ABSTRACT
As will be evident from many of the earlier points, in spite of the popular (but declining) view that person-centred therapy has no role in working with clients experiencing severe and enduring mental and emotional distress, increasingly, its theoreticians and practitioners are presenting their ideas about and ways of working with settings, clients and issues which have been regarded as ‘beyond therapeutic reach’ (see Pearce and Sommerbeck 2014: v–vi). Sanders (2013: 18) points out, even though the history of the approach indicates otherwise, ‘for many years, person-centred therapy suffered from the ill-informed criticism of only being suitable for the problems of the “worried well”’. Sommerbeck (2014b: 159) attributes the belief that person-centred therapy is unsuitable for such people to ‘four mistakes’. These are:
the idea that empathic understanding of psychosis colludes with it or reinforces it;
the confusion of ‘non-directive’ with ‘unstructured’ (see Points 13, 46, 50);
the notion that person-centred therapy is too in-depth and exploratory;
the confusion of the theory of therapy with the theory of personality.
