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`m very pleased to return to the days of the Summer Residential 2000 in my thoughts and in this letter. I hope that my following personal reactions will be useful for you.

First of all, the Summer Program gave me a very hard personal experience, that help me now feel myself more strong and vivid. Only due to combination of warm, helpful atmosphere, very intensive training and meeting with people of different cultures I could contact with my deep problems (as rivalry and shame are), that was very difficult to do in my individual therapy at home.

I felt involved in international, worldwide Gestalt life, where differences and similarity of therapists` styles help to find my own way and give a support for free self-expression. The question of therapist`s free self-expression in Gestalt boundaries became the theme of my workshop at the Moscow conference. I`d got a new outlook at Russian mentality in comparison with other nationalities. I noticed many difficulties and a value at the same time of my position as a member of Russian group in comunity.

The six different trials I`d worked in for nine days gave me the opportunity to master and develop professional skills in the very special conditions. For example, it was a good training for clearing my feelings and finding the good way to include them in the sessions in situation of rapidly changed trials. I think, that the Summer Residential Training Program is the best way of getting professional Gestalt experience.

In Russia Summer Intensive Programs ( based on the structure similar to those GATLA programs) are very popular among students, therapists and trainers. There was a special joke in Russian group concerns the Summer Residential Programs. We tried to support each other : "If you`ll survive, you`ll be very "cool"(we meant "Great" gestalt-therapist) ." I survived last summer, but I`m not sure I`m enough ''cool". So I look forward to next meetings and hope to join it, as 80% of participants do.

The GATLA summer residential is for me an extraordinary experience that enhances my personal and professional growth. I love being around professionals from all over the world communicating mainly in a beautiful broken English. It is exciting to share differences and recognize similarities with people from other cultures.

Professionally, I am always learning at the summer residential. I believe the faculty is outstanding and challenging to me. The summer residential, I think, is a good representation of what is happening in the field of psychology/psychotherapy in the United States and starting to emerge in Western Europe. The field of psychotherapy is suggesting to follow different ways of considering and understanding reality mirroring the field of physics and literature. There is no doubt to me that the field of psychotherapy is challenging some of its old certainties about psychotherapy (i.e. position of the therapist, validity of psychotherapy).

In a post-modern world where processing information that one receives constantly is a daily challenge, the psychotherapist's role is also to construct a relationship that will help the client explore his or her phenomenology. The psychotherapist is the expert in questioning the client and his own perception of his relation with the client and with himself (reflexive attitude). Gestalt therapy, as taught by the faculty of GATLA, I believe, has this reflexive attitude that questions their own practice. The summer residential is an extraordinary laboratory to explore differences and similarities where participants are willing to dialogue about it, to challenge and to define Gestalt therapy and psychotherapy per se.

I have a strong postmodern (systemic) family therapy background that I cherish. I realize that Gestalt therapy is essential to complete my practice as a family therapist. It provides my a ground to support my practice and its theory about contact and dialogue is, I believe, the more advanced in the field of psychotherapy. The summer residential is nor vacation nor training, it is both. I feel exhausted after the two weeks but enriched by the people I met and by the education I got. I believe my practice as a psychotherapist is enhanced by going there, even my clients notice it when I come back from it.

My wife and I are working in a clinic in Los Angeles County where our clients are mainly children and families (or what we call families: foster parents, child protective service..). Our training over those 7 years in Gestalt and Family Therapy is a blessing and an extraordinary asset when working with our clients. Gestalt therapists who participated at the summer residential came to teach at our clinic. Our colleagues were tremendously impacted by them as they seem to be impact by our work: my wife and I got nominated clinicians of the year by our 86 colleagues that work in the clinic....

America I love you !!!?

When I received the e-mail from Bob, I first did not know how I was going to crystallize the richness of my experience with GATLA in half in page. When I got a second e-mail I knew I was not allowed to escape this dangerous exercise, so I better start right away! It sounded so hard to summarize. My experience with GATLA has been, in so many ways, "life-transforming". The term is strong but so true. A life transformation is hard to summarize.

What is Gestalt therapy to me? What is the effect of GATLA training on my personal development? Even though GATLA is Gestalt, GATLA and its faculty members have always been more than just "a Gestalt training" (more than the sum of the parts). GATLA is a commitment to learning renewed yearly, as evidenced by rigorous methods, strong interest in publications, and interest as well as integration of the latest research in fields as different as learning theories and Neuropsychology. GATLA is a mind; a heart and hands continuously open to differences. First to the different other (a heart open well intended and welcoming). GATLA is obviously open to different cultures. Since more than 20 different cultural backgrounds have been represented at the Summer Residential training. GATLA has also developed an openness to the continual movement of our own field and a strong interest for different theoretical approaches such as Family Therapy and Postmodernism (CBT as well). This shows such important quality in our field, the willingness to lessen the "churches' wars" and learn together about what our field continue to tell use is the primary indicator of success for therapy: the therapeutic relationship.

Gestalt Therapy has taught me to understand the ingredients and the "how to
do" a therapeutic relationship more efficiently. I believe. much more so, than most of the theories of psychotherapy that I have studied. Gestalt therapy as Marshall Mc Luhan (1964) might have said is the media. If I take the metaphor of the computer, it is the number of mega bites that allows my hard disk to function. A theory of psychotherapy that is saturated in content has more than one disadvantage. It often put the psychotherapist in the back seat, instead of being in the front seat. It oftentimes invites the therapist to be defensive, because the only thing he knows is content. As you all know content is nowadays accessible everywhere. Content is necessary, but it is not enough. Gestalt therapy has given me enough ground and support, in most situations, so that I have enough working memory (availability) to be free enough, creative enough, to access as many content, as needed in different fields and not only in Gestalt writings.

Before I conclude, I need to add something. I have evolved in quite a lot of therapeutic milieu for my young age (not so young I am afraid). Never have I encounter people of such quality. The people that compose the GATLA's faculty are people with a heart as big as the one they reach. They have integrated the sense of the word integrity and have an almost total congruence with the principles they teach. This is rare enough in our field to be mentioned and saluted.

I found this very interesting definition of awareness:

"The ability to "unfocus" from the Person or a group or data we are studying, and to allow a kind of communion to emerge such that we are at one and the same time in touch with our own process and with the other" (connection with oneself and with the other, awareness of our own boundaries) This does appear to be something which people can be trained to do, but there is something paradoxical about this. To try to learn is to try to give-up trying; to concentrate is to concentrate on our non-concentrating: to grasp is it is to let go. The whole trick is to suspend thinking and to stay aware of your experience in the ever-flowing present. It is hard enough to do this kind of thing, when one is just meditating with no distractions, but to do it and act at the same time is doubly hard.
(Rowan, 1981, p.122.)