I use Person-Centered Therapy. Here’s what it’s all about.
Person-Centered therapy is a talking therapy, and that's what we'll do.
The aim is to provide you a comfortable and confidential space to talk as much or as little as you need to about the things that are important to you. In this space you'll be listened to without judgement and you'll have the focused attention of someone who genuinely wants to understand what it's like to walk in your shoes.
Within this kind of environment, many things can and do happen. For example, issues that were creating huge distress are shared and begin to lose some of their intensity. Complicated problems are given the space to be laid out, inspected, untangled and organised. Unrecognised wants and needs start to emerge and new confidence and self-valuing begins to bubble up.
These results are almost all completely down to you having the right conditions to self-heal and grow in the direction that's right for you. My job is to create those conditions, and occasionally - when appropriate - to gently help emergent moments of meaning and growth to catch hold and have the chance to take root.
Person-Centered Therapy theory, a brief description in plain language.
Person-Centered Therapists believe that only you know the way to heal and grow in a way that's right for yourself.
The reason that this growth doesn't happen for many of us is due to circumstances in our lives that have got in the way of us being able to listen to our inner-self (organismic self) and understand the warning messages that it sends us when we're not in alignment - in the form of emotional and psychological distress.
The blocks to our organismic self being heard come primarily from the beliefs and values that we've taken on board in order to gain love and acceptance during our life. Rules like 'I must always be like this' or 'Good people never do that' in Person-Centered theory are known as Conditions of Worth.
So in it's very simplest form, Person-Centered therapy aims to help people reconnect with - and be able to understand - their Organismic Self, become aware of the Conditions of Worth that have been over-riding their real needs, and start to explore how to be more aligned internally and externally in the world (we call this being Congruent).
