Phrases like Person Centered Counseling (or Person Centred Counselling if you are reading in the UK/ Aust/ NZ) are banded around in conversationa dn magazine articles as though everybody was born knowing what they meant. here's a quick all you need to know guide.

Counseling is now a widely recognized therapeutic approach for a huge variety of problem, from dealing with air crash trauma to bereavement and relationship problems. It would be difficult to discuss how to cope with such things without mention of counseling, but does it actually work and what exactly is it?

Before counseling came along in the 1950s (more of that later) we didn’t have a great deal of scope in dealing with “emotional problems”. If we were suffering from something that couldn’t or didn’t respond to tablets there was surprisingly little on offer (compared to today’s glut of over 300 talking therapies). The options that did exist still treated people very much like medical patients, who had things “done to them”, rather than doing things themselves. People where analyzed, poked and prodded, had their dreams and troubles interpreted by experts, wired up to electricity and electrocuted and generally formed a very passive target for all manner of experimental therapeutic intervention. Person Centered Counseling changed all that over night.

Person Centered Counseling is called so as it is literally centered on the person and their abilities to fix themselves, rather than having “stuff done to them”. This largely grew out of a philosophical movement called Humanism that viewed the human condition as something to celebrate rather than to shun and cure. A member of this movement, a young American named Carl Rogers almost single handedly revolutionized the way clinicians viewed emotional distress. It’s often confusing to outsiders that Person Centered Counseling is also known as Humanistic Counseling or sometimes Rogerian (after Carl Rogers) Counseling. It’s all the same thing. As well as setting up all kinds of clinics and schools and societies that advocated his approach he published a series of seminal works in the 1950s, most notably a work that has constantly been in print since its first publication entitled “On Becoming A Person”.

Carl Rogers believed that most people have the ability to make themselves feel better if given the right conditions. This has given rise to the inaccurate idea that a Person Centered Counselor “does nothing”. It’s easy to see where that idea might come from, but it is (I’m glad to say) wholly inaccurate. Becoming an effective and skilled Person Centered Counselor takes much training and experience, with many people dropping out along the way. It’s a profession only for those who are good at it, as clients simply won’t continue seeing someone who is rubbish. A good way to tell a good Person Centered Counselor is one who has been making a living at it for a long time.

So, does it actually work? The simple and short answer is “yes”. After nearly six decades of clinical trials, analysis, research studies there is no shadow of a doubt that Person Centered Counseling works; obviously the better the practitioner the better the outcomes. The ability to actually create the right conditions for people to begin to restore their emotional wellbeing is not easy, but is possible. On top of this we now have other, more up to date counseling styles that have grown out of Person Centered Counseling, such as the highly regarded Motivational Interviewing. This is a brand new counseling style that has been receiving much attention and excellent success rates over the past 20 years. In keeping with the original view of Carl Rogers this approach doesn’t seek to teach skills or to educate or even to explain suffering but to improve wellbeing by enhancing the clients intrinsic desire to change, or in other words, to increase motivation.

This approach, based upon some sophisticated models of change, such as the endlessly interesting Self Perception Theory developed by Daryl Bem and Brehms Reactance Theory and a full arsenal of techniques, strategies and  micro-skills clinicians can help people change, even in situations where they are initially reluctant, such as people suffering from alcohol dependence, drug addiction and eating disorders. It certainly feels a very long way from wiring people up to the mains electricity supply!