My training was integrative - acknowledging the veracity of several theoretical frameworks; fundamentally Person-Centred but also integrating Psychodynamic and Jungian theory, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
I integrate these seemingly different theoretical models using Petruska Clarkson's 'Systemic Integrative Psychotherapeutic Model', which gives me a framework around which to organise my work with clients based on the primacy of relationship; applying the most appropriate technique depending on the needs of the client. There are five ways in which the therapist and client relate:
Initially, my intention is to establish a working alliance to find out what my client hopes and expects and what they might want to achieve from our work together. Central to this process are Rogers' core conditions of empathy, unconditional positive regard and congruence. We might agree a contract for our work together and formalise it, which would have the advantage of us knowing whether we had achieved our aim.
Through transference, the past is manifested in the present and is accessible in the room: in my work with my client I am aware of this possible dimension to our relationship. My client might unconsciously see me as their father and attempt to provoke me as they did as a child, in which case I would need to not be provoked and then, if the relationship was sufficiently established, gentle to share my hunch: 'Can you remember any other time in your life when you felt like this?' Were I to have unresolved issues around my relationship with my father I might not be able to separate my client's father from my own idea of my father. I need to be sensitive of such issues of counter-transference within the room, highly dependent on my degree of self-awareness.
Maintenance of the core conditions is a general way of offering my client a reparative relationship, with my support in the present the witness they lacked at the time. Clients need to trust me in order to begin to fully explore theit lives. That trust comes from the psychological safety of an environment engendered by a secure frame and boundary as well as the provision of the three core conditions.
An authentic I/You relationship requires not hiding behind my role as a counsellor or expert with the concomitant imbalance of power. Respect for my client also manifests in my non-directive stance. If a contributory factor in my client's problem is that they were not respected as a person of equal value and significance, then any treatment of them that replicates that will exacerbate the problem. My clients often communicate their confrontation with the 'givens' of existence - death, isolation, meaninglessness and freedom - the same situation to which we are all subject - and this may be the moment when client and I find the person behind each other's defences. I feel this spirit of mutuality is vital for the therapeutic relationship, as I am not investigating an object that is my client, but a human being deserving respect. Mutuality implies honesty and that involves some element of risk, since I may need to reveal appropriately (that is, in the service of the client) how I am being affected in the present, then explore my part in this and acknowledge how my behaviour may be contributing to what is going on in the room. This immediacy acknowledges the co-created aspect of the relationship as well as the fact that it is an open system; one in which both people accept the possibility of change and influence.
Whilst acknowledging the possible transpersonal aspects of the therapeutic relationship, I feel it is important not to be premature to focus on it to the detriment of the other four. I am aware of the Jungian archetype of the Wounded Healer; the space (empty of ego, the betweeness, the vas bene clausum) available to my client that allows them to heal themselves.
Added to these five relationships I also recognise seven further levels that widen my understanding of the context of the client's existence: