In this statement
An orientation to human experience
My approach to counselling, psychotherapy and professional education is grounded in a humanistic understanding of people as relational, complex and continually developing beings.
I am interested in how we make meaning of our experience, how we come to know ourselves, and how our relationships shape and reflect who we are. I am equally interested in how people change, particularly when intellectual understanding has proved insufficient.
Psychological experience needs to be understood in the context of the person living it. Our feelings, beliefs, behaviours and difficulties develop within the circumstances of our lives, our histories, our bodies and our relationships. They carry meanings that may not yet be available to conscious understanding.
My orientation is principally person-centred, experiential and relational, informed by psychodynamic, existential and systemic perspectives. Dialectical thinking also provides an important foundation for understanding human experience as dynamic, interconnected and frequently contradictory.
These traditions offer different ways of understanding experience. I find value in what each brings to our understanding of the person, the processes through which experience is organised, and the conditions that support greater awareness, integration and freedom.
Humanistic foundations and the person-centred tradition
Humanistic psychotherapy begins with a particular regard for the person. It recognises the significance of subjective experience, the individual’s capacity for self-understanding and the possibility of growth throughout life.
Within the person-centred tradition, this orientation finds expression in the therapeutic conditions described by Carl Rogers: empathy, unconditional positive regard and congruence.
I understand these as qualities of being that inform the therapist’s presence and participation in the relationship.
Empathy involves an active and continuing attempt to understand another person’s experience from within their frame of reference, while recognising the limits of our understanding. Unconditional positive regard reflects a fundamental respect for the person, including aspects of their experience that may be difficult to encounter or accept. Congruence calls upon the practitioner to remain in contact with their own experience and to participate in the relationship with authenticity and psychological presence.
These conditions require ongoing self-awareness, emotional responsiveness and the capacity to recognise when our assumptions, anxieties or personal needs interfere with our ability to understand another person.
They are equally relevant to supervision, education and professional collaboration. The way we engage with colleagues and students says something about how fully we have integrated the values we seek to bring to therapeutic practice.
A person-centred orientation also requires sound professional judgement. Clinical knowledge and theoretical understanding are valuable resources, provided they remain responsive to the individual and their experience. The person must remain central to our understanding, even when diagnostic or theoretical frameworks offer useful explanations.
Growth and self-actualisation
I regard the human capacity for development as fundamental, while recognising that growth is neither inevitable nor straightforward.
Self-actualisation, as I understand it, concerns the development of a more inclusive and congruent relationship with one’s experience, including aspects of self that have been disowned, feared, constrained or insufficiently understood.
Growth may involve greater self-acceptance, an increased capacity for choice, a willingness to encounter vulnerability and the courage to live with greater authenticity.
These processes can be uncomfortable. Development sometimes requires us to question familiar understandings of ourselves, recognise painful realities or remain with uncertainty while new possibilities take shape.
The circumstances of a person’s life also matter. Trauma, loss, illness, material conditions, social environments and relational histories can significantly constrain the resources available for change.
A credible humanistic approach needs to recognise these realities and remain attentive to the possibilities available within the person’s actual circumstances.
The relational nature of therapeutic work
The therapeutic relationship is central to my understanding of psychotherapy. It is a living interpersonal process through which experience can be explored, understood and changed.
We develop our understandings of ourselves through relationships. Our expectations of others, responses to vulnerability, ways of seeking connection and means of protecting ourselves are shaped through relational experience. Many of these patterns become familiar long before we are able to recognise or describe them.
They may also become active within the therapeutic relationship.
For this reason, I attend to what a client describes as well as to what develops in the present encounter. What is felt but remains unspoken? What happens when an experience is recognised? How do familiar interpersonal expectations influence what becomes possible between us?
The therapist participates in this process. Our presence, responses, limitations and subjectivity influence the developing relationship, just as we are affected by the people with whom we work.
Psychodynamic thinking contributes an understanding of unconscious processes, internal conflict, relational expectations and the ways earlier experiences may become active in present relationships. Concepts such as transference and countertransference provide opportunities for reflection and clinical understanding, while requiring care in how interpretations are formed and used.
Systemic perspectives draw attention to the wider contexts within which experience develops. Family relationships, culture, community, social structures and historical circumstances all contribute to how people understand themselves and relate to others.
A relational approach therefore requires movement between the personal and interpersonal, the immediate and historical, and the individual and their wider environment.
Within this complexity, I am particularly interested in therapeutic presence: the practitioner’s capacity to remain emotionally available, attentive and responsive while engaging with another person’s developing experience.
This includes recognising our own responses, tolerating uncertainty and allowing sufficient space for meanings to emerge without rushing to explain or resolve them.
Relationship beyond the human
Our relational capacities also find expression in our relationships with animals and the wider living world.
Our relationships with animals and the wider living world offer experiences of connection, responsiveness, attunement and reciprocity. They can invite forms of attention and understanding that do not depend on language or conceptual explanation.
An appreciation of these relationships contributes to my understanding of relational life and the different ways living beings affect and respond to one another.
It also reminds me that some of what we understand about relationship comes directly from experience, including experiences that are difficult to explain adequately through theory.
A dialectical understanding of experience and change
Dialectical thinking provides an important philosophical dimension to my work.
Human experience is frequently contradictory. We may desire closeness and fear intimacy, value independence while seeking reassurance, experience love alongside resentment, or recognise a need for change while remaining attached to what is familiar.
These contradictions can reveal something important about the complexity of our experience, the competing needs we carry and the ways we have learned to respond to life.
A dialectical orientation encourages attention to these tensions and to the relationships between apparently opposing positions.
Contradiction and polarities
I am interested in what becomes possible when conflicting aspects of experience are encountered and understood more fully.
An internal conflict may involve different attempts to protect, preserve or express something important. Exploring the relationship between these positions can reveal meanings that remain hidden when attention is directed towards resolving or eliminating one of them.
Some tensions can be integrated. Others remain part of life and require us to find ways of living with their complexity or making difficult choices.
Voice Dialogue has been particularly influential in my understanding of internal multiplicity and polarities. Its attention to different selves and their underlying vulnerabilities provides an experiential way of exploring how aspects of personality develop, become organised and influence our responses.
Through this process, familiar identifications can become more visible. We may come to recognise the different positions from which we experience ourselves, make decisions and relate to others.
This awareness can create greater flexibility in how we respond, including the possibility of engaging with aspects of ourselves that have previously been excluded from our sense of identity.
Interdependence and context
Dialectical thinking recognises that experience develops through relationships between parts and wholes, within particular contexts and circumstances.
An individual’s response may acquire a different meaning when considered in relation to the conditions in which it developed, the functions it has served or the relationships in which it continues to operate.
Likewise, a psychological difficulty may be connected with expectations, conflicts or conditions operating within a wider relational or social system.
This attention to context creates important connections between dialectical, systemic and relational approaches.
It also encourages us to remain curious about the limitations of our explanations. Our understanding changes as we become aware of more of the conditions shaping an experience.
Process and becoming
I understand people as continually developing.
The ways we understand ourselves, the meanings we attribute to experience and the possibilities available to us can change over time. Even longstanding patterns may shift as circumstances, relationships and awareness develop.
Psychotherapy involves attending to these processes and recognising opportunities for change as they emerge.
Change does not necessarily follow a predictable sequence. Sometimes greater awareness develops gradually. At other times, a particular emotional or relational experience may alter something significant in how a person understands themselves.
A dialectical approach supports attention to these developing processes, while remaining cautious about fixed explanations and predetermined outcomes.
Experiential knowing and emotional process
One of the recurring observations in my clinical and educational work is that intellectual understanding does not necessarily produce psychological change.
People may understand the origins of a recurring pattern, recognise its consequences and know what they would prefer to do differently, yet continue to experience the same emotional and relational responses.
This points to an important distinction between conceptual and experiential understanding.
Both contribute to psychological development. Their relationship is particularly significant in experiential psychotherapy.
Experiential approaches invite attention to experience as it is being lived, including its emotional, bodily, imaginal and relational dimensions.
I draw particularly on person-centred experiential psychotherapy, Focusing-oriented work and Emotion-Focused Therapy.
These approaches recognise the importance of attending closely to emerging experience, including feelings that may initially be unclear, difficult to express or inconsistent with a person’s established understanding of themselves.
The therapeutic process involves careful attention to how experience is organised, what emotions may be communicating and how previously inaccessible or insufficiently processed experience can become available for further understanding.
Emotions can provide important information about needs, meanings, values and ways of relating. Their significance becomes clearer as we explore them within the context of the person’s experience.
Emotional responses may also reflect earlier learning, implicit expectations, defensive processes or conflicting aspects of self. This makes discernment and attention to context essential.
Experiential work requires sensitivity to the individual and the unfolding process. Techniques may support that work, but their value depends on how and when they are used.
The person of the therapist
The practitioner brings their own history, emotional responses, assumptions, vulnerabilities, capacities and limitations into their professional relationships.
These influence what we notice, how we understand others, what we find difficult to tolerate and the possibilities we make available within the therapeutic encounter.
Professional development therefore involves the continuing development of self-awareness, reflexivity, emotional engagement and ethical responsibility alongside clinical knowledge and technical competence.
I distinguish reflection from reflexivity in this context.
Reflection allows us to consider what occurred and how we understood or responded to it. Reflexivity involves examining our participation in the processes we are attempting to understand, including the influence of our values, expectations, position and relationships.
This is particularly important in psychotherapy, where the practitioner’s responses may be shaped by processes that are not immediately available to conscious recognition.
Working thoughtfully with these responses requires a willingness to engage with our own psychological processes, including aspects that may challenge how we prefer to understand ourselves professionally.
I regard this as continuing work throughout a practitioner’s professional life.
Experience can deepen our capacities, but it can also consolidate familiar assumptions and ways of working. Professional maturity involves the willingness to remain curious, recognise our limitations and allow our practice to be informed by new experience.
There is considerable value in remaining a learner, even as our expertise develops.
Experiential education and transformative learning
These philosophical commitments have important implications for the education of counsellors and psychotherapists.
Professional competence requires theoretical knowledge, technical skill, ethical understanding and sound clinical judgement. These are essential foundations for responsible practice.
The development of a therapist also involves capacities that are difficult to cultivate through conventional instruction alone.
Remaining present with another person’s distress, recognising one’s own responses, tolerating uncertainty and engaging with relational complexity all require experiential development.
For this reason, I understand psychotherapy education as involving three interconnected dimensions: theory, practice and personal work.
Theory offers frameworks through which experience can be understood and critically examined. Practice provides opportunities to develop and refine professional capacities. Personal work engages the individual who is learning to practise, including their responses, assumptions, relational patterns and developing professional identity.
The relationships between these dimensions are central to professional formation.
A student may demonstrate technical competence while having limited awareness of their own responses in the therapeutic relationship. Equally, personal insight needs to be supported by knowledge, ethical understanding and the capacity to practise responsibly.
Educational design should create opportunities for these aspects of learning to inform and strengthen one another.
Relational-dialogical pedagogy
My educational approach places particular importance on the relationships through which learning takes place.
Teaching and learning are relational activities shaped by the experience, participation and contributions of those involved.
Educators bring their own values, assumptions and ways of engaging into the learning environment. Their capacity to embody the qualities they seek to develop in students is therefore significant.
A relational-dialogical approach invites learners to participate actively in developing understanding through experience, reflection, discussion and engagement with others.
Dialogue creates opportunities to encounter perspectives that extend or challenge existing understandings. It also allows participants to examine how they respond to difference, uncertainty and the limits of their knowledge.
For this to be productive, learners need sufficient freedom to think, question and express uncertainty. They also need to take responsibility for how they participate in the learning relationship.
The quality of the educational encounter matters. Empathy, congruence, curiosity and responsiveness influence what becomes possible for learning.
These conditions need to be present in the educator’s practice as well as in the principles being taught.
Transformative learning
Transformative learning concerns changes in how people interpret experience, understand themselves and engage with the world.
Such changes may occur when familiar assumptions become available for examination, when new experiences challenge established understandings, or when emotional engagement gives personal significance to what is being learned.
In psychotherapy education, these processes can be especially powerful because the subject matter frequently engages the learner’s own experience.
A discussion about attachment, vulnerability, power, grief or relational conflict may involve theoretical understanding alongside deeply personal meanings.
Experiential education needs to recognise this relationship and provide appropriate conditions for learning.
Facilitators have responsibilities concerning boundaries, emotional safety, the demands of the work and participants’ capacity to choose how they engage.
The purpose of experiential learning is to support understanding and professional development. Emotional engagement can be valuable when it contributes to that process and can be reflected upon and integrated.
The developmental possibilities of groups
Group work occupies an important place in my clinical and educational philosophy.
Groups provide opportunities for learning that differ from those available in individual therapeutic or supervisory relationships.
Participants encounter themselves through their own reflection, the responses of others and their participation in the group as a whole.
Expectations, differences, alliances, uncertainties and interpersonal patterns may become visible through these interactions.
Group processes also invite attention to the relationship between individual experience and the wider relational field.
What is expressed by one participant may relate to something developing in the group. What remains unspoken can also be significant.
Psychodynamic and systemic perspectives contribute to understanding these processes, including unconscious group dynamics, roles, boundaries, authority and the effects of context.
Experiential group facilitation requires sensitivity to what is happening within individuals, between participants and across the group as a whole.
It involves attending to the group’s developing process, recognising the different capacities and vulnerabilities of its members, and responding thoughtfully to the demands of emotionally significant encounters.
Groups can create opportunities for personal discovery, relational learning and greater awareness of how we affect and are affected by others.
Their developmental potential depends on the quality of facilitation, the clarity of boundaries and the conditions established for participation.
For experienced practitioners, group experiences can be particularly valuable. They provide opportunities to reconsider familiar professional positions, explore responses that emerge in relationship and engage in learning beyond the role of expert, therapist or supervisor.
I have found this work especially rewarding because of the possibilities that emerge through the interactions between participants, including developments that could not have been anticipated or designed in advance.
An ongoing philosophy of practice
I understand a philosophy of practice as an orientation that informs how we attend, enquire, make sense of experience and participate in relationships.
It needs sufficient coherence to guide professional judgement and sufficient openness to develop as our understanding changes.
The humanistic, relational and dialectical perspectives that inform my work require attention to several interconnected dimensions of experience: the individual’s subjective world and their wider context; emotional experience and conceptual understanding; personal development and relational influence; professional knowledge and the limits of what we know.
These relationships are complex, and I continue to find them clinically and intellectually engaging.
The same philosophical commitments inform my work in psychotherapy, clinical supervision, group facilitation and professional education.
Across these settings, I am interested in creating conditions that support greater awareness, meaningful engagement and the continuing development of people’s capacity to understand and respond to their experience.
I believe the quality of our work depends on our knowledge and clinical judgement, our capacity for reflection and the way we participate in the relationships through which the work takes place.
These remain central concerns in my practice and in my continuing development as a practitioner and educator.