Online Playdates for Gestalt Practitioners - Dates by agreement of participants…
I am interested in creating a different kind of gestalt post training space, one that jettisons the fixed curriculum - & compliments the clinical and professional focus that permeates much modern therapy training. I am proposing a training space geared towards supporting your development - like the stone mason, aimed at releasing the shape of the therapist you already have inside you from the block of marble. I want to support you to find your own living synthesis of gestalt theory, and/or whatever related and useful building blocks of theory you have within you.
We work at our best as therapists when we are responding from who we are - the no doubt flawed people and practitioners, and yet nonetheless able to marshal our personal processes in service of another. When we work in this way, the distinction between who we are as people, and who we are as practitioners dissolves away - our humanity shines bright. Therapy trainings often leave us with a whole deal of additional structure to contend with…. they work from the basis that without the structure we pose a risk to our clients… In gestalt language the structure helps us “retroflect”, until we no longer pose a danger.
There is an important place for this, and yet many of the supposed dangers today are reflective of the regulatory, safeguarding and risk-averse landscape in which therapy finds itself - some distance from the ethos of straightforward human giving that draws many people to practice therapy.
So with this support offer I want to create a post-training space where we can begin to shed some of the unhelpful baggage, and learn to inhabit the parts we want to keep, such that they become ours - we wear them, rather than they wearing us. You’ve passed your driving test, now learn to drive!
This could be a place to have fun.
This could be a place to work through our fears of being seen, our fears of our own authority, with support.
This could be a place to bravely name the unresolved contradictions within us that may or may not impinge on our work - one of mine for example is an apparent contradiction between the degree to which I experience my client work as deeply meaningful, and yet cumulatively it also imposes a burden.
This is a place to suspend whatever beliefs we hold about the “not good therapist”.
This may also be a place where we learn to appreciate the importance of structure, and its costs - and how we find ourselves within it.
This may be a space to work through whatever personal process it wasn’t safe to work through in training.
This may be a space to sink more deeply into bodily process, and experience how the other moves in us (moves us), and how we move in them.
I intend to hold a space of exploration collaboratively with you, where we create the safety and conditions of mutual support that allow us to practice in front of each other, that allow us to supervise each other, and discuss our real clients. I want there to be space via group process, and also via presentation of writing and case studies to reflect on how we work, and who we are as therapy practitioners. There will be space to chew and grapple with theory - not as dead material, but as we live and embody it.
This feels like an adventure, one which may or may not go ahead, depending on whether my offer resonates with enough people. If this is something you would like to try out - why not message me gillie2k@gmail.com, and if enough people respond we will try out a first meeting.
Costs/contributions will be determined collaboratively, and can be in proportion to what you can afford to pay. This group will function as a collaborative (co-op) with decisions over where we allocate money made together. I expect to be paid something for convening and organising this space, the exact amount will be determined by group consensus.