Paradoxical Safety & The Billy Goats Gruff
Jan Hawkins
Why is it that some of our clients seem stuck in unhealthy patterns despite their desire to change?  Why do people caught in abusive relationships, recognise the dangers and hate their situations, yet steadfastly remain in those relationships?  Is it simply resistance?  This workshop will focus on the paradoxical safety of the hated and unhealthy patterns as well as what may be needed to empower the individual to move on.  The story of the Billy Goats Gruff is used to illustrate the increase in fear and anxiety when moving from the known and unhealthy into more healthy possibilities. 

The Playful Path to Connection and Healing: Experiencing Person-Centred Play Therapy in Action
Jayne Hatto
In this interactive and enlightening workshop, participants are invited to delve into the realm of person-centred play therapy as a transformative approach in counselling children. Through experiential learning, attendees will gain comprehensive insights into the application of person-centred play therapy principles within the context of child counselling.

Working at Oasis: An Alternative to Hospital
David Hansen
Oasis opened in 2021, and is situated in a 6 bedroomed house in Leeds. It is a ‘crisis
house’, offering person-centred support for people who would otherwise be in need
of a hospital. People can stay at OASIS for up to a week.
As a service offering person-centred and trauma informed support to people in crisis, it offers a radical alternative to traditional provision, and how different it feels is often commented on by guests who use the service. The service is run as a partnership between Leeds Survivor Led Crisis Service, Touchstone and the NHS.
David has worked for Oasis since February 2023 and is offering this workshop to talk about his experiences for anyone interested in how it works in more detail. He’ll give an overview of the service, what it all looks like in practice, before opening the floor for a Q&A/chat.

Sex, drugs and bo***cks – sharing experience and exploring personal responses
Ani de la Prida
Person-centred therapy is based on unconditional positive regard, empathy and congruence, and of entering and understanding a client from their unique perspective. Yet often training courses, tutors and counsellors shy away from certain subjects and behaviours, for example avoiding exploration of sex, sexualities, drugs, and even swearing, unintentionally communicating "I’ll accept you fully but not if you swear or...". In this workshop I’ll provide an opportunity to explore personal conscious and unconscious attitudes, responses, limitations, capacities, and challenges to offering unconditional positive regard in practice. I’ll share some of my personal challenges and experiences in training and practice. This is an experiential workshop, with a mix of challenge and humour. Participants will be invited to engage in simple exercises and self-reflection.

Is there space for humour in the Person-Centred therapy room?
Michael Kentish
First, we learn to cry. Then, before we can speak or even before we understand what our care-givers are saying to us, we laugh. It is a pure, trustful, involuntary expression of joy, and perhaps because of this we think of humour as obviously healthy: a laugh a day keeps the doctor away. Yet the concepts of humour and laughter are absent from our training as person-centred counsellors. We are neither encouraged to embrace or avoid them.
In this workshop we will explore the many ways in which humour, mirth and laughter can arise in the therapy room and how we as counsellors might act when they do arise. Through discussion, sharing and exercise, we will approach responses todiverse questions, such as:
- Do we agree with Kubie (1971) that humour has a “very limited role, if any” in  psychotherapy?
- Does laughter always equate with collusion?
- Is laughter healing?
- How can we use humour, mirth and laughter for the benefit of our clients?
- Can humour be taught? Should it be taught?

The Glorious Future of the Person-Centred Approach
Ivan Ellingham
At the end of his life, acknowledging he had ‘a keen interest in the future’, Carl Rogers spoke of being ‘convinced that at this point in time we are going through a transformational crisis, from which we and our world cannot emerge unchanged’: the kind of transformational crisis and change of ‘world view’ that in the realm of science had become called a ‘paradigm shift’. Rogers, for his part, spelled out his ‘infant ideas’ and ‘vague thoughts’ regarding such a transformation in our way of seeing things, but he expressed the hope that his theoretical speculations would ‘someday be fleshed out more fully’.
In my workshop, I will be suggesting how Rogers’ embryonic ideas might be ‘fleshed out more fully’ and opening up for discussion what this might mean for person-centred practice.  I will also be suggesting that such a carrying forward of person-centred theoretical views will resonate throughout the field of psychotherapy and so render the wholefield a more advanced scientific venture.

Power, Conditionality, and territory - an experiential workshop
Seb Heid
An appreciation of power and the experience of it is important in the counselling room. It affects our relationship with a client and can help us to empathise with clients in their relationships and their sense of power (or lack thereof) in the world. Making sense of the complicated experience of power within person-centred theory relates to conditions of worth and the external and internal locus of evaluation. The focus of this workshop will be to look at the connection of this experience of power and our assessment of the territory (literally and metaphorical) in which we find ourselves.  We will start off with a short presentation on the phenomenology of power and some observations about how to make sense of the complicated ways in which power might show up in our lives and work with clients.  We will then use a set of territory related scenarios and thought experiments to discuss and share how we would experience power (status, safety, agency) in different situations.
The intention is to explore how experiences of power, belonging, ownership, rights, and responsibility intersect and dynamically influence each other. Starting with simple territories and how they make us feel we can then ask: What changes by adding more people and roles or more abstract contexts like different types of groups, activities, or areas of conversation? Do I belong in a conversation about
cooking, philosophy, or race? How accepted, welcomed, challenged would I feel?   The goal is for attendees to gain clarity of the complicated dance that results from how our experience affects our sense of agency, the roles we feel we can play, what
roles others might experience or expect us playing, and how this can enrich our capacity to relate to such experience of our clients.

The tPCA  Non-pathologising Special Interest Group Roadshow!  Encountering Anxiety
Alison Drury and Jules Elliott
Alison and Jules are bringing the tPCA Special interest Group experience to the residential.  
The focus for this workshop is not about disseminating information, but to focus on
the "experiential knowing". In this workshop, we will look at participants’ accounts of working with clients seeking to reduce their anxiety, and also participants’ own experience of anxiety and consider what each of us can bring to the workshop in terms of our own perceptions, gut feelings of what anxiety is and how it manifests. 
We will then invite participants to reflect and have conversation about the
expectations placed on the therapist in the counselling room and the challenges
faced when working with clients who rely on a medicalised perception of anxiety.
Jules will discuss the impact of working in a non-directive way and how this allows
clients to make sense of their anxious feelings in the context of their life, she will
include a therapist and client role play with a twist!  
Alison will discuss her views on embodied attunement where participants will be
invited to join in a focussing exercise. 

Working with couples
Allan Turner
I wanted to share with you my Person-centred approach to couples counselling. I believe in adhering to Person-centered values and using only Rogers six conditions in a non-directive way without incorporating other approaches such as Systemic, Psychodynamic, TA, and CBT. I have been practising in this way for decades, and it has proven to be effective.
However, there are some things that I don't do in my work. For instance, I don't see clients individually before or during therapy, I don't assign homework or mark it, I don't dictate when clients can speak or for how long, and I don't instruct clients to take turns speaking or tell them to only talk to their partner, not me. I also don't have individual communication with each partner or set goals, although they may choose to do so themselves.  I don't view the couple as incongruent and the work doesn't have stages. I don't intentionally teach empathy or any other response style but may help with poor communication that is leading to misunderstandings. I am more likely to explain my thinking behind my statements when working with a couple. I seldom find this necessary with individual clients.

Collectivism – The other tendency to actualise?
Asha Davies
We will be exploring whether maintaining a Western view of self as an independent,
autonomous entity may unintentionally lack sufficiency within the culturally diverse therapeutic alliance and psychotherapy training contexts?
With attention to British South-Asian multicultural process and identity, Roger’s concept of the formative tendency is explored to facilitate professional awareness of human interdependent growth and development. The endeavour is to promote
reflexivity and use of empathy towards potentiating a necessary inclusive, and non- maleficent environment that honours the client and students’ multicultural frame of reference and collective process. How does psychiatric discourse shape humanistic counselling practice?

Ashley Morgan
In a world increasingly saturated with medicalised language and labels that attempt
to explain (and pathologise) the lived experience, how can humanistic counselling
professionals preserve the integrity of their profession when working with clients who are given a psychiatric diagnosis? How might we navigate tensions that may arise between psychiatry and person-centred principles in the therapeutic encounter?  Ashley hopes to provide a space to reflect on these questions in the context of our own practice. He will also offer up some insights from his MSc thesis, which was a qualitative study exploring the question ‘how does psychiatric discourse and the language of disorder shape humanistic counselling practice?’ 

Exploring person-centred creative arts therapies and their potential
for promoting relational depth – an experiential workshop.
Ani de la Prida
Creativity is at the heart of the person-centred approach. Person-centred therapy is a creative relational process, one that honours each client’s actualising tendency, a creative motivational force that promotes psychological healing, change and growth.
When the person-centred approach is integrated with creative materials and methods, it can become a powerful and transformational approach, one that
promotes relational depth, psychological integration, and a deeper connection to oneself. But the creative approaches are not always widely understood, and person- centred therapists can feel unsure how and whether to integrate creative materials into their practice.
In this workshop I would like to share my experience of how the therapeutic use of creative arts can promote relational depth. I will introduce a brief history of its development and will explore a person-centred view of the unconscious and its relevance to creative arts therapies. I will share case study material to illustrate, highlight the relevance of non-directivity and share some ideas and exercises you can safely use at any stage and level of experience.  This is an experiential workshop, and participants will be invited to engage with a simple experiential creative art exercise.  Art materials will be provided.

Experiences in Professionalisation
Mark Harrison
Many have offered extensive effort in order to promote and maintain a place for the person-centred approach within the counselling and psychotherapy profession. I intend to share related personal experiences, particularly in relation to PROCAPA (Professional Regulation Of Counselling And Psychotherapy Association). I initiated
PROCAPA as a facebook group in the hope of developing the discussion and will
reflect on the learning it offered with regard to organisation, leadership and professionalisation. This will link to consideration of wider applications of the PCA, with a view to its ongoing promotion.

Person-Centred Therapy and clients with Severe Learning Disabilities and Communication Challenges
Jan Hawkins
This session offers a presentation outlining the challenges (and delights) of welcoming clients who have severe learning disabilities  and/or communication challenges in to our practice. It will be an opportunity to reflect on work you are already involved with, and/or how you might develop your confidence to be alongside those whose learning disabilities often leave them excluded from ‘talking therapies’.  Following the presentation, there will be time to discuss your own practice as well as aspirations to open up your practice to those who most often, if any therapy is offered, are likely to receive psychological support in the form of behaviour modification programs, which tend to attempt to change behaviours, rather than trying to understand them.

Participatory Action Research: How it can help us support our person centred counselling community
Debbie Bentley
The key characteristics of PAR and the person-centred approach are complementary with regard to their values and attitudes; both aim to: "change practices... which maintain unsatisfactory forms of existence" (McTaggart 1997:182). Each views participants as competent and reflexive change agents, placing their
values and beliefs at the centre of any research intervention in order to address real life problems and generate knowledge and new meaning through collaboration.
The person centred practitioner's capacity for creative resistance is dependent upon the support of the person-centred community, and simultaneously the person- centred community depends upon practitioners actively working for its politicisation.  Yet, as Pete Sanders observed: Whenever issues of politics and therapy come up, they bring with them a myriad of possibilities.... Yet these possibilities are rarely considered, discussed or elaborated upon in public amongst person-centred practitioners; (Sanders 2006:5).
At a time when person centred practitioners express feelings of isolation, apathy, confusion and hopelessness, PAR offers a positive and pragmatic call to action.  Creating a culture of PAR within the person-centred community can allow us as practitioners, teachers and researchers to develop an ongoing interrelated range of projects to conduct our own substantive research into the practices that affect our own lives. This will not be an easy or quick process, but it may help us to find and develop a collective sense of direction as thinking-feeling persons, support the wellbeing of our community, and safeguard our future so that we may continue to be what Rogers intended: a counter hegemonic force in the world.  Each individual is unique and has her own distinct unfolding. But also all are members of groups, collectives and communities... Therefore the futures of collective identities are at stake, not those of individuals only; (Richardson 1990:3).
In this workshop I hope to offer the opportunity for us to explore our potential, as members of the person-centred community, to significantly influence our own, each others; and our communities capacity for resistance.

Decolonising Therapy; The PCA
Manisha Sheth and John Yuen, Ka Keung
Decolonisation is a huge agenda at the moment, from politics to social media. We see the importance of it, but what does it actually mean? How do we decolonise therapy, and especially the PCA? There might be assumptions that the PCA doesn’t need decolonisation because it’s already person-centred; but in who’s eyes?  Can we offer true person-centred therapy if we don’t understand someone's race,
ethnicity and culture and the complexities that come with it? Do people need to align themselves with the Western therapy model, instead of finding someone who aligns with them?
Join John and Manisha as they gently explore what it means to decolonise therapy,
and the importance of understanding someone’s identity, explicit and implicit. Come and reflect on how you can start to unpick this huge topic, in a non-judgmental space; and start to take the steps towards becoming more culturally safe in your practice.  John and Manisha are not here to teach you but to facilitate a discussion based on their own experiences of being Asian, born and brought up in the UK. Come to hear and explore stories of challenges people face bringing together their cultural practices with mental health services in the West.

On Being Passively Receptive
Mike Moss
‘What I mean is this: I feel at times when I am really being helpful to a client of mine, in those sort of rare moments when there is something approximating an I-Thou relationship between us , and when I feel that something significant is happening, then I feel as though I am somehow in tune with the forces in the universe or that forces are operating through me in regards to this helping relationship that –well, I guess I feel somewhat the way the scientist does when he is able to bring about the splitting of the atom.’ Carl Rogers in conversation with Paul Tillich: Published in Rogers C.R. (1965) in: Kirschenbaum, H. Henderson, V.L.(Eds.)  (1990) The Carl Rogers Dialogues, London, Constable.
This workshop is based on an article ‘When We Are Passively Receptive.’* Where it is considered how therapists can be changed by their clients seeking help, and that the actualising tendency of both therapist and client may be activated in synthesis
towards growth and change in the therapeutic relationship. Participants will be introduced to a powerful experience of working with a client where it was as if therapist and client had met before, beyond their understanding and for a moment their depth of connection was like being connected in an invisible world, where something greater was revealed.
Participants will also be invited to explore their own therapeutic experiences and there will be interactive and reflective time as well as exploring Rogers work and the core conditions further. It is also hoped that in this workshop we may dare to imagine beyond our five senses, and that new patterns of growth and change in how we connect with and help our clients will be discovered.
*First published in COSCA Counselling in Scotland, Winter/Spring 2022/23 and re-published in Person-Centred Quarterly Spring 2023