PCCS Books is an independent mental health publisher.
We want a better deal for everyone who seeks help for emotional distress – better understanding from practitioners and society, better responses and more choices from services and better outcomes from treatments. Our aim is that our publishing reflects these goals.
This book is about working as autistic counsellors and psychotherapists. It is a collection of stand-alone chapters put together by members of the international online collective Autistic Counsellors and Psychotherapists (ACP). It shares their main aims: to tackle the lack of appropriate therapy available to autistic clients and to challenge the common stereotypes about autistic people, which are still very much alive and can bar them both from therapy and therapy training. But, because the writers have lived experience of the issues they are working with, they are also writing about ways of working most effectively and helpfully with autistic people. And that is what makes it unique. Each chapter describes both how the writer perceives and processes the world and how they work with clients. Their stories provide incontrovertible evidence that the existence of autistic therapists, far from being problematic or even a contradiction, is quite simply normal. And that neurodiversity, just like biodiversity, enriches, broadens and benefits all. It offers readers - autistic, allistic, therapists and would-be therapists, clients and would-be clients - the chance to meet the contributors and see them as humans, therapists and supervisors. Their hope is that, in its small way, this collection may give readers the understanding that they need to join them in changing the world.
'On Being an Autistic Therapist represents a moment in history and is a milestone. This anthology of writings and drawings by professional counsellors and mental health therapists about their experiences of being autistic and how their work is informed by them is timely, informative and compelling. When, in 2020, with funding from the Scottish Government, we were able to offer one-to-one counselling with autistic therapists to SWAN’s growing community of autistic women, the experiences were reported as revelatory by clients and therapists alike. And so, I am very, very delighted to be a witness to this community of autistic professionals as they grow in confidence and self-expression.'
Dr Catriona Stewart, OBE, co-founder of the charity SWAN Autism Scotland
Next Steps in Counselling and Psychotherapy Practice: A student’s companion
By Nicola Blunden, Pete Sanders and Paul Wilkins
3rd edition
Publication date - 24th April 2025
ISBN 9781915220370
This is the third edition of the very popular Next Steps in Counselling Practice, revised, updated and expanded to accompany today’s counselling students on their journey towards qualification.
Next Steps in Counselling and Psychotherapy Practice is aimed at the more advanced trainee and continues from where the PCCS Books classic First Steps in Counselling leaves off.
Like First Steps in Counselling, it is intended as a companion guide, addressed directly to the student counsellor. It is not a theory textbook – there are plenty of those already on the market. Rather, it seeks to answer the many questions that may come up for the individual student counsellor while in training, drawing on the authors’ accumulated experience as trainers and practitioners, and as one-time trainees themselves.
This book is designed to be of use to and facilitate the learning of all counselling and psychotherapy students, irrespective of the theories that underpin their training programmes and their own approaches to practice. It is not about one model of therapy but about what informs best practice across all therapies.
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This book will enable the student counsellor to learn about themself as well as discover new ideas and understand more deeply the skills required to be an effective practitioner.
Nicola Blunden is a person-centred and pluralistic therapist, with special practice interests in creative methods, plural identity, childhood trauma, and co-creation of therapy. She was previously Director of Studies of the person-centred pluralistic training at Metanoia Institute, and now leads the counselling and psychotherapy Masters' programme at UWE Bristol. She is an advocate for therapy that embraces diversity and co-creation.
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