Welcome to our pluralistic practice website. We hope you find it an interesting and valuable resource for developing pluralistic thinking and practice in the counselling and psychotherapy field.

We are delighted to invite submissions for the fifth international conference on pluralistic counselling and psychotherapy, hosted by The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. This conference theme is ‘The power of collaborative relationships: working together to rebuild lives and communities’.

We are seeking submissions of abstracts for:

● Papers of 30 or 60 minutes (20 or 45-minutes presentation/10 or 15-minute questions)
● Panel dialogues (60 minutes)
● Workshops (60 or 90 minutes)
● Poster presentations to the full conference (2 minutes per presentation, again with a focus on one of the two strands)

The deadline for submission is Friday 29th April.

Who: We welcome submissions from trainees, practitioners, and service users, as well as more experienced academic and researchers. Our aim is to create a warm, friendly, and supportive environment in which a plurality of voices and perspectives can be heard and exchanged.

If you are interested in presenting you can find the submission form here and send the completed form to pluralistic@rgu.ac.uk.

If you want to attend as a participant you can find tickets here

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Pluralistic counselling and psychotherapy is based on two key principles:

• There’s no ‘best’ way of doing therapy: different clients need different things at different times. 
• If therapists want to find out the best way of helping clients, they should talk to them about it. 

This doesn’t mean that clients will always know what they want, or that what clients want is what they need; but that any views that clients have on how best to do therapy should be actively elicited, respected, and engaged with.

Pluralism in counselling and psychotherapy can be both an attitude towards therapy and a specific practice. 

• Pluralistic attitude: a general respect for different approaches, and a willingness to help clients find the right therapy for them. That means that therapists who practice ‘pure form’ therapies—like person-centred counselling or CBT—can still consider themselves pluralistic. 
• Pluralistic practice: a form of therapy in which the practitioner draws on a range of methods and understandings to try and tailor the therapy to the individual client—based on what they and the client think may be most helpful.

This Pluralistic Practice website is the central hub for information and resources about the pluralistic approach, developed by the leading people in the field. It is primarily orientated towards counsellors and psychotherapists who identify with, or are interested in, the pluralistic approach; but it is also accessible to clients and other interested laypeople.

If you are interested in contributing to the website we welcome blog posts. You can also join our Facebook discussion group @pluralisticpractice , or see our posts on Twitter @PluralPractice , or Instagram @pluralisticnetwork .

You can also email us with your comments and ideas.

Marc Johnson, Abertay University, has developed a fantastic new video on developing a timeline map.