If you've spent any time reading through this blog, you'll have noticed that I draw on several different frameworks — polyvagal theory, ideas from Transactional Analysis, concepts around the nervous system and communication. You might be wondering what holds all of that together. I want to be clear from the outset: I'm not a specialist in TA or any other single modality. I'm a person-centred, pluralistically trained counsellor who draws on tools from various models where they're useful. What holds it together is the person in front of me, not a framework.
This post is my attempt to answer that honestly. Not as a credentials exercise, but because I think understanding an approach matters — especially when you're deciding whether to work with someone.
The short version: I'm a person-centred counsellor, pluralistically trained, and polyvagal-informed. Each of those things shapes everything I do. And together, they point toward the same destination: helping you understand yourself — in your body and your mind — and find your own way through.
Person-Centred: The Relationship Is the Foundation
Person-centred counselling, developed by Carl Rogers in the mid-twentieth century, is built on a deceptively simple idea: that people have within them the capacity for growth, understanding, and change — and that what unlocks that capacity is the right kind of relationship.
Rogers identified three core conditions that make that relationship possible. The first is unconditional positive regard — a genuine acceptance of the person in front of you, without judgement and without conditions. The second is empathy — not just understanding what someone says, but really feeling into their experience. The third is congruence — the counsellor being real, honest, and present rather than hiding behind a professional mask.
These aren't techniques. They're ways of being. And when they're genuinely present in a relationship, something remarkable tends to happen: the person begins to feel safe enough to look honestly at themselves. To say the things they haven't said. To explore the parts of themselves they've kept hidden — sometimes even from themselves.
What polyvagal theory has helped me understand is why this works at a physiological level. The presence of a calm, accepting, non-judgemental other person is one of the most powerful signals of safety the nervous system can receive. Rogers was describing, decades before Porges named it, what it feels like to have your nervous system held by someone else's. The relationship doesn't just feel safe. In a very real sense, it is safe — in the body, not just the mind.
This is why the therapeutic relationship isn't a backdrop to the work. It is the work. Everything else — the frameworks, the insights, the understanding — happens within it, and because of it.
Pluralistic: No Single Map Fits Everyone
If person-centred practice is the foundation, pluralism is the architecture. And the central idea of pluralistic counselling is one I find both honest and liberating: no single therapeutic approach holds all the answers, and different people need different things.
I was trained pluralistically, which means I wasn't taught to see every client through the lens of one fixed model. Instead, I was trained to listen — carefully, collaboratively — for what this person, at this point in their life, with this particular history and these particular difficulties, actually needs. And then to draw on whatever frameworks or approaches are most likely to be useful for them.
This matters more than it might sound. A lot of people have had the experience of feeling like they didn't quite fit the therapy they were offered. Like the model was more important than they were. Pluralistic practice starts from the opposite assumption: you are the point. The approach serves you, not the other way around.
In practice, this means that conversations with me might involve polyvagal theory one week, a concept borrowed from Transactional Analysis the next, and something much more simple and human — just sitting with what's hard — the week after that. What guides the choice isn't a protocol or a model. It's you: what you're bringing, what seems to be landing, what feels useful and what doesn't.
It also means I'm explicit about this. I'll often check in: does this way of thinking about things feel helpful? Is there something else you'd find more useful? That kind of collaboration — working together rather than having things done to you — is itself a person-centred act. And as I explored in the posts about Transactional Analysis, it's also an Adult-to-Adult relationship. You're not a passive recipient of my expertise. You're the expert on yourself. I'm just here to help you access that.
Polyvagal-Informed: The Body Has Its Own Understanding
Polyvagal theory, developed by neuroscientist Dr Stephen Porges, has genuinely changed the way I understand what happens in the room — and what happens in people's lives outside it.
The core insight, which I've written about in more detail elsewhere on this blog, is that the nervous system is constantly scanning for safety and threat, and that this scanning shapes everything: how we feel, how we think, what we say, who we are in any given moment. When we feel safe — in the ventral vagal state — we have access to the best of ourselves. When we feel threatened — in the sympathetic or dorsal vagal states — we lose that access, often without realising it.
Being polyvagal-informed means I pay attention to the body as well as the mind. Not just what you're thinking and saying, but what's happening underneath — the quality of your breathing, the tension or settling in your posture, the moments when you seem to arrive more fully in the room and the moments when you seem to retreat.
This isn't about analysing or diagnosing. It's about curiosity. The body holds a lot of information that the mind hasn't yet put into words — and sometimes, the most important work happens in the gap between the two.
Polyvagal theory also helps explain something that person-centred counsellors have always known but haven't always had the language for: why the quality of presence matters so much. When I'm genuinely settled, genuinely attentive, genuinely non-judgemental — that has a regulatory effect. Your nervous system picks up on mine. Safety is, in a very real sense, contagious.
How the Three Fit Together
Person-centred practice gives the relationship its quality — the safety, the acceptance, the genuine human contact that makes growth possible. Pluralism gives the work its flexibility — the willingness to draw on different frameworks and follow what's useful for you rather than what's prescribed. And polyvagal theory gives both of those things a deeper grounding — an understanding of why the relationship matters in the body, not just in the mind, and why working with the nervous system is so central to lasting change.
Together, they point toward something I care about deeply: helping you understand yourself — not as a collection of symptoms or problems to be fixed, but as a person with a history, a nervous system, and a set of responses that made sense once and that can, with the right support, begin to shift.
That's the work. Not me doing something to you. Both of us, together, finding out what's true for you — in your body, in your mind, in your life — and slowly, carefully, helping you find your way back to yourself.
A Note on What I Don't Do
I think it's as important to be clear about the limits of my approach as it is to describe it. I work with individuals only — not couples or groups. I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, and I don't diagnose or prescribe. I'm an NCPS-accredited counsellor and psychotherapist with a diploma in counselling and a professional diploma in psychotherapeutic counselling and I work within the ethical framework of my accrediting body.
The frameworks and ideas I draw on — polyvagal theory, concepts from Transactional Analysis, and others — are tools, not labels. I am not a TA specialist, and I don't hold myself out as practising TA. I borrow from it because some of its ideas are genuinely useful, and because a pluralistic approach allows me to do that responsibly. I hold all of these tools lightly, always in service of what's actually helpful for the person in front of me.
If you're trying to work out whether I might be the right person to work with, the best thing to do is get in touch for an initial conversation. It's free, it's without obligation, and it's a chance for both of us to get a sense of whether working together feels right.
I offer a free initial consultation — a twenty-minute conversation about what's going on for you and whether working together makes sense. No pressure, no obligation. Just a chance to talk.
📞 07368 155826
threeoakstherapy.co.uk
Martin Truscott | Dip CST & Prof.DipPsy.C | NCPS Accredited | Person-Centred | Pluralistic | Polyvagal-Informed
Three Oaks Therapy | Broughton Gate, Milton Keynes | In-person and online
A note on AI: This post was written with the assistance of AI, based on my own professional knowledge, training, and experience as a counsellor. All content reflects my own views and approach. The header image was also created using an AI image generation tool. I like to be transparent about both.