What is the experience of counselling from the perspectives of both client and counsellor? What can be learned for the practice of counselling from an understanding of how it feels to be a client or a counsellor? Addressing these questions, central to this book are the personal accounts of individual clients and counsellors, who each relate their own very different experiences of counselling. They explore such issues as identity, expectations, trust, power and boundaries in the client-counsellor relationship. And each examines the intense personal meanings of `success′ or `failure′ in the client or counsellor role. An analysis of the implications for the counselling relationship concludes the volume.
Dave Mearns is formerly Director of the Counselling Unit and Professor of Counselling at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Dave is author or co-author of four other counselling books published by SAGE: Person-Centred Counselling in Action, Second Edition, Experiences of Counselling in Action, Person-Centred Counselling Training and Person-Centred Therapy Today: New Frontiers in Theory and Practice.
Windy Dryden is one of the leading practitioners and trainers in the UK in the Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) tradition of psychotherapy. He is best known for his work in Rational-Emotive Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (RECBT), a leading CBT approach. He has been working in the field of counselling and psychotherapy since 1975 and was one of the first people in Britain to be trained in CBT.He has published over 200 books and has trained therapists all over the world, in as diverse places as the UK, the USA, South Africa, Turkey and Israel.He is Emeritus Professor of Psychotherapeutic Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.