A Guided Tour of Person-Centred Counselling & Psychotherapy

Welcome to A Guided Tour of Person-Centred Counselling & Psychotherapy!

I am a BACP accredited person-centred counsellor & psychotherapist. As well as working as a person-centred practitioner with clients, I also worked as a counselling tutor for 4 years, supporting students to becoming fully qualified therapists. Before that, I have worked for numerous charities offering therapy to adults, children and young people in a range of settings, and I also managed a therapy service in a school for a while. Currently I share my time between my work in private practice as a person-centred therapist and my role as a specialist crisis worker.

Since deciding to leave my teaching role in February 2023, I have been itching to put everything I have learned about the approach into some kind of format that I can offer to people - my decision to create this online course is a result of that.

How is this course structured?

The course is structured in such a way that after the introductory module, we begin by zooming out and exploring a little about the wider world of psychology leading up to the emergence of humanistic psychology and the person-centred approach. This is so that not only do you understand the approach itself, but you have an idea of where it come from and what it was developed in response to.

Afterwards, we zoom in a little and there are two modules giving a detailed look a counselling theory from a person-centred perspective. What are the ideas that underpin the approach? How does a person-centred therapy conceptualise mental health? What is the best way to help people, according to this approach? All these questions and more are answered in these two modules on counselling theory.

After exploring the counselling theory modules, we zoom in a bit more and become a little more practical, looking at the specific counselling skills that are used by the person-centred practitioner when working with clients.

Finally, the last module on the course will involve putting those individual skills into practice in an example session, which involves an actor talking about some (fictional) problems in their life, and myself responding in a similar way to how I would in a real session. After this, the rest of this module involves me watching the video back and sharing my own reflections on it - things I have missed, any feelings I have about the session, and why I said or didn't say certain things. Bear in mind this is NOT a 'real' counselling session, as it would not be ethical to do that, but it is as close as we can get to showing one in this way.

By the end of the course you will have an idea of when and how the person-centred approach emerged, as well as a thorough understanding of person-centred theory, the relevant counselling skills and how to be with a client, and of what a counselling session can actually look like.