A person-centred approach to therapy
There’s no prescribed destination in person-centred therapy. And it’s never about turning you into a “better” version of yourself according to what I think “better” means. It is about having the time, freedom and relationship to look more closely at your life and see what is actually there.
A radical relational tradition
Person-centred therapy begins with a simple premise: your experience deserves to be taken seriously. Rooted in Carl Rogers’ work, it holds that the therapeutic relationship itself makes change possible—offering empathy, acceptance, and genuineness rather than diagnosis or expert technique.
However, person-centred therapy is no more about applying a set of techniques as it is settling into polite agreement. Rather, it describes a real working relationship—one where being taken seriously means staying with discomfort, noticing contradictions, and working through moments of frustration, where empathy fails or misunderstandings happen.
Respect for your autonomy
In the version of person-centred therapy that I practice, I won’t be telling you what you ought to do or what you ought to talk about. Nor will I try to steer you towards a particular version of yourself. But this shouldn’t be taken to mean that I have nothing to say. I may ask questions, offer observations, tell you when I’ve not grasped something, or draw your attention to something that’s going on that seems important.
What I won’t do however is take control of the conversation. My role is not to become an expert on you. It is to help create the conditions in which you can examine your own life more freely.
Responsive to the world within
I don’t see therapy as a process by which everything that has happened to you is stripped away, revealing a long-lost “authentic” version of yourself. We are shaped by other people and the circumstances of our lives. Language, family, relationships, losses, communities, and the wider social context all influence who you are. But sometimes, the influences can become so familiar that it’s hard to distinguish between what we might genuinely want and what we have learned to want.
Therapy cannot make the circumstances of your life go away, but it can make discovering those distinctions easier, help you to become clearer about what matters to you.