Conversations with Clinicians

Friday, August 1, 2025: Revisiting the Importance of Getting Support

Faculty: Sharona Halpern, MA, LMHC, and Lucy Ball, BAHons

In order to be as available as possible to the people in our lives, including to our clients, we need support. In this experiential hour, we will offer you an opportunity to explore what support means to you and how you are doing with getting the support you need. We will hear from each other, our colleagues from around the world, about who and what supports them. We hope you will join us.

Friday, September 5, 2025: Working with "What Is" in the Therapy Session

Faculty: Stuart Simon, LICSW, MCC

Clients often enter therapy focused on who they wish they could be or what they wish they could do. As therapists, we have an opportunity to invite them into a different kind of awareness—one that centers on what they are doing now or “what is”. From a Gestalt perspective, this attention reveals where their energy is currently held. By working with the Paradoxical Theory of Change, we can help clients attend to who they are and what they are doing in the present, which can free the energy needed to become who they want to be or do what they hope to do. 

Friday, October 3, 2025: Exploring Contempt: A Hidden Force Behind Shame 

Faculty: Joseph Melnick, PhD

Much has been written about the topic of shame in therapeutic publications, but little on the topic of contempt, which, when experienced from another, or self-generated, is a primary creator of shame. In this conversation, we will look at how it is to generate and experience this poisonous emotion.

Friday, November 7, 2025: Learning in Our Bodies

Faculty:  Lucy Ball, BAHons, and Nancy Rutkowski, PhD, LCSW, PCC

When our clients come to us, they might not be expecting to learn, but as Gestalt therapists we hope they will. With our help, our clients might learn to change established habits, they might learn new capabilities, and they might expand their range of possibilities. 

Learning that is most sustained and long-lasting occurs when we learn not only cognitively, but also somatically, in our bodies. How does this belief influence our work with our clients?  

• What do we see, ask, or say, as clinicians that support learning in the body? 
• How do we create experiments that provide opportunities for learning? 
• What are we aware of in ourselves when we are working in this way? 

In this session we will invite a conversation about learning in our bodies. We will share our experiences and ask you to share your own. 

Friday, December 5, 2025: Getting Caught in the Story

Faculty: Lucy Ball, BAHons, & Gaynor Sharp, Bsc Hons

When we sit with our clients, we hear their stories. Stories are magnetic to our human, meaning-making brains and we make up our own stories about what our clients share. But what do we miss, or not see, or become seduced by in getting caught in the story? In Gestalt theory we have the notion of working "phenomenologically". This means noticing "what is" without interpretating. It means getting interested in process as distinct from content. It means discerning the difference between what happens and the sense we make of what happens. In this hour, we’ll examine the craft of working phenomenologically. We will share our own experience and help you to share yours with each other.