experiment

Millennial stress: the more things change, the more they stay the same

Bristol Therapist BlogMay 16, 20180Comments

This year, Mental Health Awareness week is themed around stress. As part of this, the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) is running a series of articles zooming in on the idea of millennial stress. A boiled down version of this post appears on the UKCP blog here: What (some) millennials think about millennial stress. As…

The Golden Arrow: how to live a more or less fulfilling life

Bristol Therapist BlogFebruary 22, 20180Comments

The Golden Arrow is a heuristic tool I've been thinking about for a while now to help frame my understanding of what is happening in therapy at a given time. Really, it's an app running off the gestalt cycle api; the theoretical cycle of gestalt formation and destruction chunters away in the background, and gets…

Timing is everything. I repeat, timing is everything!

Bristol Therapist BlogFebruary 18, 20180Comments

the bristol therapist facebook page digest - january 2018 Quite a while back, I got excited and over-committed myself to an in-depth process of chewing over everything I read online that would culminate in a weekly digest. The two main outcomes of that experiment were an inability to get beyond week two, and a consequent reduction…

Chewing digital food in my pocket

Bristol Therapist BlogMay 2, 20170Comments

An enduring metaphor in gestalt therapy is to imagine experiences as food. Whilst this was a concern of the founders back in the 1950s, social media has given emphasis to its appropriateness. We regularly refer to what's appearing in our feeds, mostly without pursuing the hint that the information delivered by our feeds is a…

Resentments and regrets: working with unfinished business.

Bristol Therapist BlogApril 12, 20170Comments

Any incomplete gestalt is unfinished business demanding resolution. Usually this takes the form of unresolved and incompletely expressed feelings. Patients are encouraged to experiment with finishing business which heretofore was unfinished... Gestalt therapists have found that resentments are the most frequent and meaningful unexpressed feeling, and often deal with this with a game in which…

The psychopathology of boredom

Bristol Therapist BlogApril 3, 20172Comments

Psychopathology is a great word. It has three parts: 'psyche' (the soul), 'pathos' (suffering), and the suffix 'ology' (the study of). If you're ever writing about something in the context of its impact on human suffering, you can't go far wrong by dropping in psychopathology (incidentally, given those meanings, that makes the meaning of 'psychopath'…

EU Referendum: 3 gestalt therapy exercises for undecided voters

Bristol Therapist BlogJune 22, 20160Comments

Tomorrow (Thursday 23rd June 2016), millions of us will go to a polling station, and decide the fate of our nation by putting a cross in one of two boxes in the much anticipated EU Referendum. Polling puts the result on a knife-edge, which means that the votes of undecided voters will decide the result. I've…

Dream a little dream of me

Bristol Therapist BlogApril 15, 20110Comments

I’ve been quiet on the blogging front of late. This is because I’ve been directing most of my spare time and energy into a research project exploring the gestalt approach to working with dreams. Not only am I fascinated with the subject matter but I’ve also become somewhat entranced by the research process itself. Lots…