Person Centered Counselling

The field of counselling contains many theories, sometimes very different from each other. There are, however, three major theoretical approaches: “humanistic”, “psychodynamic” and “cognitive behavioural” and within each of these approaches there are discrete models, for example, “person centred” and “transpersonal”. This diversity of counselling theories and approaches is really valuable and important. Why? Because the different theories relate to different ways of thinking about how people develop and manage their lives and reflects the diversity and complexity of people and their life experiences. Different clients will have different needs so different approaches can be used to suit the client. It is the foundation of good counselling. Without a well thought out theory, counselling can risk being ineffective. Theory helps counsellors focus on relevant information and tells them what to look for. Theory is something that is being tried, tested and developed all the time. There are more than 400 systems of psychotherapy and counselling it is important to keep in mind that no one theory can provide all the answers. No one theory is right or wrong they just have different theatrical approaches. Counsellors need to discriminate among the many theories to find the ones that seem to fit for them and their individual client issues.
Each counsellor develops their own particular way of working based on the theories they’ve studied, the skills they’ve learnt and their own particular experiences of working with clients. No two counsellors work in exactly the same way or apply theory to practice in exactly the same way. Tonight not only did we look at the importance of theory in counselling work which I have discussed above but we also looked at the theory behind person centred counselling.

The idea of using core conditions is so that the more our client becomes self-aware the more accepting they become and the better their self-esteem is. The more the client knows