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Gestalt Global Corporation
Indexes for Gestalt!

Gstalt-L, An email discussion group devoted to Gestalt therapy and the community of its practitioners (www.g-gej.org/gstalt-l).
Gstalt-J, An email discussion group devoted to research on Gestalt therapy, theory and practice (www.g-gej.org/gstalt-j). Supported by the Gestalt Research Consortium (GRC) (www.g-gej.org/grc).
Gestalt Bookmarks, a place to begin researching the field of contemporary Gestalt therapy on the world wide web (www.g-gej.org/gestaltbookmarks).

I sometimes think that when I am an old woman sitting in a Retirement Home for Sisters of Mercy in the West of Ireland one of my delights will be to close my eyes and open up my album of memories from the Gestalt Summer Residentials. If my companions see me smile, little will they know that I am thinking of the freedom the residentials gave me to experiment with painting my toe-nails red!

My first Workshop was in Navan, Ireland in 1978. I arrived utterly terrified but making a brave attempt at nonchalance. It was my first Gestalt group, my first experience of an international community and it just blew my mind! Some feedback I got at the end was that I always looked so interested. That didn’t surprise me as I worked hard throughout at not having my mouth hang open in amazement! The whole experience was truly freeing and I treasure the memory of the work I did and the people I met.

Two years later in Connemara, Ireland the experience was somewhat of an anti-climax. What remains figure for me from 1980 was the dark, brooding beauty of the Connemara landscape.

My next Residential was not until 1988 in Grimstone Manor, Devon where the owner told us we must be “squeaky clean” before we used the indoor swimming pool and the food was so healthy it left me longing for a Big Mac! This was Gestalt of the 80’s, more focused, more emphasis on theory, on training and on boundaries. I was terrified all over again. But the diversity and richness of an international community fascinated me as did the commonality of the human condition. Here I had my first experience of individual in a workshop and each morning at 7.45 am I climbed the attic stairs to meet my therapist and supervisor.

Leaving, I promised I would be back, and I was in Rocca di Papa in 1990. This was somewhat of a Fawlty Towers experience complete with armed police barring our way to the dining room one lunchtime. But the work continued. I achieved my personal goal of working as therapist in the large group and was so pleased.

1992, Soro, Denmark, where I loved the setting, the climate, the food and the company. Four of us shared a small room with bunk beds and we giggled and gossiped our way through the workshop like schoolgirls in boarding school. Here too I had the mind-boggling in-sight that certification was not just for other people but could be for me too. This was a quantum leap in my way of thinking but I had grown in confidence in an environment which supported my personal growth and therapeutic skills.

My goal for certification was 1994, so in 1993 I was in Rorschach, Switzerland . By now I felt part of the community and it was great to see familiar faces and be welcomed back. This time I really needed to put myself out in the big group and have my work seen by the faculty. It was a real challenge to fight for my place and I did. That year, as I went into the party on the last night, I met Bob; he told me I was beautiful and I was. It was the glow of satisfaction which he saw.

In 1994 we were in the Czech Republic. I was the only Irish person at the Workshop but what a welcome I got and what support I received! I did my Oral and Clinical examinations and became a certified member of GTILA. If in 1978 somebody had looked into a crystal ball and told me I would one day sit in a Hotel room in the Czech Republic and do what I did, I would have dismissed the prophecy as utter rubbish. How interesting life can be! I was so lonely saying goodbye that year as I did not know if I would be back again.

I was back twice in the Senior Practicum Group in Barcelona and Vevey. Each time a new challenge but I enjoyed it all especially the contact and the richness of an international group. Imagine my delight when invited to be a TA in Summer 2000 in Greece. Another challenge and another growing edge. One of the highlights for me there was presenting a paper on “The Interface of Gestalt and Spirituality.” Once again I marvelled at being able to find a common ground with people from so many different cultures, countries and religions.

The Gestalt community is a human community and as such had its share of difficulties, disagreements and disappointments over the years. This I acknowledge but it is not figure for me as I remember. I always came away enriched personally and professionally and with something of the feeling that Denise Levertov writes of in her poem "Beginnings"

I will have plenty to reflect on in my Retirement Home!!!

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When I attended my first Summer Residential 12 years ago, I never expected it to become a long-term relationship. In fact, as I kept reminding everybody, I didn’t belong there: I am not a therapist, I don’t want to be one, and I have no background or training in psychology. I went at first to find out what it was all about since I had heard so much about it from good friends who had gone and I found myself with an opportunity to join them. From the beginning I experienced being drawn in by the powerful dynamic of this workshop and at the same time struggling to extricate myself. Well, I did extricate myself, but only at the end of the 12 days and then, as it happened all the other years, then I left riding a wave of exhilaration. When I think now about my twelve years attending the SR, I often think about this mystery and know that although I can’t explain it, I must try.

Everyone comes to the SR expecting something. Something. Different things, probably, but something. At the beginning the expectations are about training, I think, because this is a serious workshop, lasting a considerable period of time and imposing a demanding and even sometimes grueling schedule on the hapless attendees. I came wanting to understand what Gestalt therapy was all about. I am an academic, an English teacher for many years, and I like ideas. I came to the SR initially as a teacher, then as a department chair, and later as a union president in contract negotiations, and as a sometimes administrator. I came as a beginner and an outsider. I came for my own reasons, and it took me a long time to realize deeply that although I was chided for being too intellectual, too “in my head,” my reasons were the right ones. I came, it turns out, like everyone else: wanting something. Entering the workshop is a profoundly altering experience, and the power of it, I have come to believe, is the ability to enter a process for very good reasons, but then to be willing to let go of those reasons and enter fully what is there.

The kind of learning I experienced was very different from any I had ever experienced. There was no syllabus, no agenda for any of the group meetings (although the schedule of meetings imposes a rigid structure I lashed out against sometimes inside), no testing or evaluation. I hated that because I like things to be predictable and planned. Spontaneity has often seemed too risky to me. But sitting with strangers in a group room, waiting, looking around in silence, looking inside myself, waiting, wondering, I learned patience (albeit very slowly) and trust. Every year I have experienced that slow development of what is to be learned, what will present itself in the room full of people and within me, what will emerge as the color and shape of that group, in that place, with those chairs, looking out that window. That is how I learned what Gestalt therapy is all about: by experiencing that workshop as it emerged with all of its complexity, texture, awkwardness, beauty, disappointment, triumph , boredom, anger, frustration, and tenderness. I learned it by staying with the rivers of words I thought would drown me sometimes and by entering the silences I could no longer stand. By submitting to it when I wanted to escape.

I learned a great deal about Gestalt theory and always left hungry to know more, to explore concepts more deeply, to question more closely, but I also learned about entering the dynamic of interaction with people that is the essence of this workshop. I have done a great deal with my hunger to understand what Gestalt therapy is all about. I applied field theory principles to my work managing a department of 35 cranky people. I looked at the Gestalt formation and destruction cycle to help me work with my students in writing class trying to learn the process of writing. I began, with time, to look at the processes of interaction at the college I work with from the perspective of Gestalt principles trying to understand the dynamics of an educational institution. I took and passed my certification exam (and still remember the way I looked up from my computer when I was done, dazed and exhausted by trying to coax three-dimensional experience into sentences on a screen). I have spent a year as a trainer assistant. I have now even found a way to begin a doctoral program in education, fulfilling a life-long dream, and find myself in every class instructed, prompted, and primed to understand new material through the Gestalt perspective, the principles that have had such an essential impact on my thinking: field theory, dialogue, support, interruption, process.

There is no experience for me that resembles the SR. Drawn back year after year, I am beckoned by its mystery, seduced by the memory of years of loving its gifts and dreading its unerring demands on me. It never gives up all of its secrets, this workshop that has made so much difference to me and informed my professional and personal life so dramatically. The SR never grows old. It is never repeated. It still, after all this time, amazes and humbles me.