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Celebrating 40 years of the MHCPC

1985-2025

 

The MHCPC has developed over 40 years starting with a request from the Outreach Team at the Sternberg Centre to provide workshops for people working as volunteers in the local community.

It was recognised that people working in the community in various capacities were too often placed in a position where their work was limited by a lack of confidence in how to communicate most effectively and how to respond to feelings revealed in both themselves and others. In response to this dilemma our co-founders Judith Dell and Tina Simmonds who were members of the Outreach Team, were asked to develop an informal training project in an environment of personal growth to nurture skills that were intuitive to many to ensure that the local community as a whole could benefit.

The project initially began in 1985 with half day then weekend workshops focused on enabling people to improve their listening skills. Before long as word spread, the demand for more training led to the creation of a series of counselling skills workshops which later became a yearlong course. In 1989, the training programme had evolved into offering a two-year Diploma in Counselling in the Community Skills.

Due to its popularity, over the next 4 years the Outreach Team developed an Introduction to Counselling, a Diploma in Psychodynamic Counselling, an Advanced Diploma, offered supervision and provided consulting services to other organisations. Recognising the need for the training programme to have its own identity, in 1993 The Manor House Centre for Psychotherapy and Counselling (MHCPC) was founded. 

Since then, the Training Programme has evolved into the Certificate in Counselling Skills Course, the three-year Diploma Course on Psychodynamic Counselling in the Community accredited by the BACP and the BPC and the soon to be launched Diploma in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. In addition, the MHCPC offers a low-cost psychodynamic counselling service to the local community.