What Is Gestalt Therapy?
A holistic, relational approach to psychotherapy, and the living tradition at the heart of our four-year training.
Healing Through Meeting
Gestalt therapy is a holistic approach to human functioning that can be applied at any level from a personal life philosophy, to direct application to broader social, political and professional fields of influence. It was originally developed in the early 1950's by a group of avant-garde psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers and educators, as a reaction against the orthodoxy of psychoanalysis of the time, and as a model of human experience that values authentic living and relationship.
With its emphasis on the person-environment interaction, Gestalt therapy has laid the basis for an understanding of psychotherapy as a “healing through meeting”, in which the nature and quality of human contact is paramount. It views authentic, spontaneous and open dialogue, based on adequate awareness, as necessary for developing sustained and nourishing relationships.
Explore the Training Programme
A Dynamic Tradition of Awareness
Since then, it has gradually evolved into a dynamic tradition of practice and theory about human experience and behaviour, which in its clinical application values open and respectful dialogue between client and therapist, focuses particular attention on phenomenology as a means of enhancing awareness, and considers the broader field or environmental context in which we live our lives.
The Gestalt Therapy approach encourages an individual's personal growth through the development of self awareness, and self support for appropriate, spontaneous and creative contact with the environment that we live in. It is an anarchist process, in the sense that it does not conform to preset rules and expectations. Gestalt Therapists do not try to adjust people to a certain way of being, living or behaving. They assist their clients to find ways to live personally meaningful lives.
The learning and application of Gestalt Therapy is always experientially based and experimentally orientated. The Gestalt Therapist does not know what is best for the client, but helps the client explore and discover what that might be. Gestalt Therapists work with what is immediately obvious and available in awareness to the client. From there they proceed in small steps using mini-experiments with novel behaviours, in order to expand awareness. In this way, optimal support for creative and adaptive contact with one's environment becomes possible.
The Principles of Gestalt
Four qualities distinguish Gestalt work, and shape the way we train our practitioners.
Phenomenological
We begin with what is actually present, in the body, the room and awareness, here and now, rather than with theory about the past.
Experiential
Learning is experientially based, using small experiments with novel behaviours to expand awareness and choice.
Relational
Change happens through real, spontaneous, honest contact and dialogue between people, the meeting itself.
Field-Sensitive
A person is understood within the fuller context of their environment and relationships, never as a set of symptoms.
Who Gestalt Therapy Is For
As a way of working with the whole person, Gestalt is applied across a wide range of concerns, from anxiety, depression and trauma to relationship difficulties, life transitions and personal growth. Because it is non-prescriptive, it adapts to each person rather than fitting them to a formula.
The same qualities that make Gestalt powerful in the therapy room make it a rich modality for professionals to train in. It deepens the practice of psychologists and clinical psychologists, social workers, occupational therapists, psychiatrists, general practitioners and counsellors, and offers career-changers a profoundly human path into mental-health work. Community workers, health workers, educators, trainers and managers may also find the training applicable to their own profession.
A Tradition Worth Training In
GTIWA's four-year programme is built to teach this way of working by having you live it first, in the room. You don't simply learn a method, you become a different kind of practitioner.
Ready to Train in Gestalt Therapy?
Explore our four-year programme, or talk with the directors about whether this path is right for you.