Blogoctober2024

What if you don’t want the Bach Flower Remedies?


In a discussion recently someone asked me what happens if a client doesn’t want the Bach Flower Remedies, or isn’t ready for them. 


What if they simply want to talk, and be heard?

First of all; it’s important to meet clients where they are at that moment, and to ask rather than make assumptions. 

I might simply ask a client ‘how is it to be here?’

The client is always at the heart of my work – they are the expert on themselves. 

Their experiences are particular and precious to them. 

I have years of training and experience, but I can never be the expert on someone else’s life.

“When you are in psychological distress and someone really hears you without passing judgement on you, without trying to take responsibility for you, without trying to mo(u)ld you, it feels damn good!”Carl Rogers: A Way Of Being

The therapeutic connection can take place regardless of someone’s political and ethical stance, and clients can feel truly heard and accepted.

I’m interested in people, in what they feel and do, and the reasons why. Sometimes the actions and reasons can be hard to express, and sometimes also hard to hear. 


How do I work with these clients?

Also, if a client wants me to provide a six-point action plan, or a ten-step path to ‘being cured’, we’ll discuss why this means, why it’s important to the client, and how they feel when I explain that I don’t do that – but what I will do is work with them to develop their own plan, and lay their own path.

It’s the Person-Centred approach, developed by Carl Rogers in the middle of last century. Revolutionary in its day, as it focusses on the client’s self-actualisation, rather than the client being regarded as a ‘patient’ and being ‘fixed’ by their psychotherapist.

I trained as a Person-Centred counsellor more than 25 years ago, and Rogers remains a hero to me, influencing my work at a profound level. I’m not sure he’d have been comfortable with my hero-worship – I love this quote of his: 

“It becomes easier for me to accept myself as a decidedly imperfect person, who by no means functions at all times in the way in which I would like to function. This must seem to some like a very strange direction in which to move. It seems to me to have value because the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change.” Rogers: On Becoming A Person


And what do I do if the client and aren’t a good ‘fit’?

And if a client wants something different from what I offer? That’s not a problem.

Over the years I’ve gathered a number of excellent therapists, each a specialist in their field. I work in the client’s best interests, and can suggest different types of therapist or modality which they might feel interested to explore.

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