Anti-Oppressive Practice: New windows
A university lecturer I knew some years ago once mocked a student's excitement that her family were getting new windows in their council flat. The derision was casual, almost unconscious. Her joy, her pride in something that meant real material improvement in her home and her life, was somehow inappropriate to him. Misplaced. Too small.
I've thought about that moment a lot nearly twenty years since. What it revealed wasn't just snobbery, it was a complete failure to notice the wider field. An inability, or an unwillingness, to hold someone else's reality alongside his own.
What is Gestalt therapy?
I am not a Gestalt purist. But as the modality in which I've trained, it shapes how I work and how I think about what happens in the room.
People often come to me saying they have good self-awareness. They want to understand more, the reasons, the whys. I don't judge that. But I often notice something is out of awareness. The trouble with understanding alone is that it can send us up into our heads. We end up analysing our experiences, stacking more interpretation on top of interpretation, and there's a limit to what we gain from that.
Counselling in Croydon: A diverse borough, and why it matters
Croydon doesn't always get the recognition it deserves. London's poor cousin, people say - dismissed, overlooked, derided in favour of more fashionable parts of the city. The more contact I have with it, the harder I find that to take. It doesn't match my experience of the place, and it shortchanges something genuinely vibrant and dynamic about Croydon.
On making contact
I'm on the train, phone in hand. The carriage is full but somehow also empty. The person opposite me is on FaceTime, half-present, their gaze moving between the screen and the middle distance. The person at the ticket office serves me whilst scrolling - and I notice, as they do, that I'm doing exactly the same thing. We are both somewhere else. I wonder about these passing moments - these brief, unremarkable contacts between strangers - and what happens to them when attention is already somewhere else. Including mine.
What is LGBTQ+ affirming therapy?
To affirm means to state something publicly and positively as a fact - to express strong support. It comes from the Latin affirmare: literally, to make firm.
In the context of LGBTQ+ affirming therapy, that word carries weight.
On putting things down
The facilitator caught in a moment of conflict. Her bracelets jangling. She takes a moment and says, caught up in the back and forth of a charge between two people: I'm not so good with speed.
The room softens. Something releases.
The part that rushes to know
I'm sitting at my desk, restless and shifting, trying to write about gestalt therapy, and I notice I keep jumping ahead. I want to already have written the perfect post, knowing full well it doesn't exist. The perfect introduction that somehow captures my voice. I'm jumping ahead for the conclusion, the neat summary, the thing that will make me sound like I know what I'm doing.