Gestalt Therapy / Trauma Integration Workshops

 
 

Gestalt Therapy Field Theory & Trauma Integration: Experiential Learning and Hands-on Practice

 

I'm offering a 6 x 3hrs online seminar series (Saturdays 3pm CET) exploring a gestalt therapy/trauma integration, drawing on ideas from my first two books. Therapy for Perverts et al (2025), and Standing on the Edge of the World (2026 forthcoming). I'm proposing a heavily discounted first series (£100) in order to workshop some of the books' principal ideas (max 10 people). [9th Jan, 23rd Jan, 6th Feb, 20st Feb, 6th March, 20th March]

Join me if you live with developmental trauma, if your practice relates to trauma or if you are a trauma expert and are looking for a new lens. Some of the ideas presented are counter to the ways we are taught to think: I will attempt to convey these in simple language.

You will get:

An integration of trauma that is intuitive, equalising and will support you in your practice.

  • A shift in the tectonic plates of your self-organisation.

  • Excitement from exposure to new ideas.

  • Personal confidence in relation to trauma practice – and experience of meeting others from one’s own trauma patterns.

  • A group experience.

Much therapy theory/trauma training is individuating and premised on a normativity that privileges a supposed trauma-less state. My workshops will draw the curtains back on the neat fiction of episodic trauma, exposing a dynamic reality whereby trauma is understood as part of the bedrock of human experiencing.

 

You will learn why what some of you have been taught in your therapy/trauma training needs revisiting:

 

  • The individuating impulse that assumes the personal integrity of the individual-as-unit (organism/environment) gives way to a relational hermeneutics whereby individual experience is constituted relative to a socialised domain of meaning.

  • Trauma is when our capacity to ‘gestalt’ (make meaning) of wholes of experience breaks down – due to limited data, or relational support.

  • A phenomenological/field-theoretical rendering of the symptomatology of trauma relative to our being in space-time destabilises concepts that presume a shared background such as “present moment”, and “contact boundary”.  How about there is no present moment until we create one?

  • Understanding trauma as a “field phenomenon” – i.e. looking beyond the individual to the context in which trauma arises, and learning how our tendency to see trauma as a property of individuals, rather than of systems, results in our “doing”/perpetuating of trauma.

  • Nervous system activation might be seen as a mediator between the possibilities of different ways of organising within a live field – rather than as a re-experiencing of a prior trauma, or indeed as designating the trauma itself. A relatively more settled nervous system then becomes a privilege rather than an indication that one necessarily carries less trauma.

  • Learning how to work with my trauma from your trauma.

 

Workshops will include:

  • Presentation and discussion of theoretical material – bringing insights from hermeneutics, phenomenology and quantum physics to bear on trauma phenomena.

  • Exercises/experiments to integrate learning

  • Groupwork to support individual and collective process

  • Skills practice to situate learning.

[18hrs CPD / CE credits]

9th Jan, A Gestalt Therapy Integration of Trauma, the basics

23rd Jan, The therapist as a relational foil – bringing the world back for our clients/ and re-starting the client’s meaning-making process

6th Feb, Trauma as a field phenomenon /symptomatology of trauma. Working with trauma from a field perspective.

 20st Feb, Nervous system activation in therapy and the “Two funnel” model of trauma work.

6th March, Integration of therapist trauma into therapeutic approach – how do our patterns show up?

20th March, Understanding trauma as a site of privilege/oppression.