Person Centred

What is Person-Centred Counselling?

Person-centred counselling is a compassionate and non-directive approach to therapy that places you, the client, at the heart of the process. Developed in the 1940s and 1950s by the pioneering psychologist Carl Rogers, it is based on the belief that you are the expert in your own life. With the right support and conditions, you can work through challenges, make sense of your feelings, and find your own path forward.

The Person-Centred Approach to Therapy

The Person-Centred approach is based on a rich philosophy about how we become who we are. As human beings, we are wired for safety and connection. From a very young age, we learn how to behave, or even who to be, in order to feel accepted by those closest to us.

The difficulty is that sometimes there is a gap between how we truly feel and how we behave in order to keep approval and stay connected. This gap is called incongruence.

Understanding Incongruence

An example of incongruence might sound like this:

“I feel really angry about something, but I’ve learned that anger is bad. To stay connected to others, I swallow my anger. Over time, I’ve come to believe that feeling anger means there’s something wrong with me, so I judge myself whenever I feel it. This creates an inner tension between what I feel and what I allow myself to express.” I may also disapprove of others anger and so it continues.

How This Starts in Childhood

Imagine a small child eating an ice-cream. It slips and falls to the floor. The child might feels sad, disappointed, or angry.

• In a supportive environment, their feelings would be acknowledged and comforted. They would learn that it’s okay to feel sad or angry. This is what Carl Rogers called unconditional positive regard: The experience of feeling accepted exactly as you are.

• In a less supportive environment, they might be told to “stop being silly,” ignored, or even scolded. To stay connected to their caregivers, they learn to suppress their true feelings and act in ways that win approval.

Over time, this shapes how we see ourselves. As adults, we might push away feelings altogether: “I shouldn’t be angry,” or “I ought to be calm.” We start living according to what we’ve “should” be, rather than how are.

How Person-Centred Therapy Helps

Person-Centred Therapy provides space to tell your story, explore painful feelings and be met with empathy and acceptance. When you feel safe enough to express yourself, you begin to see your emotions as valid rather than denying them. By speaking something out loud, we lift it out of the swirl in our head and place it in front of us. Externalised, it becomes something we can look at, work with, and maybe even change.

This process helps you integrate your experiences, understand yourself more fully and live in line with what truly matters to you. Carl Rogers called this the actualizing tendency, the natural drive within all of us to heal, grow and become our authentic selves.

The Role of the Therapist

In this approach, the therapist’s own self-awareness is essential. Through their own reflective work, they learn to be present and genuine in the moment. This realness creates a sense of safety and trust, allowing you to risk being real too.

When you share your feelings, no matter how vulnerable or uncomfortable, the therapist responds with empathy and understanding, not judgment. This experience of being deeply heard and accepted is what allows healing and self-acceptance to grow. In person-centred therapy, it’s not “therapist fixing client” it’s two people working together. The therapist knows how to guide the process, but the client knows their own life better than anyone.

Why This Matters Even More Today

With all the books, podcasts, and “mental health hacks” out there, you’d think we’d all be thriving. But information isn’t the same as transformation. Research keeps pointing to the same thing; it’s the relationship that heals. Without that human connection, the trust, the feeling of being truly seen, all the knowledge in the world stays stuck in your head.

These days, it can feel like we’re under constant pressure to look like we’ve got it all together. On social media, and even in everyday life, we often hide how we really feel. Our experiences can get reduced to symptoms that need fixing, rather than being explored with curiosity and asking what happened?

It’s common to hear people talk about their mental health as if it’s separate from who they are: “my anxiety,” “my depression.” When we speak like this, it can feel as though our difficulties are something outside of us, or worse, that they define us entirely. Sometimes, when people say “I have anxiety”, it can become both a truth and a full stop. The label is valid, it names a real experience and can be a relief to articulate. But it can also act like a period at the end of a sentence that might have been better with a comma. The conversation often halts at the diagnosis instead of continuing into questions like:

• What triggers this feeling for me?

• When did it start?

• What’s happening in my environment, body, or relationships that feeds it?

If “anxiety” becomes the entire explanation, we might skip the uncomfortable but necessary work of exploring the patterns, histories, and contexts that created it. It’s a bit like saying, “The car won’t start because it’s broken,” technically true, but not especially helpful if we actually want to fix it.

Naming anxiety is a starting point, not an ending point. The real insight often comes from treating that word not as the answer, but as the doorway to deeper exploration.

Life’s challenges don’t have to be faced alone. If what you’ve read here resonates, take the first step, book an introductory meeting.