UKCP has withdrawn from the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy. This is my response and current thoughts.
A memory comes into my awareness:
I am 15 back in my hometown, going to the cinema with some friends. As I'm crossing the road, a car with an England flag in the windscreen pulls up. I throw my arms wide and yell "England" at the driver, who beeps his horn several times in celebration.
That was…
UKCP recently issued a press release urging NICE not to publish its guideline for depression in adults. They provide a bullet pointed list of highlighted concerns, including definitions of depression used, and the focus on Randomised Control Trials to the exclusion of other valuable evidence.
Of particular concern is the proposal to limit first-line treatment to…
One of the core concepts in gestalt psychotherapy is contact. Specifically, gestalt therapists are interested in what happens at the contact boundary; itself an emergent phenomenon that arises wherever self meets other.
In gestalt's founding text, Perls Hefferline & Goodman's Gestalt Therapy (PHG), the self is defined as "the system of contacts at a given time".…
My first encounter with what pre-gestalt Fritz Perls would have recognised as concentration therapy, came in the form of two exercises from a book called Concentration & Meditation. These were exercises designed to lead into wider Buddhist practice, but I was using them to still and focus my otherwise drastically scattered mind.
One of these exercises…
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…
Every theoretical system has its biases, and gestalt is no exception. Along with gestalt's bias towards here and now experience, gestalt also has a bias towards emotion and feeling.
There is a general wisdom in gestalt that emotions are Good Things, and that feeling one's emotions is better than not feeling them. Whilst I agree with…
At the heart of every course of therapy sits a struggle between change and resistance.
Traditionally, the therapist is seen as an agent of change. In this view, it is the therapist's job to help bring about change, be that the explicitly desired change of the client, or an unwanted albeit necessary change.
In gestalt therapy, this…
From time to time, I like to return to first principles to remind myself of what I'm doing, and to what end. I haven't written a "what is gestalt therapy?" post for a while, so here we go.
"What is gestalt psychotherapy?" is really three questions in one. And I think those questions are best approached…
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…
