This piece is an elegy for my shame, and a tribute to the work of all my clients enlightening themselves to the consequences of living with structured-in shame. I suggest that shame is not the evil per se - the problem (as with money) is the fact that shame is not shared out equally. Some people end up holding more than their fair share - because we’re queer, racially marginalised, and often due to unprocessed intergenerational trauma.
Here I have a go at describing how I use two-chair work in my gestalt practice. I write that: “Two chair work functions as a support for the person doing intra-subjective work (‘parts work’ if you like), and yet what is often missed by the non-gestaltist using two chair work as a ‘technique’, is the degree to which it primarily functions as an adjunct to and extension of the broader work of bringing relationality to the client’s process. The motivator for my suggesting two-chair work in a session often comes from my wondering “how do ‘I’ engage this particular part of my client in a relational dance?”
In this writing I offer a take on the process by which change happens in therapy, and in particular my understanding of what in Gestalt therapy gets called the “Fertile Void”. This is the place minus ‘old coping mechanisms’, old patterns and scripts, where it is almost intolerable to be… And yet through hanging out here, whilst change may seem barely discernible at first, over time our worlds and ourselves are unrecognisably transformed.
Here I speculate about the role that early developmental themes and particularly the emotion of shame plays in structuring our core sexual urges. I write that “When working therapeutically with kinks, typically the need is to move away from the particularity of the kink itself, and instead to give more attention to the role it plays in structuring possibilities for intimacy.”
“From this vantage youth and age seem like apples and pears – youth is what you’re given; age is what becomes possible once you’ve learned how to give to yourself. For most of us this most precious lesson is hard won… And to return to the guru’s question, most people are unable to see the gifts of age until we have lost those of youth. It’s only when faced with our youth, beauty, innocence and bodily capacities beginning to slip away that we are confronted with the need to side with ourselves, and to cut through all the bullshit.”
A fudge of accountability underpinning public services leads to a paradigm where no-one can be ultimately held accountable. This leads to a derogation of individual conscience when it comes to failure of public services to meet individual needs. No one takes responsibility. In mental health as in other service areas this lends itself to standardised services that meet the individual needs of no-one. The public concern for equity (of access if not outcome) leads to a paradoxical state of affairs where no-one is likely to be getting very much of what they need. Those who feel angered by this state of affairs need to be speaking out.
This is my first stab at a piece exploring the intersection between sexual identities that can at first glance appear to play into ‘old fashioned’ gender or race paradigms, and anti-oppression agendas. It narrates some of my experience of bringing aspects of BDSM into contact with Black people and with women, these communities holding different bodies of oppressive experience. I point the way to a holding of BDSM such that its insights deepen awareness and experience of real-world oppression. I see this as a contribution to dialogues around anti-oppression.
This is a part of me that does not often see the light of day. Although superficially different from therapy in all sorts of ways, from the intention behind it to the nature of power differences, ultimately whether you’re paying for sex or for therapy, you are inviting a stranger into your life space for a finite period, and according to some agreed protocols. The wonders that can come from the intimate chance meetings of sex work stand in comparable profundity to those that I experience via therapy.
“Why would anyone chose sanely to devote their life to working with those in agonising trauma and pain?” This was the question posed by my then therapist during my training, and which still gives me pause for thought. In this article I count both the exquisite gifts of practicing therapy alongside my difficulty assimilating the pain. I conclude that we all have our growth paths and practicing therapy currently happens to be mine. And being on this path I find it hard to envisage a different path.
This feels a really painful piece of writing. I am trying to get to grips with collective dynamics - such as racism, capitalism, patriarchy - as manifestations of collective trauma patterns. The nature of traumatised experience is that we act out a pattern - a destiny - in blindness to the impact of our following this trajectory on other people, and on the planet. There is not always parity of suffering across different people affected by collective trauma. Agency comes from avoiding ‘victimhood’ - affording dignity to our own hurts, so we become able to see the hurts of others, and the ways we may be oppressing others.
What do we do in gestalt therapy… How does it work? Gestalt therapy proposes that I both create my world, and am subjected to it (a sense of an external world that I cannot change)… The act of creating my world involves a synthesis - pre-ceding my coming into awareness of myself in the situation. It is this ‘act’ of synthesising, that gestalt therapy takes as its material. For new people coming to therapy it is a subtle sell “The world you inhabit limits you, so let’s work together to look at how you are creating your world, and in-so-doing your world changes.” When we release energy in ‘holding patterns’ (tension) we face the world with maximum energy/presence, and no longer experience ourselves in subjection to it.
Feelings/emotions exist in us as manifestation of the manner in which the world (particularly significant others) moves in us. One way of seeing therapy is the experience of allowing the “other” to move in us once again. As therapist I can facilitate this by allowing the client to move in me. And so the client gets to experience the world moving in relation to them once again, and is then able to take up their part in the reciprocal dance of feeling. For people who have experienced trauma by neglect, they can arrive in therapy with the experience of feeling very little. In this article I describe the experience of supporting a resensitising to feelings as a (re)-learning how to move again in relation to another.
I have written this starter guide for fellow therapists as inspiration for the journey of setting up in private practice. The approach that will work for any therapist is individual and unique. If you are interested in support around developing your personal presence and marketing your practice I am running a co-learning group for newly qualified therapists, and those looking to give their practice a boost, during 2025.
In this writing I draw out the similarity between trauma and great art in that both hold meanings that cannot be expressed through conventional language. People seek out therapy because language is not adequate to their experience. As therapists working with trauma we learn to feel into, and to move anew with pain that cannot be languaged via the paucity of the 2D world.
Here I share a bit about my discovery of gestalt therapy and how it first moved me. The radical challenge of gestalt is in the way it can destabilise rooted and fixed ideas of who we are. It offers a version of the self as always in relationship with an ‘other’ - the self as present centred, and thus as always ‘emergent’ of its context. I might argue the aim of therapy is to invite people’s interest beyond the past ‘fixed’ self that cannot be changed, towards this ever imminent experience of dancing with ‘other’ in the present.
Gestalt therapy privileges experience in the here and now. In this article I describe my work as endeavouring to narrow the gap between what is happening in the therapy space and the various ways this is languaged and attended to. I go on to make a distinction between two domains of experiencing a person coming to therapy is typically working on - the more receptive functions that allow us to take in the world, and the more active & boundary policing functions that keep us safe and enable us to get our needs met, making impact on the world.
This is a more academic article written principally as provocation and support to debate with an audience of fellow gestalt practitioners and trainees in mind. I intend to create some clear water between what each of these lineages brings to the practice of gestalt therapy, and the way I understand gestalt therapy. Gestalt therapy is often defined as the conjunction of these three disciplines or bodies of knowledge, and I believe this obscures as much as it enlightens. Jettisoning them as constituent theory allows for a gestalt therapy closer to indigenous ways of knowing.
This post looks at my work with kinky clients - those drawn to BDSM, fetish and kink. At one time I would have been concerned about putting a post about BDSM/kink “out there”. I still worry about my work being pigeon-holed, or that it will intersect negatively with other domains of work I am involved in. The fact is however that my kink work is very much apiece with all the work I do, inviting awareness to and being willing to talk about arenas of life that exert their power over us via repression.
My inspiration for this writing comes from the ubiquitous nature of self-hatred among my clients. Also my own, and also that of my friends and colleagues who are therapists, and training to be therapists, sometimes enduring after years of therapy. Self-hating is not superficial, nor is it a correlate of psychological immaturity. Its roots are often deep and its effects visceral.
My aim in these writing ‘outtakes’ is to convey a sense of what I am doing when I am practicing gestalt therapy that can be intuitively understood by the lay-person and potential therapy client. I find that writing about therapy invites a kind of poetic expression, replete with metaphors - and in finding language adequate to the task, I begin to discover in new ways what I do. Here I convey my experience of how the work of trauma therapy is essentially that of building a relationship, an embodied dialogue that starts with the meeting of two nervous systems.
This is a meditation on the way the work of therapy is often an encounter with the apparently unsupportable. I end up talking about my relationship with my father.
“As humans we are fundamentally a part of each other, and yet in the particular human society we happen to live, most of us have had to amputate parts or ourselves as the cost of going on living. I would contend that to become adult is to be able to hold in mind the truth of both parts of this statement. To allow that human life here as we know it is a rending of what is sacred; the place that another has within me. I might venture that to have accepted this is to have accepted life, with the possibility that, once we accept this, a kind of compromised living becomes possible.”
In this short article I address an issue close to my heart… My belief that it is impossible to separate working therapeutically with individuals from wider social change work that raises awareness around unjust and oppressive systems. Importantly this does not mean foisting my own political agenda onto my clients… Rather it involves drawing from an understanding of the aetiology of mental ill health that is reflective and derivative of wider social forces… Sometimes the work with individual clients is to support their awareness of the social ‘situatedness’ of their distress.
Here I discuss the philosophical position underpinning gestalt therapy, which proposes a break from a centuries old tradition of European philosophy that posits separations between mind/body, perceiver and perceived. Instead gestalt proposes that experience/ing is primary and the separation into “I-not I” is derivative of and emergent of experience. This different view lends itself to a more visceral form of living - meeting each moment as a new experience in which I will find myself anew.
This piece of writing isn’t so much about therapy. Here I am musing on implications of gestalt therapy theory - which is really a way of seeing and understanding our world… On the nature of creation, the universe and humanity’s place in it. Beyond addressing imminent suffering, gestalt therapy can help people cultivate a personal understanding of what the world is like. Mine helps me to face the pain of living in the world.
When I set up in private practice I did not expect so many straight men to seek me out. Writing about sex and gender is a delicate matter and feels controversial. Whilst acknowledging the beauty and challenges inherent in all gender expressions and sexualities, I want to pay particular homage here to the work of straight men - and acknowledge the fierce qualities of integrity and love that straight men bear when seeking out therapy, and the gifts of walking the path alongside them.
New Gestalt Voices is a community for people newer to gestalt psychotherapy and other applications of gestalt. We publish a twice yearly journal and offer networking and development opportunities.
The UK’s largest independent organisation working with gender and sexual diversity clients. Links to resources for LGBTQI clients.
A citizen think tank working to create a world where everyone matters. Publications and a raft of ideas on welfare state reform, prioritising people with disabilities and others hardest hit by recent reforms.
A network of psychotherapists and counsellors and people accessing therapy who see the process of engaging with systemic inequalities as integral to personal growth and healing from trauma
I am a Friend member of BAATN (Black African and Asian Therapy Network), the UK’s largest independent organisation to specialise in working psychologically, informed by an understanding of intersectionality, with people who identify as Black, African, South Asian and Caribbean.