What is Person Centred Counselling?

Person Centred Counselling was developed by the pyschologist Carl Rogers. Roger’s developed an ‘humanistic’ approach to counselling people and believed that the process should be deeply empathetic, that the therapist should be supportive, be non-judgemental and build trust with their client.

Roger’s believed that sessions should be deliberately ‘non directive’, so the client leads where the discussion goes and brings forth what they would like to discuss during their counselling session.

Another fundamental principle of Roger’s was that the therapist should operate with an ‘unconditional positive regard’ towards the client. This meant a therapist should strive to create an emotionally safe space for a client to share anything they want with complete empathy and without judgement or direct criticism.

Roger’s approach was pioneering in that it does not take a strict, detached and prescriptive approach towards a client by ‘neatly’ diagnosing them and implementing a strict programme of treatment or medication which was normal at the time. Prior to Rogers, counselling was an highly ‘medicalised’, authoritative and top down practice.

Instead, the therapist strives to understand the client by encouraging open and honest communication and developing trust between both the client and therapist. This listening rather than diagnosing approach is fundamental in creating a space where a client can feel their thoughts and emotions are valid and can be shared genuinely and without conflict or embarassment with a counsellor. Rogers innovative ideas and, consequently, results, definitively changed the field of counselling.

How Does Person Centred Therapy Work?

It may sound simple but in the first place, it really does enable a person to just sit down and talk to someone about their problems or what is troubling them. Any issues that may be preventing them from living a positive and happier life or undertaking everyday activities and social events.

The way a Person Centred Therapist listens without judgement and lets the conversation go where the client needs becomes a very effective way of surfacing issues that are the cause of negative thoughts and behaviours and inevitably helps the therapist identify ‘patterns’ of behaviour in your life in response to people, events and relationships in a person’s life.

Through this process, the therapist will help you understand why you respond or feel the way you do about certain things that have happened or keep happening in your life. Why your relationships with people follow the same patterns but you feel unable to control or change them in ways that help you lead a happier and more fulfilling life. Person Centred Therapy will help you recognise the root cause of these patterns and help you with strategies to overcome them, be truer to your own self and how you want to live your life.

Person Centred Counselling is also sometimes referred to as ‘Talk Therapy’ and is effective at helping individuals experiencing Anxiety, Depression, Low Self Esteem, Low Mood, Phobias, Addiction, Bullying and Bereavement.

We specialise in Person Centred Counselling Therapy at Omega Counselling and offer services in West Lancashire, Central Manchester and Greater Manchester. If you are interested in how we work, please take a moment to read our client feedback here: Omega Counselling Testimonials

What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy?

ACT comes from the Behavioural Therapy school of counselling. It’s a therapy that encourages you to ‘accept’ your emotions rather than suppressing them and ignoring them. This process works through you accepting emotions as they occur and examining them and then deciding how you want to respond to them rather than trying to control them, suppress them or have an ‘automatic’ emotional response.

A counsellor will use various methods or techniques to help you accept an emotion and examine not just how it affects you now, in the present, but also why it affects you this way.

ACT therapy provides real action oriented strategies that helps you align these feelings with the values you live your life by today. This process results in a person accepting small comittments to doing something in keeping, or ‘alignment’, with their values, when these recoccuring emotions appear again (this is known as the ‘comittment phase’).

How Does Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Work?

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy offers a practical set of techniques or methods to react to the rise and fall of a person’s changing emotional state.

So you can address your emotions as you experience them in the ‘here and now’, in the present state, a process of learning to acknowledge that these feelings do exist in the present. This is followed by a form or commitment (an action by you) to respond in ways that enable you to move on with your life the way you want.

The commitments an individual is encouraged to make are generally taken in small steps and are always incremental, thereby, changing negative behaviours progressively, over time.

It is used to help people experiencing a wide range of mental health issues such as Trauma, Addiction, Obsessive and Compulsive Behavioiur , Anxiety and Depression.

What is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?

CBT is a form of Pyschotherapy that focuses on understanding the way you think about things, your ‘cognition’, and how you do things, so how you respond to events, your ‘behaviours’.

It focuses in particular on your negative thoughts and negative behaviours and how they affect your actions or responses to people and events in your life.

Therapy is usually conducted through the use of specific question and answer sessions with you. How you respond to these questions helps the therapist identify how you are thinking about the idea in the question and how it affects your emotions and behaviours. In other words, how you automatically respond to things.This method helps the therapist identify negative patterns and devise ways that will enable you to unlearn negative thinking and stop your negative behavioural responses.

How Does Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Work?

In part it works through exercise repition and practise, so that over the duration of your sessions, it will help you to think and act differently about things that have been affecting you negatively.

You may be asked to keep a journal, practise identifying negative thoughts and replacing them, shown new ways of problem solving and learning relaxation techniques.

CBT is helpful for people that prefer a structured approach and focuses on specific emotional and pyschological responses that have previously encouraged negative thoughts and behaviours in an individual.

It is used in many different areas of mental health care but has been used frequently , and effectively, as a therapy for Depression, Anxiety, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), overcoming Phobias and Fears and changing negative behaviours. It can be acessed as Face to Face therapy and Online.

What is Gestalt Therapy?

Gestalt Therapy is a form of Pyschoanalysis. It has been used by professional therapists for over 70 years although remains largely unknown by people working outside of the counselling professions.

Rather than looking exclusively at past events in a person’s history, Gestalt Therapy encourages you to focus on how you ‘feel in the present’, on how you are feeling in the ‘here and now’. It encourages the individual not to just see past events as the reason for behaving or feeling as you do now but to consider the larger collective of events, people and experiences that makes up a person’s life, including how one lives in the present in shaping a person’s life. It is the sum of all these parts and not exclusively things that happened in the past that are formative in how an individual lives and experiences the world in the present .

How Does Gestalt Therapy Work

Gestalt Therapy works towards you recognising it is how you negotiate the world around you today, so how you engage with people, events and your current environment in the present and by examining and confronting how that might be affecting you now.

Gestalt resists trying to identify a specific trait or past event that could in other circumstance be said to ‘define you’. Rather it examines how your relationships to things and people right now are interdependent and these relationships and connections play a significant role in creating different parts of your ‘whole self’.

Gestalt Therapy will often use Role Play and Re-enactment to identify the different ‘parts’ of your self come together to make the whole person. Often therapists will engage you in some form of ‘artistic’ expression like drawing or painting to help encourage greater self awareness and understanding of thought patterns and behaviours.

What is Existential Therapy

Existential Therapy has more of a philosophical element to its approach as it helps people examine what is the sometimes referred to as ‘life’s big questions’ . Typically, for people struggling with concepts like, ‘what is my purpose in life?’, ‘what is the meaning of this life?’, ‘what happens after I die?’, ‘Am I free, what is freedom?’, and there is any number more of these big questions about life and where you fit in the scheme of things that Existential Therapy is concerned with helping people with.

People struggling for meaning about their own existence will sometimes develop serious anxieties about these big life questions and can become paralysed or overwhelmed with the magnitude of these concepts and beliefs, causing them to struggle with their own personal growth and life ambitions as a result.

Existential Therapy differs somewhat from the approach of other counselling therapies in that it does not set out to ‘cure’ or even diagnosis specific symptoms a person may be exhibiting. Existential Therapy will focus on a person’s agency and responsibility in the world as it is in the ‘here and now’. Existential therapy is focused on a person’s life in ‘the present sense’ and not strictly examining in great detail things that may have happened to you in the past.

It encourages a person to understand where they fit in the world around them, how the choices they make and how they interact in the world produces (subjective meaning) rather than trying to determine if there is some universal, guiding, over arching meaning to this life we live.

So in essence, we as subjects make our own meanings and create our own sense of freedom by not only taking responsibilty for our choices but critically, accepting them too.

By taking this approach, the therapist can encourage a person to ‘lean into’ their anxieties rather than automatically avoiding them, to accept them and face their fears and move towards living with a sense of freedom, personal growth and emotional and pyschological healing.

How Does Existential Therapy Work?

Existential therapy will entail discussing your anxiety and fears about the meaning of life’s big things and, importantly, how they affect you.

A therapist will usually take examples of how you feel about something and examine how these align with your values and can be used to support and reinforce your fears. Through this process of examination and searching for the meaning of the idea, it enables the therapist and client to discover a position more authentic to their ‘true self’ and to choose their attitude and relationship to their fear(s) or dissatisfaction moving forwards in life. This taking responsibility and making choices about how you want to live is part of the readjustment in how you live your life that Existential Therapy is seeking to achieve.

Existential Therapy actually has 9 foundational (theorectical) principles that guide the interaction between a therapist and client. We have summarised what Existential Therapy is based upon and also what it is seeking to do in principle but if you want to learn in more detail then the 9 principles is a great starting point.

What is Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing?

EMDR is a therapy that focuses on the brain’s bilateral activity, similar to what a person experiences during the Rapid Eye Movement phase of sleeping (REM Sleep). It is during REM sleep that the brain processes events from your daily life, including traumatic ones.

However, sometimes the event is so traumatic for a person that the brain cannot process and store them correctly in you mind’s memory, so they become disconnected from your normal memory network. In this sense, a traumatic event is said to be ‘stuck’ and, consequently, the effects of the trauma are still being experienced or triggered in a person.

The theory is that by inducing the bilateral processing of a memory, similar to what happens during REM sleep, a therapist can ‘unblock’ this trauma from the brain and allow your mind to process the memory correctly.

This process and experience enables the subject to remove the negative thoughts and emotional pain that they associated with a traumatic event in their past.

How Does Eye Movement Desensitisation Work?

It involves going through a person’s history and identifying traumatic events and the emotional response a person has to them. The therapist will then target specific memories and use Rapid Eye Movement inducing techniques to begin to ‘desensitse’ the subject’s emotions towards these memories.

Whilst inducing this bilateral brain activity, the therapist will help the subject address their negative emotions associated with this memory until the subject is no longer adversely affected.

There are actually 8 steps in the EMDR process and during the REM exercises the therapist uses the targeted memory to ultimately work through negative emotions and reinforce positive beliefs.

EMDR is predominantly used with people that have experienced life changing trauma. This doesn’t have to be a one-off event but can be something like persistent bullying, which has a cumulative effect.

EMDR has been effective in helping individuals suffering from PTSD, a sudden unexpected loss, an unforeseen accident or life changing event/disaster, as well as physical and sexual abuse.

What is Mindfulness Based Therapy

Mindfulness Based Therapy is actually considered to be a modified form of Cognitive Based Therapy. However, it focuses primarily on techniques that improve one’s ability to be in the present moment by using meditative techniques, body scanning techniques and deep (diaphragmatic) breathing exercises.

It is sometimes described as combining both Westernised counselling pyschology with ‘Eastern’ Meditation practices. It has been used extensively to help people with depression and anxiety as it offers practical techniques that can anchor a person in the present moment and learn to break out of persistent negative thought patterns and behaviours. By ‘practising’ these techniques when faced with negative thought patterns it is thought that a ‘remapping’ of a person’s neural network takes place and, thereby, ‘pushing’ out the negative patterns of thought and behaviour a person adopts over time. It relies on practise and repetition of the exercises used as part of the therapy.

How Does Mindfulness Based Therapy Work?

Where is differs from many of the other therapies described here is that it will often be undertaken in small groups of people.

Groups tend to meet weekly (online or face-to-face) and usually a programme runs for 8 sessions. The group sessions provide a forum to discuss and learn more about depression and anxiety and teaches people the techniques that help induce a state of mindfulness. Attendees are encouraged to practise these techniques at home and out in real world situations, particularly, in situations that trigger negative patterns of thought and behaviour.

Ultimately, this practise can become a natural or automatic way of countering difficult situations that caused negative responses and behaviour previously.

There are generally around 12 different techniques and routines that are used in Mindfulness Based Therapy. The key routines all require some process of ‘taking stock’ of an individual’s senses or physical reactions as a means to focussing onbeing present in the ‘here and now’.

Typically, you will be encouraged to practise Deep Breathing Exercises, Body Scanning Exercises, Visualisation Techniques and Mindfulness Movement ( e.g. Tai Chi or Yoga) as well as some other therapeutic methods that form the basis of Mindfulness Based Therapy.

What is Transactional Analysis?

Transactional Analysis is a pyschological theory based around our interactions with people in relation to our own ‘Ego States’.

The theory details 3 different states of ego: Parent, Adult and Child. Each of these ego states manifest a different set of thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

Another foundation principle is that it even though we may be different in some ways, it recognises that every individual is of value and worth. This means we can take the position that ‘I’m Okay, You’re OK’ as a foundational premise.

The ‘transactional’ aspect is recognised when we exchange our thoughts and ideas with another person, so how we communicate. This exhange happens in one of the 3 Ego States and a therapist will identify which of these states exists during a communication exchange. So think of this Ego State as falling into a pattern, a scripted behavioural response to another person. You might always have a child like ego state with someone even though you are now an adult and this will determine how you respond and act in these situations. You will follow this pattern, this script, even though you may feel differently about what is being communicated with the other person.

How Does Transactional Analysis Work?

This recognition and understanding of the Ego State by a therapist enables them to intervene and identify ways to respond and change this pattern of behaviour towards a predetermined Ego State. Put simply, it will help you change the ‘script’ and respond and exchange communication in new ways with people that is more positive and helpful to you.

This also works towards an alignment with the foundational premise, ‘I’m Okay, You’re Okay’ as you begin to exchange ideas and thoughts with people in a more authentic way and move beyond the almost, ‘triggered’, prescribed, Ego State responses.

There is a lot of detail and theory built into Transactional Analysis and it has many component parts. If you are interested in learning more, further reading about Eric Berne’s theoretical models is the best place to start.

Transactional Analysis is considered a powerful therapy for overcoming a person’s ‘scripted’ responses to the people that communicate with them. So it is excellent at examining how a person’s interactions work in the real world and putting in place methods to change them by developing greater self awareness.

TA is known to help people with social anxiety, difficulty with relationships, a need to improve how they communicate and a desire to have a greater understanding of themselves.

What is Psychodynamic Therapy?

Pyschodynamic Therapy has its roots in the psychoanalytic theory developed by Sigmund Freud. It focuses primarily on past events in a person’s life and how they may, unconsciously, be the cause of internal conflicts that may be affecting a persons emotions, relationships and behaviours still in the present day.

Pyschodynamic therapy places an emphasis on a person’s early relationships, especially, those with people responsible for parenting or caring for an individual in their formative childhood years.

Consequently, a therapist will work through a person’s childhood and past events in order to bring a self awareness of how these experiences and events may still be influencing how they respond to certain people, societal roles ( authority figures for instance) and situations today. The aim of the therapist is to help an individual understand themselves better, why they react to people and events the way they do, why they think about the world they inhabit in the ways they do. Ultimately, psychodynamic therapy should enable much greater self awareness in a person and offer ways of coping with negative thoughts, responses and behaviours.

How Does Pyschodynamic Therapy Work?

In additon to examining childhood experiences, there are a number of different methods and techniques a therapist will consider using during your sessions. It may include ‘free association’ exercises, identification of patterns and repetitive behaviours, even analysing your dreams and symbols that you recognise in your life.

Sessions are usually conducted on a weekly basis and can be maintained as long as an individual is happy to continue. Pyschodynamic Therapy can help people with Anxiety, Depression, Personality Disorders, Self Esteem issues and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).