Anti-Oppressive Practice: New windows
A university lecturer I knew some times 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.
That is not something I want to bring into a therapy room.
Field theory
One of the pillars of gestalt therapy is field theory, the understanding that we cannot be separated from the environment we exist within. That environment is social, political, economic, and cultural. It shapes us in ways that are sometimes visible and sometimes not, sometimes chosen and sometimes not.
A gestalt therapist works relationally, alongside you and from your frame of reference. But that doesn't mean collapsing into a purely individualistic view of your experience. To do so would be to ignore the very real, very tangible conditions that shape the quality and trajectory of your life. To pretend the room exists in a vacuum, and it doesn’t!
We can think of field theory as a set of concentric circles. The innermost is your own inner experience: your feelings, your body, your sense of self. The next circle out is the relational: what happens between you and others, including what happens live between us in the room. And the outermost circle is the wider landscape: the political, social, and economic conditions that are always present, always exerting pressure, even when we don't name them.
I am interested in all three circles. I don't think good therapy is possible if we only ever stay in the innermost one.
I am not a nodding dog
There are moments in therapy where what's needed is space, particularly early on when simply being heard can feel like enough. Time to process, an empathic presence, room to breathe. I can offer that.
But I am not a nodding dog. There are moments where naming the wider landscape is not just appropriate but necessary. Where to stay silent about what I'm noticing would be a kind of collusion.
As a working class queer person working in an industry that is often steeped in privilege, I have my own lived experience of when that wider field is present in the room, and when it's being quietly edited out. But I also carry my own privileges as a white, male, British person, and I've worked in spaces where that's been palpable. Working alongside migrants, people of colour, people from diverse backgrounds and genders, I've had to stay honest about what I bring into the room as much as what I notice in it.
This isn't about comparing experiences or positioning myself. It's about staying curious about you, about me, about what's happening between us. There may be times where naming our differences is vital to the work. At others, it's something to hold quietly in mind. The point is that it's never invisible to me.
What this looks like in practice
Anti-oppressive practice doesn't mean turning every session into a political seminar. It doesn't mean imposing my analysis or politics onto your experience, or assuming I know what your background, culture, or identity means to you.
What it means is that you won't need to explain yourself from scratch. Whilst I'm not claiming to know all facets of your experience, I stay curious about how that experience has been shaped by wider structures such as class, race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, disability, economic precarity. I hold those things as real and present, not as background noise to be closed off.
It means I recognise that what brings someone to therapy is rarely just internal. That anxiety, depression, shame, relational difficulty don't just arise in a vacuum. They arise in a field, and the field matters.
It means that your joy is welcome here - be it in new windows, in small material improvements, in the things that matter to your life as you actually live it. And equally, the bigger things: the losses, the injustices, the structural forces that shape what's possible for you. All of it belongs here. Nothing is too small, and nothing is too large.
Who this is for
This way of working is for everyone. But it may feel particularly relevant if you've had the experience of not quite fitting in a therapy room, of sensing that your frame of reference needed translating, or that certain parts of your life weren't quite understood by the person sitting opposite you.
If that resonates, I'd love to hear from you.