This PowerPoint presentation was developed by Rab Erskine and was offered to the tPCA's Practitioner Conference, Alfreton in June 2022. The slides highlight aspects of offering a Contact-Orientated counselling/therapy model in nature and are based on Rab's learning over the years.. Rab has lived and worked as a therapist, in the Tweed Valley (Scottish Borders Region) for over thirty five years. His initial experience of working therapeutically started in 1985, while employed at a pioneering therapeutic-community project. After qualifying in 1993 as a counsellor and psychotherapist, and alongside working as a counsellor in primary care, he set up a small company offering nature-based short term residential experiences to individuals and groups. From 2004 to 2016, he was commissioned to run the nature-based project for the Adult Mental Health Psychiatric Rehabilitation service. For a number of years he also worked as a trainer and supervisor. He presently runs a nature based private practice alongside mentoring and working with charities that support adults with complex trauma. Rab describes his work in the following way: "Although most counselling and psychotherapy takes place indoors, there are times when there is a need for a more natural working environment than the often, somewhat ‘clinical’ indoor therapeutic space. This much larger working environment sometimes known as Eco-Therapy, Nature Therapy, Eco-Psychology, can assist in the creation of a gentle yet powerful therapeutic encounter, often useful when there is trauma or deep seated emotional experiences to be worked with. A way of engaging therapeutically which (Rab believes) understands the individuals’ need for a supportive, non judgemental, less intrusive, compassionate environment within which to explore and better understand him/her self. This very humanistic way of engaging therapeutically, works well with the nature based working context of ecotherapy.

2.  I work with many people who
feel very lonely,
 There may be many reasons
behind this feeling..
 They struggle to feel accepted
for who they are.
 They feel judged, criticised,
dismissed, etc.
 Working in a contact orientated
way supports the individual in
feeling heard and accepted.
 What they do with that
‘offering’ or which direction
they chose to take it in, is up to
them.
 My aim is to attempt to be ‘less-
intrusively’ Present,

3. • Born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1960.
• Urban jungle one way and fields, streams and
areas of woodland and farmland the other
way.
• Started working life at 16 as an apprentice
electrical and mechanical engineer with
British Telecom.
• Left aged 21.
• Travelled for a few years before returning to
Scotland aged 25.
• Started working at a List G residential school
(therapeutic ethos).
• 1990 – started training in Counselling and
Psychotherapy.
• Introduced to Pre-Therapy in 1995.
• Joined the Pre-Therapy International
Network in 2002.
• 1995-2004 working one to one in nature with
clients (Social work, Education – normally
crisis orientated)
• 2004 – 2016 Developed the nature-based
project for Psychiatry (Adults with
Schitzophrenia and Psychosis)

4.  In June 2016 the ‘Going Places’
project came to the end of its
funding stream.
 I chose to continue to offer the
“Contact orientated’ way of
engaging by developing a
private practice based in nature.
 My want was to create the
opportunity for individuals who
were interested in
walking/spending time in a
natural environment while
experiencing therapeutic
encounter.
 My clients are often individuals
who have experienced traumatic
situations in their lives or are
wanting to work with deeply
engrained or hard to reach
emotions.

6. Garry would like to see society take up the care for the people who suffer
from mental illness.
He wanted society to provide the people the care one needs,
since much of the suffering,
as he said,
is avoidable and unnecessary. (Taken from the PTIN website)

7.  “Traditionally, the most disturbed
clients in psychiatry have been
regarded by most schools of
psychotherapy as being ‘beyond
therapeutic reach’, …..
 They are, however, not beyond reach
of client-centred therapy, most often in
combination with Pre-Therapy, due to
the non-directive attitude of the client-
centred therapist and pre-therapist.
 A non-directive client-centred
therapist using Pre-therapy will make
no particular interventions in the hope
that they will be helpful to the client.
 Of course, the therapist hopes that the
relationship, in general, will benefit the
client, but in a very basic sense he or
she meets the client with an offer of
interest rather than an offer of help.”
 Beyond therapeutic Reach,(p50-51) In and out of Contact:
Therapy with people in the ‘grey-zone’. Lisbeth
Sommerbeck, chapter 5, The Contact Work primer, edited
by Pete Sanders, PCCS Books, 2007.

8. Dion Van Werde
in Pre-Therapy Reaching contact-impaired clients (PCCS Books. 2002.) writes:.

9. Treatment
should be
an active
verb
rather
than a
noun.
R.D. Laing 1986.

10. “Its always lovely to see him coming back smiling”

11. • Garry Prouty: “In Psychotherapy, the primary
understanding is for the clients’ literal experience, not
interpreted experience. Many therapists do not respond
to the actual lived experience of the client – they respond
through their schemas about client experience.”
• Taken from: Chapter two- pre therapy and existential phenomenology, Pre- Therapy,
reaching contact impaired clients. PCCS Books, 2002.

12. • “Pre-Therapy is a way of offering
the client or the person
encountered, handles to get
rooted again amidst the flood of
experiences he or she maybe is
locked into, or even drowning in.
This being said, it is implied that
to meet the client, one has to look
at the ‘edge’ where the clients
world meets ours, a demarcation
area where subtlety is needed in
order to be allowed to visit the
area or even to be allowed to
merely refer to it.”
• Dion Van Werde, Chapter 5, Pre-Therapy at its edges from
palliative care to exercise newly recovered contact
functioning. Person-Centred Practice at the difficult edge,
Pearce and Sommerbeck, PCCS Books, 2014.

13. “You talk a lot more
than other therapists
…but it really helps”

14. Peter Schmid, Some
Misunderstandings: What
Non-Directivity is not:
• It is not inactive,
• It is not (necessarily)
unstructured,
• It is not non-influential,
• It is not a denial of power,
• It is not a technique.
• Carl Rogers: “The person
who should guide is the
Client.”

15. Outside of the allocated time slot for any indoor
counselling/Psychotherapy session, the therapy room is not
available to the client.
With nature-based sessions, the route remains available,
before and after any therapeutic encounter.

16. “The successful outcome of person-centred counselling is in
direct proportion to the authenticity and integrity that the
counsellor brings to its practice, and the growth and healing
of clients depends on the deep human connection we are able
to establish with them”.

17. • While journeying in nature, the level of sensory
material which is open to reflections feels far more
available than in a therapy room and since we are
journeying, we are constantly moving, exploring and
creating opportunities to notice, sense and invite
(contact) into awareness. Rab Erskine 2021.

18. Understanding Meanings and Intents
(taken from Chapter 8, Client Centred Therapy, Carl Rogers, 1951.)
• Attending to what others might say and give some proof of this
by reflecting back…
• It might be enough, providing people said what they actually
meant.
• We know however, that people seldom do.
• They are prevented from doing so both by the limitations of
language itself and by internal inhibitions which operate to
protect the individual from threat.
• Furthermore, even if people actually said what they meant, it is
not always true that the listener will understand. …..

19. Using the environment as a metaphor and way of checking
or supporting (decoding?) the language used.

20.  Carl Rogers and Richard Farson produced a book in 1957 (re-printed in
2015). In it they state:
 “Active listening carries a strong element of personal risk. If we manage to
accomplish what we are describing here –to sense deeply the feelings of
another person, to understand the meaning his experiences have for him, to
see the world as he sees it – we risk being changed ourselves.”
 It is threatening to give up, even momentarily, what we believe and start
thinking in someone else’s terms.
 It takes a great deal of inner security and courage to be able to risk one’s
self in understanding another.
 It can be developed only by being willing to risk seeing the world from the
speaker’s point of view.

21. “Your very good at Validating ,
but sometimes I’d really like
you to tell me what to do.”

22. • Existential Empathy is for the human condition,
psychotic or not.
• It is a ‘bearing witness’ to human suffering with
humility and acceptance.
• It is an openness to the agony and destruction beyond
healing.
• It is where the last response is to ‘be with’.

23. • This is a two-person-centred Therapy, or
client-centred relational psychotherapy.
• This is an approach to person-centred therapy
in which the primary focus of the work is
neither on maintaining non-directive attitude
nor on facilitating emotional change but in
encountering the client in an in-depth way
and sustaining such a depth of relating.
• A state of profound contact and engagement
between two people, in which each person is
fully real with the other, and able to
understand and value the others experiences
at a high level.
• There will be many moments of relational
depth, but there are also likely to be times
when there are less intense moments of

24.  Our therapeutic presence theory of relationship
suggests that the therapist’s ability to be present –
fully immersed in the moment, (physically, emotionally,
cognitively, and spiritually) without judgement or
expectation with and for the client – facilitates
healing.
 Therapeutic presence involves being open and
receptive to what is poignant in the moment.
 We hypothesize that although the experience of
presence by the therapist and its communication to
the client are important, they are healing only if the
client experiences the therapist as being fully there in
the moment.

25. Carl Rogers: “I am inclined to
think that in my writing I have
stressed too much the three
conditions (Congruence, UPR,
and empathic understanding).
Perhaps it is something around
the edges of those conditions that
is really the most important
element in therapy – when my
self is very clearly present”
Quoted from Baldwin 2000, taken from Therapeutic
Presence, Geller and Greenberg. 2012. APA.

26. The Place of Theory in
therapy.
... It is the existential
encounter which is
important, and that in
the immediate moment
of the therapeutic
relationship,
consciousness of
theory has no helpful
place.
Carl Rogers Some Learnings
from a Study of Psychotherapy
with Schizophrenics 1962.

27.  The timing of reflections will be easier for the speaker to
receive if the intention is to clarify what has already been
said, named or brought into awareness by the client and
may be more usefully received if offered within the
immediate time-space.
 A reminder from Garry Prouty: “The primary understanding is
for the clients’ literal experience, not interpreted experience”.
 Its like following a flowing stream, your trying to keep up
with the flow, noticing and reflecting back its journey/
changing moving direction, without overly interrupting the
flow.