I Never Planned to Become a Gestalt Therapist

I started my first level of Gestalt therapy training in December 2015. By that point, I already had a degree in psychology, I was working and seeing clients, I had experience in charitable organizations, and I had completed a large number of trainings and professional programs. I had also trained in a client-centered approach and had some exposure to psychodrama, so I already had a certain sense of myself as a professional and some confidence in my work.

In fact, by then I was already quite saturated with training. Alongside university, I was constantly studying something: psychology, social work, working with teenagers, addiction, sex education, crisis support, teamwork, group work. So I did not feel any strong inner need to start another training program. If anything, I was a little tired of the endless process of learning.

I already knew something about Gestalt therapy, but my understanding of it was fairly superficial. I saw Gestalt as one of many tools a psychologist could use in their work. I did not yet think of it as a complete therapeutic approach, let alone a particular way of understanding a person, contact, relationships, and the therapeutic process itself.

My husband at the time, now my ex-husband, was very supportive of my professional development. Sometimes, I think, even more supportive than I was prepared to be of myself. He also started Gestalt training, but at a different institute, because we quite reasonably decided that being in the same training group was probably not a good idea. You could say he almost signed me up for the first level himself.

I remember being quite skeptical before it started. My thinking was something like, “All right, another course, another forty-fifth training program.”

What I did not realize at all was what I was getting myself into. I thought the first level meant nine months or perhaps a year of training, and I did not give much thought to everything that came after: the second and third levels, intensives, specializations, supervision, personal therapy, written case protocols, and certification. If someone had shown me the entire list at the beginning, I am not sure I would have agreed to it. But at the time I simply thought, “Fine, one year. Why not?”

And quite quickly, I realized that I actually liked it.

A first year of Gestalt that almost perfectly matched my pregnancy

We had a very good group, and I remember genuinely enjoying being there. Despite all my previous experience with trainings and educational programs, this felt different. There was more liveliness, more real contact and involvement, and a lot of practical work, exercises, and discussion of real situations.

I cannot say that I was deeply immersed in the theory at that stage. For me, the first level was probably more of a personal and therapeutic experience than professional training in the strict sense.

There was another important factor as well. When I came to the second meeting of the program, I found out that I was pregnant. The pregnancy was planned, but I was still frightened, and somehow the nine months of my first level of Gestalt training almost completely coincided with the nine months of my pregnancy.

I still have some very funny and warm photographs of myself holding my first-level certificate with a huge pregnant belly. So, in a way, you could say that my child was born into Gestalt.

Of course, being pregnant affected the way I experienced the training. I took more support, contact, connection with the group, and atmosphere from it than theory. But even then, I began to realize that Gestalt was much broader than I had previously imagined.

And although I had only just given birth by the time the first level ended, I already knew that I wanted to continue to the second.

The second level, motherhood, and finding my way back to myself

I came to the second level with what people jokingly called my “mechanical baby.” My actual baby was only a few months old, and during the breaks between training sessions I would sit with a breast pump and express milk. My child stayed at home with my parents or my husband.

Looking back, I think the beginning of the second level was, in its own way, something that helped save me. I had had a difficult birth, a complicated postpartum period, and a difficult personal situation overall. The first months, and in many ways the first years, of motherhood were not easy for me.

The Gestalt group became a place where I could be more than just a mother, more than the person constantly taking care of a small child. I could feel like a separate person again, a psychologist, someone who still belonged to a professional community. For my inner balance, that mattered enormously.

Gradually, I also started returning to work. My child was still very young, but about a year and a half later I began practicing again. At first, it was very little: a few groups, a few sessions a week, sometimes one or two clients. Professionally, it did not feel like enough, but psychologically it meant a great deal to me. It was important to feel that I could be a mother without disappearing as an individual and as a professional.

During the second level, I began to engage much more deeply with Gestalt theory, its concepts, terminology, and the logic of the approach itself. And the more I understood, the more interested I became.

Gradually, I realized that of everything I had studied before, Gestalt had become the most substantial and coherent approach for me. An approach, not simply a collection of techniques.

Why Gestalt suited me

What I really value in Gestalt is that there is no rigid protocol telling the therapist how to move with a client from one predefined point to another. Of course there is theory, there are principles, and there is a framework for understanding the process, but the therapy itself remains alive.

I am drawn to the attention Gestalt gives to contact and to what is happening here and now between therapist and client. Not only to what a person is telling me, but to how they are telling it, how they are present with me, how they move closer or pull away, what happens to their feelings, and how they organize their experience.

Within this approach, I feel freer as a therapist. I can rely on fundamental principles without trying to fit a person into a predetermined structure. Instead, I can pay attention to this particular client, their way of being, their needs, and what is actually happening between us.

I think this sense of aliveness is what became most important to me.

At the same time, my second level of training coincided with some very difficult events in my personal life. I went through my husband's infidelity and our divorce, and I sat my exam at a time when there was a great deal happening internally.

I must have had a lot of determination then, because I continued studying anyway. I attended intensives, stayed in personal therapy, had supervision, and gradually became more involved in the professional Gestalt community.

It was around this period that I first began to truly identify myself as a Gestalt therapist.

After completing the second level, I went straight on to the third. I was gaining more practical experience, I had more clients, and along with that my confidence as a therapist gradually grew.

Why therapists need therapy, supervision, and colleagues

Throughout this time, personal therapy, supervision, training groups, and peer consultation were major sources of support for me.

For a period, we had a small peer consultation group of our own. We talked about our clients, about ourselves as therapists, about what was happening in our work, where we felt lost, where we were missing something, and where, on the contrary, we felt very connected to the process.

I used to call it professional “feather grooming”: a chance to come together regularly, compare notes, reflect, look at your work from a slightly different angle, and receive support from people who genuinely understand what you are talking about.

For me, supervision and peer consultation have never been about finding one correct answer to how I should have worked with a particular client. They are more about remaining thoughtful in my work and not becoming trapped inside my own perspective.

In general, most of the training requirements felt quite natural to me. I have been in therapy myself, with breaks, since around the age of fifteen, when the first psychologists and therapists appeared in my life. Over time, therapy stopped being simply a professional requirement or something temporary and became part of my life.

I like this way of looking at myself, other people, relationships, and the way we live in general. So personal therapy, supervision, groups, intensives, and specializations never felt like boxes I simply had to tick in order to receive a certificate.

The biggest obstacle turned out to be something completely different: the written case protocols.

Protocols, certification, and learning to accept my imperfections

Writing protocols and case studies became a real stumbling block for me. Because of them, my certification process took about five years longer than it might have, and I certainly cannot say that I spent all of that time peacefully accepting it as “part of my unique journey.”

I went through shame, disappointment, apathy, and anger at myself. I looked at people who had completed the process long before me and thought that they had moved on while I was somehow still stuck in the same place.

Then I would return to the protocols again, sit down with old session records, and look at my work. Only much later was I able to see something in that delay beyond the fact that it was a delay.

If I had analyzed the protocols immediately during training, it would undoubtedly have been useful and might have helped me develop professionally more quickly. But because I returned to them years later, I gained a different opportunity: I could see myself over time.

I can now look at how I conducted sessions then, what I relied on, where I rushed, where I lost my way, where I tried too hard to help, and where I was not yet able to hold the process well enough. And I can compare all of that with the way I work now.

That turned out to be surprisingly valuable because I could literally see my own professional growth.

At the beginning of my practice, I had an enormous number of expectations of myself. I wanted to be the best therapist, to do everything correctly, to understand the client well, ask the right question at exactly the right time, and preferably never make mistakes.

Now I can see how much tension that created. When part of your attention is constantly occupied by the question, “Am I doing this well enough?”, it does not exactly help you stay present with the real person sitting in front of you.

My path, with all its mistakes, delays, shame, and returns, gradually helped me accept my own imperfections as a therapist. And strangely enough, it was only then that my professional position became much more solid.

I no longer try to be a perfect therapist. What matters more to me is being a good-enough therapist: alive, attentive, engaged, able to see the process, tolerate uncertainty, and return to contact when we lose it.

What gives this profession meaning for me

Another very powerful experience during my training was the death of someone who had been very important to our professional community. It affected me not only as a student or therapist, but simply as a person.

I saw how many people grieved, how many remembered this person, and how many continued to remember them after their death. It made me think a great deal about the fact that being a therapist is not only about a profession, a method, training hours, or certification. It is also about the way we affect other people's lives.

I do not mean this in some grandiose sense of “changing someone's life.” I do not believe a therapist should remake a person or lead them toward some supposedly correct version of themselves.

But if, after our work together, someone feels even a little lighter, a little clearer, or a little more alive, then there is meaning in that for me.

Even if my contribution to a person's life is a hypothetical 0.01%, sometimes that is enough.

That experience made something very clear to me: a person can continue to be present in other people's lives through the way they once related to them, what they taught them, what they gave them, or how they supported them. For me, that became part of the answer to why I choose this profession at all.

So when did I actually become a Gestalt therapist?

Looking back now, I find it difficult to name one specific moment when it happened. It was certainly not the day I received a particular document, and it was not one particular exam.

First there was the first level, which I entered almost by accident, skeptical and already tired of studying. Then came pregnancy, the birth of my child, a difficult beginning to motherhood, and the second level, which became an important source of support. After that came personal crises, divorce, returning to professional life, the third level, clients, personal therapy, supervision, peer consultation, intensives, and a great deal of practice.

There were also the protocols that I could not finish for years, the shame around that, and many returns to something I had once put aside.

For the past several years, I have worked specifically within the Gestalt approach, and that is still where I see myself professionally. At the moment, I have no desire to move into another method or search for a different main professional identity. On the contrary, I want to continue going deeper into Gestalt, developing my presence and sensitivity, and becoming better at seeing not only the content of what a client tells me, but the process itself: how they organize their experience, what happens between us, where contact emerges, and where it gets interrupted.

Sometimes I think that my own path into Gestalt turned out to be quite Gestalt-like. It was not smooth or beautifully organized, with every stage of the training completed neatly and on time. There were interruptions, periods when I lost energy, delays, crises, new attempts, searching for support, and returning.

So today I can say that I became a Gestalt therapist not only through training, certificates, or the number of hours I completed. I became one through personal therapy, groups, supervision, clients, colleagues, my own crises, mistakes, and experience.

And probably also through the fact that, at many different points in my life, I kept choosing this profession again.