10 Questions with Jim Filshie

• What led you to choose psychotherapy or counselling as a profession?

• A combination of things have led me here: my deep interest in engaging with and getting to know others, my increasing understanding of how the world and society impacts positively and adversely on people, my fascination with the words and work of those who have understood that truly helping people doesn't mean telling them what to do or even gently nudging them in certain directions, but in giving them the conditions that will help them to chart their own course.

• Which philosophical approaches have influenced your professional/personal development?

• Client-centred (or person-centred) therapy is my main influence. It's the only truly non-directive approach. To me it is not just an approach to therapy, but a deeply philosophical concept about being human: namely that autonomy and liberation are at the centre of happiness and good mental health.
  
  The converse way of looking at it is that, from an early age, we tend to be coerced and constrained in all sorts of ways, overt and subtle. It's not always possible to shed the various social influences, but often therapy is an opportunity to recognise the forces that are weighing most heavily on us, hindering us. That leads to insight, action, progress.

• Which particular aspects of health or the human journey are you interested in?

• The human condition, A-Z.

• What method/s do you use?

• Client-centred therapy isn't really a method, in that it's not 'doing' anything as such - more a way of being - actually Carl Rogers said that. The therapeutic environment, or relationship, becomes a space for exploration, emotion, thinking and ... figuring stuff out. There are no rules.

• When do you think the client will start to feel that progress is being made?

• The sooner the better of course... but everyone's different. For some people it's just making the booking. I hope that if and when you meet me you get a sense that you're heading in the right direction.

• Do you ever have 'bad hair' days?

• I have fewer and fewer bad hair days as I get older (and my hairline recedes). Or is it that every day becomes a bad hair day, meaning that none of them are? What a conundrum...