That original venue in Budva, courtesy of the government tourist agency Globus, was a former private villa. We were assured we would be the exclusive occupants. We were, at least on the inside. The roof, porches and lawn were strewn with hundreds of additional people in tents all using the bathrooms and washing diapers in our sinks. Welcome to rural Yugoslavia, circa 1972. With connections to the communist government, one of our Yugoslav participants arranged for us to all be moved to a good hotel in Dubrovnik - an absolutely magical ancient city 80 miles up the coast of the Adriatic. How glad we were that day that not everyone in Yugoslavia was equal.

Programatic Shifts

As the years went on, our program continued to evolve. We have worked in dozens of different countries many with magnificent venues and a few that were problematic like that original villa. For roughly the past two decades, Americans comprise only about 15% of the community with participants coming from all over Western and Eastern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Turkey, South America and even a few from Korea and Hong Kong. Typically, we have participants from 20-25 different countries at each summer residential. One year the majority of participants are Australian, another year Irish and yet another year, Norwegian. What a wonderful mix.

In the beginning, almost all of our trainee participants were beginners in Gestalt Therapy. Over several decades (and all over the world), many fine Gestalt Therapy training centers have been established offering comprehensive three or more years of training. Thus, as training needs changed, we have had more and more advanced trainees who needed different formats, levels, opportunities and experiences. We've included individual therapy, supervision, theory building, teaching, couples therapy, organizational development and much more within our ever evolving curriculum. Interestingly, all the major new format groups (Clinical Practicum, Supervision Practicum and Advanced Intensive) were born of a group of trainees designing and suggesting to us what they wanted and needed. In addition to formal evaluation of all segments of this workshop, we typically also do a six month follow up evaluation to find out which impressions were transitory, which were durable and which took time after the workshop to ripen and emerge. All of our Trainer Assistants have trained and been certified by us. Importantly, all of them have trained elsewhere as well.

A Personal Note

For me personally and professionally, this workshop is the highlight of my year. In all of the thirty years, I have only missed one workshop (1980 in Connemara, Ireland) and can remember well the ambiance of each workshop - the work, the singing, the laughter, the tears, the food, and mostly, the community.

Wonderfully, participants choose to return to our summer program year after year. We are very proud of our 80% return rate for what may be the oldest annual ongoing psychotherapy training program in the world. What a joy to be a part of participants changing and growing both as Gestalt Therapists and as people. What a privilege to learn from them as well as teach them. This mix of people from many different cultures returning year after year creates an incredibly rich community - a truly international family that has become a very solid foundation for people to stretch, to risk and to learn.

Impact on the World

Professionally, we can see the fruits of our work in many, many countries around the world. Our participants have established training programs, set up advanced ongoing training, emulated our summer residential workshop format in their own countries, attended and presented at international Gestalt Conferences such as AAGT, EAGT and GANZ, and established the first psychotherapy clinic in the entire country of Albania (a Gestalt therapy clinic within the University of Tirana). We have seen them impact university academic programs, hospitals and clinics, agencies and organizations. Recently, we have added both a Couples Therapy Training Workshop for Therapists and a Couples Therapy Workshop for Couples as an integrated workshop preceding the regular European Summer Residential Gestalt Therapy Training Program We have also added an Organizational Development Seminar track as an optional part of the Gestalt program. We are now on the cusp of creating a GATLA Research Institute to facilitate doctoral theses and other research projects as part of our summer program. What a fantastic opportunity for research.

International Faculty

Our international faculty, including our Trainer Assistants, are trained and come from many different counties. In addition to the U.S., our faculty comes from Scotland, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Australia, and South Africa. This year (July 2001) we are for the first time honored to include two Distinguished Visiting Faculty for part of our program: Edwin C. Nevis, Ph.D. and Sonia M. Nevis, Ph.D. - founders of the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland and heading the Gestalt International Study Center (Edwin) and the Center for the Study of Intimate Systems (Sonia) respectively.

Professional Highlights

For me, the single most important and striking part of these summer residencials are the differences in the backgrounds that participants and faculty bring to the engagements thus creating the array of differences in meaning. If meaning is the relationship between figure and ground, participants bring with them an anthropological, sociological, economic and psychological palette of backgrounds including how figures are chosen. To work with this diversity of backgrounds every summer serves as my annual thorough pipe cleaning - my phenomenological high colonic. At home too people bring different backgrounds (and therefore different prisms to refract meaning), however, the larger discrepancies of backgrounds of both the summer residential participants and faculty provides a very special opportunity to hear the static in the system when not sufficiently bracketing off preconceived ideas, assumptions, beliefs, theories, interpretations, values, etc. These experiences always seem to frustrate and humble any attempts to superimpose one's phenomenology on another and lead to a more full understanding of, and respect for, otherness. This is truly the honoring of differences.

This understanding is what allows prejudice to become respect through contact. We have had participants from different countries with centuries of hatred between them learn that each of them has similar problems with their spouses, their aging mothers and their work. Although many differences still remain, the ìknowingî and ìbeing knownî creates connections that are a sanctuary from the fixed perceptions of distrust, hate, and envy. This microcosm of the deconstruction of fear and hate gives some hope to the more global and geopolitical concerns of the larger field.

Coda

Fundamentally, we are sharing and teaching a way of looking at the world, at groups, at families, at couples and at individuals from a Gestalt Therapy perspective. We are so profoundly nourished when we see this respect for both the self and the other realized and growing. Isadore From is often quoted as saying"health is when the other is foreground". I would amend that to read "health is when both the other and self are foreground".

What an odyssey. What a ride.