ABSTRACT
Person-centred therapy has many strengths when it comes to working with people experiencing severe and/or enduring mental and emotional distress. This is increasingly apparent from the published accounts of person-centred practitioners in the UK and elsewhere. Continually, there are accounts of the applications of person-centred theory and practice being applied to new client groups and in new settings. This leads to developments and extensions to theory which are in turn taken and used in innovative ways. This includes the re-conceptualisation of trauma as, in the context of person-centred therapy, ‘the springboard for transformational changes in a person’s life – referred to as posttraumatic growth’ (see Murphy and Joseph 2014: 3). Murphy and Joseph (2014: 3–13) are, with reference to therapeutic interventions with a client ‘Denise’, expanding on Joseph’s (2003, 2004, 2005) work explaining how post-traumatic stress can be understood from within person-centred theory. Of their approach, Murphy and Joseph (2014: 12) state that it constitutes ‘a radical ontology for trauma’. This is because, as opposed to other current therapies recommended for working with clients experiencing post-traumatic stress, ‘it is the client and not the therapist that determines the direction of the therapy’.
