Dave Mearns > Quotes

“Development is not about learning how to counsel but about becoming the kind of person who can counsel.”
― Dave Mearns, Person-Centred Counselling in Action

“In our hearts we know that with a different fate, we, too, could be in the ranks of the dispossessed, stripped of our identities and belonging nowhere. The refugee becomes a sinister symbol of what can quickly happen once personhood is denied and people are transformed into disposable units of contemptible impediments to the greed or power-mongering of others.”
― Dave Mearns, Person-Centred Therapy Today: New Frontiers in Theory and Practice

“What is shared in common is infinitely more significant than what apparently divides.”
― Dave Mearns, Person-Centred Therapy Today: New Frontiers in Theory and Practice

“Part of the discipline of the person-centred approach is not to make assumptions about the client's appropriate process, but to follow the process laid out by the client.”
― Dave Mearns, Person-Centred Therapy Today: New Frontiers in Theory and Practice

“People were surprised in the 1990s when multinationals began to contribute heavily to New Labour, favoured even above the Conservative Party. But this move of Labour to New Labour was much more important to capitalism than simply having one party to support, for if you can have both big parties you have achieved the ultimate switch from a capitalist democracy to a totalitarian capitalist democracy, such as was accomplished in the USA many years previously.”
― Dave Mearns, Politicizing the Person-Centred Approach: An Agenda for Social Change

“Criticism hurts most because it comes from another person and abuse is most damaging when it comes from someone who should love us.”
― Dave Mearns, Working at Relational Depth in Counselling and Psychotherapy

“The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.”
― Dave Mearns, Person-Centred Counselling in Action

“Self-acceptance should not be confused with an over-vaulting aggrandisement of self over others. That individual's exaggerated positive view of self relies upon a comparison with others - they sustain their own positive self-view, relatively, by maintaining a negative view of others.”
― Dave Mearns, Working at Relational Depth in Counselling and Psychotherapy

“The way to make the giving a free vote safe for a totalitarian capitalist regime is simple - make all political parties the same!”
― Dave Mearns, Politicizing the Person-Centred Approach: An Agenda for Social Change

“a new person in an old life’. This experience is common for clients who have achieved a turnaround in their attitude to their self. Previously they will have built a life around them that reflected their lack of self-acceptance. They may have been self-defeating, over-submissive and under-valuing of their own abilities. When self-acceptance is achieved all these things can now change, but sometimes at the cost of considerable turmoil. Perhaps the client’s relationships at home and at work can be nourished and strengthened by his development but it is possible that these relationships have been founded upon the client being weak.”
― Dave Mearns, Person-Centred Counselling in Action