What follows I hope will give to those who wish to explore a little further a sense of what lies behind the Person-Centred approach to therapy and how it looks in the counselling room.  

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Carl Rogers, psychologist and founder of the Person-Centred therapy, based the approach on his belief in the 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 forest will always strive to grow to its optimum best.  

‘Man’s behaviour is exquisitely rational,’ Rogers said, ‘moving with subtle and ordered complexity toward the goals his organism is endeavouring to achieve.’  (Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person) 

It is the circumstances in which we grow and develop that dictate the direction of a growth that, regardless of of how it appears, will have always been towards to its optimum best. The therapist’s role, then, as Rogers saw it, was to provide the conditions in which that potential for healthy development can best can be enhanced and nurtured.  

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As Rogers saw it, the therapist is not a detached ‘expert’ there to ‘fix’ the client with his or her superior knowledge, but is there as a real, feeling, emotional and spiritual being in whose presence and with whose help the client can feel truly seen, heard and 'encountered', and hence empowered deep within themselves.  It is under these circumstances, Rogers believed, that the organismic agency of the client that will allow them to move in the direction that is uniquely right for them can be stimulated. 

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. 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. This leads, not so much to an intellectual comprehension of the issues by the client - although this too can be of importance - but to a movement precipitated by the client's whole, embodied and spiritual being: a ‘reorganisation’ that comes from the client’s whole self, addressing the core of the issues, not just the symptoms.

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‘Trust the process’, was Rogers’ by-word, by which he meant, trust the processes with which the client’s organism, when freed from ‘conditions’, ‘judgements’ and ‘fears’, uses to rebalance itself.

When we can truly sense what it is we feel – and most of us are to greater or lesser degrees often alienated from what we truly feel; when we find ourselves in conditions that allow us to be most ‘in ourselves’, it is then that we learn to trust ourselves and our instincts, for the only true yardstick we have with which to gauge the world about us are the senses with which we encounter it.

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The way I see it, then, and in the manner in which I approach Person-Centred therapy, my practice incorporates implicitly, if less explicitly, the main elements of the major therapeutic approaches - Freudian/Psychoanalysis, Humanistic, Cognitive/Behavioural -

in that attention is paid, when and how they emerge from the client, to aspects that are Relational, Developmental and Attachment focused, Holistic, Process-orientated, Spiritual, Trauma-Informed and Cognitive.