My Experience with Experiential Therapies (Celia Dawson)

​Ever since I attended training weekends as a part-time youth worker I have been fascinated with group work. It wasn’t about therapy but most of the sessions were about personal development. I thoroughly enjoyed all of my youth work trainings and I would come home feeling high.
 
It was as a result of my youth work that I found counselling.  I decided to take an introductory course because I thought it would help me to connect with the young people in the club. I found it fascinating! This was what I really wanted to do!  So then I embarked on learning to do counselling and finding out an awful lot about myself in the process.
 
My Person-Centred Counselling course was all experiential, designed by Carl Rogers it was unstructured and everything was done in the group. When I finished that course I wanted to find out more and ventured into all sorts of alternative methods of healing, all of them experiential and all of them most enjoyable. The one thing I found to be the most powerful was Focusing. It encompasses all of the other methods and approaches in a simple and gentle way. It gets straight to the root of a problem and resolves it far more quickly than can be done with talking therapy. It does, however, work on the same principle as Person Centred therapy, where the client finds her own way through a process with very little input from the person listening. It was discovered and developed by Professor Eugene Gendlin in the 1960’s who, together with Carl Rogers, listened to thousands of tapes to discover what it was about therapy that made it work. They found that if the client noticed a feeling inside themselves and tried to describe it, then the therapy was successful, regardless of who the therapist was and what model they were using.
 
So, if you are interested in new and different ways to heal people, do sign up for our courses. We include lots of experiential exercises, so you are likely to find out new things about yourself, as well as new things you can use with clients. Dzmitry and I do our best to keep the experience gentle and safe, so that you can enjoy the process.