Bernadette Smith

An Amalgamation of Pre-Therapy and Person-Centred Counselling Bernadette Smith

Person-Centred counselling is one of the most popular approaches to counselling developed by Carl Rogers. Pre-Therapy one of the tribes of Person-Centred is a method of establishing psychological contact, developed by Garry Prouty for work with more seriously contact impaired clients. The author takes the reader on a journey of similarities and differences between the two approaches, examining the philosophical and theoretical principles of each. Sometimes a person has an experience that is too painful to comprehend and too difficult to explain or talk about. When this happens the experience can become trapped within the person. A trapped experience or feeling can become implicitly expressed by way of strange or difficult behaviours and non- lexical expressions like guttural sounds, utterances and screeches. Within a therapeutic relationship, some clients become distant during therapy, the therapeutic connection is broken; neither the client nor counsellor know how to continue. Within the emptiness, the client may exhibit pre expressive behaviours and sounds which have no meaning to the therapist. The author using case studies shows and explains how empathic Pre-Therapy strategies lead the therapist to enter the pre-expressed client world allowing the behaviours and sounds to become meaningful. Once the implicit becomes explicit the therapeutic process will continue. This skill will be invaluable to therapist and professionals who journey into the world of others.