Peter Hudson
Counselling Therapy
I am a qualified counsellor registered with and Accredited by the British Association of Counselling and psychotherapy. I provide a safe, non-judgemental and empathic space in Cardiff
where in our confidential sessions you will able to explore what is going on for you.
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The manner in which I work rests on my belief that each person is
a unique and special individual and whole.
I do not see only labels and conditions.
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I work with a wide range of issues and see my job as to not to try
and fix you like a machine but to help you find again the
growth and potential which I believe lies at the
heart of every person.
ABOUT ME
I qualified as a counsellor in 2016. My training was in the Person-Centred approach to therapy (see Here).
I also completed foundation training at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London. I have studied other models of therapy including Psychodynamic, DBT, CBT, Attachment Theory and Jungian.
I have worked as a counsellor with the mental health charity Mind, with the Probation Service and with a private counselling agency, and for a number of years I was a counsellor in schools and colleges.
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In these differing settings I have be privileged to work with a wide range of clients and continue to do so from young people upwards. The manner in which I work integrates all my training, study and experience, the core of it, however, remaining Person-Centred. This means primarily that I believe therapy to be a collaborative undertaking and that the answers to the difficulties faced by clients lie within themselves.
Most people at different times in their lives face difficulties that may seem insurmountable, seem to be recurrent or seem rooted in their pasts. I believe that we are all to greater or lesser degrees conditioned by our pasts but I also believe that, given the right help, the agency and potential all humans inherently hold within themselves for healthy development can be aroused and a more embodied sense of confidence, self-compassion and wholeness regained.
As well as my training and knowledge, I also of course bring to my practice all that I am too as a person: all the experiences, good and bad, painful and joyous, I, like everyone, have faced in my life. With this in mind, a little more about myself.
Originally from a farming background, I have in my life been a farmer, van driver, travel writer, photographer, development charity director and counsellor. I am the father of four beautiful girls, now young women, and have spent as much time in my life living in cities as in the countryside. Again, like all people, I have not always found life easy and have suffered at different times from addiction, ME and depression, all conditions with which I now work. But I have also found life exciting and at times wondrous and imbued with a meaning and beauty that may be fleeting, but is inherently, I believe, part of the universe we inhabit.​
Qualifications & Training
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Person-Centred Counselling, Foundation Degree, University of Worcester
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Psychoanalysis, Foundation, Institute of Psychoanalysis
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Diploma, level 3, Counselling skills, Hereford and Ludlow College
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Dialectic Behavioural Therapy, The Association for Psychological Therapies
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Providing Good Clinical Supervision, Association for Psychological Therapies
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Courses: Psychosynthesis, MSC; Bereavement Care, Children and Young People, Cruse; CBT, Bristol CBT; Equality and Diversity Awareness, Xenzone; Attachment, Xenzone; Suicide and Risk, Xenzone.
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tes training: ADHD Awareness; Autism Awareness; Safeguarding Adults; Child Protection, Advanced.
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Person-Centred Approach to transference and defence mechanisms, Nic Quinto; Non-directivity, Nic Quinto; Soul Husbandry, Matthew Trustman.
​OUR SESSIONS
I work both short term and more psychotherapeutically long-term. There is no commitment required for how long you remain in therapy. After our first session, if you wish to continue, we can discuss whether you wish to think about how many sessions you want or if you want to work open-ended.
Our sessions will be an hour in length and occur weekly. That hour is there for you. This means that there is no pressure on you to perform or be a certain way.
What is paramount for me is that you feel at ease in our sessions and so the manner in which we work will be dictated by your own needs and goals. As was said to me by my own therapist, ‘We come to therapy in order to discover why we have come to therapy.’ This may be the case for you. It may not.
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Fees for one hour sessions are £60. Concessions are available.
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I work face-to-face and do not provide an on-line service although I will offer the occasional online session to existing clients if required.
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In my practice I adhere to the BACP Ethical Framework
PERSON-CENTRED THERAPY
What follows I hope will give to those who wish to explore a little further a sense of what lies behind the Person-Centred approach to therapy and how it looks in the counselling room.
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Carl Rogers, psychologist and founder of the Person-Centred therapy, based the approach on his belief in the human potential for healthy development. By this he meant that all organisms, including the human organism, will always move in the direction of optimum healthy development given its circumstances. The plant in the forest will always strive to grow to its optimum best.
‘Man’s behaviour is exquisitely rational,’ Rogers said, ‘moving with subtle and ordered complexity toward the goals his organism is endeavouring to achieve.’ (Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person)
It is the circumstances in which we grow and develop that dictate the direction of a growth that, regardless of of how it appears, will have always been towards to its optimum best. The therapist’s role, then, as Rogers saw it, was to provide the conditions in which that potential for healthy development can best can be enhanced and nurtured.
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As Rogers saw it, the therapist is not a detached ‘expert’ there to ‘fix’ the client with his or her superior knowledge, but is there as a real, feeling, emotional and spiritual being in whose presence and with whose help the client can feel truly seen, heard and 'encountered', and hence empowered deep within themselves. It is under these circumstances, Rogers believed, that the organismic agency of the client that will allow them to move in the direction that is uniquely right for them can be stimulated.
In terms of therapy, this all means that in the Person-Centred approach, it is entirely in the person of the client that the focus rests. Whether it is trauma, abuse, self-esteem, identity or relational issues, depression, anger, anxiety or other issues that the client brings to therapy, it is the gentle, careful attention to the processes taking place, both within the client as those processes occur in real-time with all their inherent implicit and explicit meanings, and in the relationship between the client and therapist, that becomes the path the client and therapist follow. This leads, not so much to an intellectual comprehension of the issues by the client - although this too can be of importance - but to a movement precipitated by the client's whole, embodied and spiritual being: a ‘reorganisation’ that comes from the client’s whole self, addressing the core of the issues, not just the symptoms.
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‘Trust the process’, was Rogers’ by-word, by which he meant, trust the processes with which the client’s organism, when freed from ‘conditions’, ‘judgements’ and ‘fears’, uses to rebalance itself.
When we can truly sense what it is we feel – and most of us are to greater or lesser degrees often alienated from what we truly feel; when we find ourselves in conditions that allow us to be most ‘in ourselves’, it is then that we learn to trust ourselves and our instincts, for the only true yardstick we have with which to gauge the world about us are the senses with which we encounter it.
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The way I see it, then, and in the manner in which I approach Person-Centred therapy, my practice incorporates implicitly, if less explicitly, the main elements of the major therapeutic approaches - Freudian/Psychoanalysis, Humanistic, Cognitive/Behavioural -
in that attention is paid, when and how they emerge from the client, to aspects that are Relational, Developmental and Attachment focused, Holistic, Process-orientated, Spiritual, Trauma-Informed and Cognitive.
RESOURCES
The following are quotes from some of the books I have found inspirational both for myself and for my counselling practice and they can provide a reference for those who might have an interest in reading further.
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Gabor Mate, Myth of Normal.
".... someone without the marks of trauma would be an outlier in our society.
We are closer to the truth when we ask: where do we all fit on the board and surprisingly inclusive trauma spectrum? Which of its many marks has each of us carried all (or most) of our lives, and what have the impacts been?"
"…..early experience becomes our template for our character and involvement in the world."
"Everything within us, no matter how distressing, exists for a purpose .... The question thus shifts from ‘How do I get rid of this?’ to ‘What is this for? Why is it here?’ ... these disturbers of our peace have always been our friends... protective, beneficent ....It isn’t them but rather our desperate efforts to keep them at bay that levy the heaviest toll on our mental and physical well-being.... Agency is gained not by resistance to ourselves but by way of acceptance and understanding."
"The journey is to find the gift in the challenge."
Carl Rogers, A Way of Being.
".... I have found that if I can help bring about a climate marked by genuineness, prizing, and understanding, then .... Persons .... in such a climate move away from rigidity toward flexibility, away from static living toward process living, away from dependence toward autonomy, away from defensiveness toward self-acceptance, away from predictable toward unpredictable creativity."
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Iain Mcgilchrist, The Matter with Things.
"During life it is possible that the physical and the spiritual are entangled, neither causing the other, neither depending on the other for its existence, but their entanglement certainly depending on the coexistence of each."
"What is wonderful about us is not our pitiful lust for power, our self-absorbtion and our armour-platred invulnerability, but precisely our capacity to be vulnerable, to wonder, and to love...."
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Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher.
"Direct experience which is never adequately communicatable in words is the only knowledge we ever fully have."
Christiane Ritter A Woman in the Polar Night
"We human beings are only instruments over which the song of the world plays.’
Karl Jung: Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics, Bernardo Kastrup.
"The psychic is an emancipation of function from its instinctual form …. and begins to show itself accessible to a will motivated from other sources."
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John 12: 20 - 33
"It is for this reason I have come to this hour."
Peter Levine. In an unspoken voice.
"As traumatised individuals begin to reown their sense of agency ….They achieve the compassionate realisation that both their immobility and their rage are a biologically driven, instinctual imperative and not something to be ashamed of as if it were a character defect."
Thomas Hardy
"If a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst."
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Serenity Prayer
"Give me the grace to accept with serenity those things which cannot be changed, courage to change those things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other."
Contact Peter
Peter Hudson, Fd.Sc MBACP (Accred)
07773 487 075
Contact Peter to book an appointment.
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Sessions held in a relaxed setting based in Central Cardiff.