecting
again with our true feelings
can help us find a
way forward. ​​
Registered with and Accredited
by the British Association for Counselling
and Psychotherapy, I work
with a wide range of issues.
​
Together we can explore
what is going on for
you and the journey that
has brought you here.
ABOUT ME
I qualified as a counsellor in 2016. My core training was in the Person-Centred approach to therapy (see Here) I also completed foundation training at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London. I have studied other models of therapy including Psychodynamic, DBT, Trauma Informed, Internal Family Systems and Poly Vagal
I have worked as a counsellor with the mental health charity Mind, with the Probation Service and with a private counselling agency, and for a number of years I was a counsellor in schools and colleges.
​
In these differing settings I have be privileged to work with a wide range of clients and continue to do so from young people upwards.
What is distressing me? Where did it come from? What can I do about it? My therapist to me said: ‘we come to therapy in order to discover why we come to therapy’. Therapy is a journey and the answers to the above questions can emerge only from you. The manner in which I work, then, is to assist this process, helping you come into a closer and truer relationship with yourself and engagement with the difficulties or traumas that lie behind your issues. This can at times be difficult with prohibited feelings, thoughts and experiences coming to the surface, but it can lead to a renewed sense of agency, balance and understanding and a closer connection with yourself.
Originally from a farming background, I have in my life been a farmer, van driver, travel writer, photographer, development charity director and counsellor. I am the father of four beautiful girls, now young women. Like all people, I have not always found life easy and have suffered at different times from addiction, ME and depression, all issues with which I now work.
Qualifications & Training
​
-
Person-Centred Counselling, Foundation Degree, University of Worcester
-
Psychoanalysis, Foundation, Institute of Psychoanalysis
-
Diploma, level 3, Counselling skills, Hereford and Ludlow College
-
Dialectic Behavioural Therapy, The Association for Psychological Therapies
-
Providing Good Clinical Supervision, Association for Psychological Therapies
-
Working with Complex Trauma Clients, PESI UK
-
Courses: Psychosynthesis, MSC; Bereavement Care, Children and Young People, Cruse; CBT, Bristol CBT; Equality and Diversity Awareness, Xenzone; Attachment, Xenzone; Suicide and Risk, Xenzone.
-
tes training: ADHD Awareness; Autism Awareness; Safeguarding Adults; Child Protection, Advanced.
-
Person-Centred Approach to transference and defence mechanisms, Nic Quinto; Non-directivity, Nic Quinto; Soul Husbandry, Matthew Trustman.
​OUR SESSIONS
I work both short term and more psychotherapeutically long-term. I offer for those who want it an initial free chat on the phone. After this if you wish to continue, we can discuss whether you wish to think about how many sessions you want or if you want to work open-ended.
Our sessions will be an hour in length and occur weekly. That hour is there for you. This means that there is no pressure on you to perform or be a certain way. ​​
​
Fees for one hour sessions are £55. Concessions are sometimes available.​​ I work face-to-face and offer only the occasional online session to existing clients if required.
​
In my practice I adhere to the BACP Ethical Framework
PERSON-CENTRED THERAPY
Although the manner in which I work integrates all my learning and training, what follows I hope will give to those who wish to explore a little further a sense of what lies behind what is my core, Person-Centred approach.
​
Carl Rogers, psychologist and founder of Person-Centred Counselling, based the approach on his belief in the inherent human potential for healthy development. By this he meant that all organisms, including the human organism, will always move in the direction of optimum healthy development given its circumstances. The plant in the darkness will still always still strive to grow to its optimum best.
​​
As Rogers saw it, the therapist is not a detached ‘expert’ there to ‘fix’ the client, but is there as a real, feeling and emotional being with whom the client can feel truly seen, heard and valued and, hence, enabled to more truly see, feel and value themselves. By being in a 'safe' enough and trusting environment, the client can come into closer connection with their more authentic selves. It is then, Rogers believed, that the organismic agency of the client will move them in the direction that is uniquely right for them, this viewpoint now backed up by empirical research into the nervous system and the discovery of how vital relational connection and co-regulation is to its healthy functioning.
​
In terms of therapy, this all means that in the Person-Centred approach, it is entirely in the person of the client that the focus rests, they being deemed the best expert on themselves. Whether it is trauma, abuse, self-esteem, identity or relational issues, depression, anger, anxiety or other issues that the client brings to therapy, it is the gentle, careful attention to the processes taking place, both within the client as those processes occur in real-time with all their inherent implicit and explicit meanings, and in the relationship between the client and therapist, that becomes the path the client and therapist follow, addressing the core of the issues, not just the symptoms.
​
​
​
​
​
RESOURCES
The following are quotes from some of the books I have found inspirational which can provide a reference for those who might have an interest in reading further.
​
Gabor Mate, Myth of Normal.
".... someone without the marks of trauma would be an outlier in our society.
We are closer to the truth when we ask: where do we all fit on the broad and surprisingly inclusive trauma spectrum? Which of its many marks has each of us carried all (or most) of our lives, and what have the impacts been?"
"…..early experience becomes our template for our character and involvement in the world."
"Everything within us, no matter how distressing, exists for a purpose .... The question thus shifts from ‘How do I get rid of this?’ to ‘What is this for? Why is it here?’ ... these disturbers of our peace have always been our friends ....It isn’t them but rather our desperate efforts to keep them at bay that levy the heaviest toll on our mental and physical well-being.... Agency is gained not by resistance to ourselves but by way of acceptance and understanding."
"The journey is to find the gift in the challenge."
Carl Rogers, A Way of Being.
".... I have found that if I can help bring about a climate marked by genuineness, prizing, and understanding, then .... Persons .... in such a climate move away from rigidity toward flexibility, away from static living toward process living, away from dependence toward autonomy, away from defensiveness toward self-acceptance, away from predictable toward unpredictable creativity."
​
Iain Mcgilchrist, The Matter with Things.
"What is wonderful about us is not our pitiful lust for power, our self-absorbtion and our armour-platred invulnerability, but precisely our capacity to be vulnerable, to wonder, and to love...."
​
Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher.
"Direct experience which is never adequately communicatable in words is the only knowledge we ever fully have."
Christiane Ritter A Woman in the Polar Night
"We human beings are only instruments over which the song of the world plays.’
Karl Jung: Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics, Bernardo Kastrup.
"The psychic is an emancipation of function from its instinctual form …. and begins to show itself accessible to a will motivated from other sources."
​
John 12: 20 - 33
"It is for this reason I have come to this hour."
Peter Levine. In an unspoken voice.
"As traumatised individuals begin to reown their sense of agency ….They achieve the compassionate realisation that both their immobility and their rage are a biologically driven, instinctual imperative and not something to be ashamed of as if it were a character defect."
Thomas Hardy
"If a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst."
​
​
Contact Peter
Peter Hudson, Fd.Sc MBACP (Accred)
07773 487 075
Contact Peter to book an appointment.
​
Sessions held in a relaxed setting based in Central Cardiff.