Dave Mearns

Counselling in the United Kingdom: Past, present and future

We chart the development of counselling in Britain since the Second World War through to the present and speculate about possible directions counselling may take in the future. Our major, but not exclusive, focus is on counselling as a developing profession and the particular role that the British Association for Counselling has played in this development. To this end, we consider some of the professional issues that have preoccupied practitioners in the field and those that may do so in the future. Thus, amongst others, we consider the relationship between counselling and psychotherapy, the costs and benefits of counsellings increasing visibility in British society, the role that supervision has come to play in the maintenance of professional standards, the debate that has surrounded the issue of counsellor accreditation/registration, the development of standards and ethics and the tension that exists between the relational and technical aspects of counselling. Counselling does not exist in a vacuum, and this is seen most strikingly in the speculations that we make about future developments of counselling. Thus, for example, we argue that counselling will have to grapple with the increasing emphasis that society places on the accountability of human services and with the inexorable progress occurring in the area of technological development. We note that counsellings response to these significant trends will have to be made against the backdrop of the continuing dissolution of barriers between previously distinct areas of human knowledge .

Experiences of Counselling in Action

The Clients Experience of Counselling and Psychotherapy - John McLeod A Review of the Research Literature A Clients Experience of Failure - Laura Allen A Clients Experience of Success - Myra Grierson The Experience of Couple Counselling - Paul and Rosanne The Client Becomes a Counsellor - Brendan McLoughlin The Practitioners Experience of Counselling and Psychotherapy - John McLeod A Review of the Research Literature The Counsellors Experience of Failure - Dave Mearns The Counsellors Experience of Success - Dave Mearns My Experience of Counselling Couples - Senga Blackie What Might be Learned from these Experiences of Counselling in Action? - Dave Mearns and Windy Dryden

A call for a pluralist epistemological understanding in the assessment and evaluation of counselling

Abstract The authors outline and posit the futility of the ‘paradigm war’ between reductionistic/positivistic and phenomenological/naturalistic philosophies within counselling evaluation, pointing out that the notion of such competition is itself based on positivist thinking. They trace attempts at creating a ‘truce’ in the war based on strict demarcation of territory. They conclude that in the longer term more might be gained by accepting the veracity of both philosophies and creating a pluralist model which will be more fully equipped to evaluate the human process of counselling.

Supervision: A tale of the missing client

Abstract The profession of counselling is praised for its emphasis on the ‘developmental’ rather than ‘policing’ role of supervision. However, the profession is challenged on its presumption that supervision tells us anything about the client. For this to happen, the client must be admitted to the counselling room. Various means by which this can be achieved are explored and the resistance of the profession highlighted.

Applied pluralism in the evaluation of employee counselling

Abstract The method and major findings of a complex, ‘pluralist’ evaluation, which investigated the effectiveness of the counselling provision of an employee support and counselling service in a local authority education department over 22 months, are outlined. Reference is made to the underlying philosophical approach of integrated pluralist evaluation, which may represent a significant step forward from the accepted methods of triangulation. In addition to achieving predicted high satisfaction rates from clients, counsellors and clients both indicated significant improvements in all measures used. These were maintained at follow-up which took place at intervals from 1 to 18 months after counselling had ended. Reduction in absenteeism post-counselling suggested the possibility of very substantial revenue savings. Responses also indicated the acute, and often chronic, need for employee counselling provision in the education system.

Problem-centered is not person-centered

Abstract In this paper I look at the relationship between person-centered therapy and a problem-centered world in which the medical model is applied to mental health. I reject the responses of either opting out of that mainstream or conforming to it. Instead, I take a principled stance that the person-centered paradigm has much to offer and that it therefore behoves us to establish it by a process of ‘articulating’ with the relevant institutions of society. In this paper I endeavor to retain the personal and provocative nature of the keynote presentation from which it derives.

The humanistic agenda: articulation

This article responds to the “call to action” by emphasizing the importance of humanistic psychology “articulating” with the mainstream institutions of society to exert its effect. The concept of“articulation” is outlined and its relevance explored in relation to universities, professional associations, and purchasers, with examples drawn from work in Britain where person-centered therapy predominates over all other disciplines.

Working with Couples and Families

Carl Rogers never met with a couple or a f d y in therapy, although his 1972 book, Becoming Partners, based on interviews with a diverse group of couples (all heterosexual), offered his thoughts on how a couple might be together. However, many client-centered therapists have written papers on the subject. Indeed the journal Person-Centered h i m (edited by David Cain) offered a whole issue on working with couples and h i l i e s (Anderson, Cain, & Ellinwood, 1989) and several books have chapters on the subject (Cooper, O’Hara, Schmid, & Wyatt, 2007; Levant & Shlien, 1984; Mearns & Dryden, 1989). Many readers oriented towards work with individuals have been or will be asked to meet with clients and their intimate others. Couple work is often indicated when a relationship is the primary concern. Meetings with parents and siblings can be helpful and sometimes urgently needed as part of the therapy of a child. In designing this special issue the editors sought to invite those authors who had the strongest publishing record in the field all these authors accepted the invitation. The five papers offer a range of perspectives w i h n the PCE field on therapy with couples and families. Two of the papers are by former students of Rogers (Gaylin and O’Leary) who have also written books on person-centered couple and family therapy. A h r d paper is by a M y therapist with an experiential background (Rober) who has written numerous articles on family therapy and the experience of persons in dialogue. The other two papers (Greenberg & Goldman; Burgess Moser & Johnson) are co-authored by people who are particularly responsible for the development of emotion-focused couple therapy (EFTj which, experiential in origins, is one of the two approaches towards work with couples that have the strongest empirical support. Though there are predictable similarities in their theoretical basis, it is also interesting to see their divergence, as EFT integrates with other theoretical models. Ned Gaylin offers a perspective about the core similarity of individual client-centered therapy and work with hnilies. From his over fifty years’ experience he describes the unique challenges of work with more than one person and offers tools compatible with the core work of empathic acceptance. Like Gaylin, O’Leary presents a relationship therapy application of the six conditions of the person-centered approach. He also offers a therapist job description unique to relationship therapy and invites readers’ reflection and comparison with their own

The Challenge of Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia has challenged the person-centered approach since the Wisconsin Study in the 1960s. That project set out to prove that the core conditions were sufficient, not only for the population of Chicago neurotic clients (Coulson, 1987), but for those who had been labelled s b p h r e n i c . Although the study led to a d e d e d and interesting publication (Rogers, 1967), the data were incomplete and the results characterized by non-findings on the main hypotheses. That is not a purely negative conclusion because it has led us to look at other variables such as the motivation of a largely institutionalized population and the therapeutic context as well as the therapeutic relationship. However, it effectively marked the end of the clinical progression of client-centered therapy in the USA as Rogers and his colleagues subsequently directed their attention away from clinical settings and research to respond to the popular appeal of the approach and later towards political concerns. So, was schizophrenia a bridge too far for client-centered therapy? Or was the problem as much epistemological as anythmg else? How could a therapeutic approach that emphasized the idiographic and took a phenomenological perspective articulate with an illness model that required norm-based diagnosis and treatment protocols? This conflict has dogged personcentered and experiential therapies throughout the past forty years. In some parts of the world the suuggle has been engaged and PCE therapies have retained a presence in mainstream secondary mental health provision albeit a shaky presence as outlined in the last issue of PCEP (Hutschemaekers & van Kalmthout, 2006). In other parts of the world the conflict has proved too much and efforts have gone into developing services in the private sector or in primary health care where the medical model is not so symptom-centered and attends better to the whole person of the patient. Yet, this need not be the end of the story of PCE therapies in relation to chronic or severe forms of mental illness. PCE therapies emphasize listening to and revealing the experiencing and process of the individual patient, an approach that is potentially well-suited to clinical work among patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses. In addition, a person-centered phenomenological approach is highly appropriate for the empirical investigation of the experiential processes that characterize living with and recovering from mental illnesses. This is the position taken by Jan van Blarikom in one of the papers in this issue the first of what is intended to be three papers on a person-centered approach to chronic mental illnesses. In his paper, Aperson-centeredapproach to schizophrenia, van Blarikom challenges us to relinquish our resistance to the description of schizophrenia as