The Bristol Therapist

03/09/2025

It's been a year of big change for me and Year of the Snake has offered a useful metaphor for navigating the personal impact of it; particularly the idea of shedding.

Snakes shed their skin in recurring cycles of ecdysis as they grow. In gestalt terms, the snake's old skin could be seen as a fixed gestalt, all the creative adjustments one has made that no longer hold vitality. Like the snake's old skin, they are old and dry, feeling tight and restrictive around the vibrant new skin that has developed within, a new way of being restricted by what has been outgrown.

The cyclical nature of this process is such that any significant development of self will mean revisiting old wounds and familiar patterns. This often feels like regression, and comes with the exclamation "why am I back here again?".

The truth is, old wounds and deep patterns don't go away; they reconfigure as the self reconfigures. Their meaning changes, sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically. And every shedding opens up a window of opportunity to draw wisdom and learning as what was old and known becomes for a while new and unknown.

And as essential and fruitful as this may be, it can also be painful, frustrating, and strange. So I offer this poem for anyone having a bit of a moment as you peel away a layer of your own outgrown self.

I see you.



Image credit: snakeskin by April Miller (upsidedownapril, Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/prilmill/)
Shared under creative commons: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en

30/08/2025

"jade is praised as precious,
but its strength is being stone"
- Lao Tzu

This is from Ursula K Le Guin's rendition ("this is a rendition, not a translation") of the Tao Te Ching, the foundational work of Taoism, and comes from the 39th verse, Integrity.

This is one of those verses that gets to the heart of the Tao Te Ching for me. It is a book about the Way and it's nature (Te, usually translated as virtue, and rendered by Le Guin as power). Tao is the Way, and Te is how you recognise the Way in experience.

In this context, jade is a great analogy because it zeroes in on the relationship between Te and Tao. The preciousness of jade (its te) emerges from its strength as stone (its tao).

This te/tao relationship is setup earlier in the verse:

"Heaven through its wholeness is pure;
earth through its wholeness is steady;
spirit through its wholeness is potent"

Pure, steady & potent are emergent effects of the wholeness of heaven, earth & spirit. Te emerges from Tao, "their wholeness makes them what they are". And without that wholeness, the emergent effect collapses, "without what makes it pure, heaven would disintegrate".

For me, this speaks to the heart of gestalt, the idea of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, recognisable by its emergent properties, but ultimately an emergent effect of the wholeness of those parts. All of which speaks to me of what it means to practice therapy.

In the style of Lao Tzu I might say:

"Therapy through its wholeness is healing,
without what makes it healing, therapy would harm"

So what gives therapy the Te of healing? What is its Tao? I would say:

"Therapists are praised as healers,
but their skill is being there"

Being there means showing up every session to do the work; it's consistency, availability, and presence. Healing in a therapeutic sense is the emergent effect of the consistent dedication to being available to another person.

27/08/2025

These head sculptures are from .merrett’s Mood States exhibition at .

Dotted around Glenside’s regular mental health care collection showing the history of care in the Victorian Asylum, each sculpture gives pause to consider mood through metaphorical expression.

You can also paint a model brain to express your own mental health. Though the paints were gone by the time I got there so I took a blank brain home to paint in private… which was kind of apropos on reflection!

The final exhibition date is Saturday 30th August, 10am to 1pm, tickets via eventbrite.

15/06/2025

I’m sitting with the complexity of Father’s Day. For me, its layers include:

Celebrating my relationship with my son, which is full of joy and tenderness. Father’s day makes me step back and remember how big an influence I am in his life, which can be dizzying sometimes.

Familiar feelings of grief around my own father. A strange double loss; I knew about him but for complex family reasons never knew him & he died before I got the chance.

Acknowledging my discomfort with father’s day being rooted in my experiences with toxic masculinity & my own gender identity. I’m kind of in the process of quiet quitting manhood, so the father label sits more uneasily than usual.

Gestalt therapy is about making space to explore the layers of context that make experience meaningful. These are my most prominent layers this father’s day. I’d love to hear about yours.

Let me know in the comments, or by dm if it feels too raw.

25/04/2025

"An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour"
Viktor E. Frankl; Man's Search for Meaning

I love how obvious this is!

And yet this insight poses a significant challenge to therapeutic models that seek to explain present behaviour by past experiences. Systemic oppressions become personal pathologies, and the frog that notices the water getting hot gets sedated.

A good way of navigating this is to emphasise context. What is the relationship between the behaviour in question (figure) and the situation it arises in (ground)? Meaning emerges from this interplay between figure and ground, and allows us to make contact with the abnormal situation.



{image of Frankl taken from wikimedia & shared under creative commons https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Viktor_Frankl2.jpg}

21/04/2025

SIGN & SHARE! A letter to Government expressing concern about the UK Supreme Court’s recent ruling that defines "s*x" as biological s*x only in the Equality Act & Baroness Falkner’s subsequent comments.

Please also read the notes at the top of Philippa's letter for more information about how the campaign is coming together (things are moving fast!) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QPXsrIehAq_FenQoi8vVUXDOynpcNpKSmZDFuFh6x44/edit?tab=t.0 Philippa's letter expresses deep concern about the recent U...

19/04/2025

Good crowd for today’s rally in response to the UK Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this week. Was good to hear trans voices & from trans-led grassroots organisations. Also good to hear Bristol Central MP calling on cis allies to show support.

As therapists, it’s important we understand the social power structures that we and our clients live within. This is the political work of personal therapy; to acknowledge the reality of these structures and to deconstruct them. Not as a substitute for collective action, but as a complement to it.

🏳️‍⚧️

17/04/2025

Yesterday’s ruling was a gut punch to trans rights in the UK & the exclusion of trans inclusive perspectives from the court’s deliberations was particularly unfair and insidious.

Along with the rest of TACTT, I stand in solidarity with my trans siblings. ✊🏻🏳️‍⚧️❤️

We are devastated and enraged by yesterday's supreme court ruling which ruled that trans women are not included in the definition of women in the Equality Act.

As therapists, we are seeing the fear and desperation this ruling - and the wider context of increasing hostility towards trans people both in the UK and the USA - is having for our trans, non-binary, q***r and gender nonconforming clients.

Please take care of yourselves and one another. These are scary times, but there are also many, many of us who will stand against hate and bigotry.

Trans and non-binary people know who we are, and no ruling can change that.

TACTT will continue to oppose transphobia and to work in solidarity with other groups to push for trans rights. If you are a therapist who opposes transphobia, join us. Link in bio.

🏳️‍⚧️

19/03/2025

This is Cthulu. It’s been in my therapy room for about 2.5 years now & recently went on a growth spurt.

One of the concepts I draw on in my work is Carl Rogers’ core conditions. In a gestalt context, I understand these to describe a way of developing a fertile ground so that the figures of interest a client needs to attend to can emerge.

I’m not sure what it says about my practice that I’ve created the conditions needed for an eldritch horror to bloom but I’ll take it!

13/05/2024

"Self-sabotage or self-protection?"

Self-sabotage is an interesting example of therapy speak that has entered everyday use. I think it's also been picked up by a lot of people's inner critics as a way of legitimising critical self-talk. Talking about ways in which you sabotage yourself might just be another way of your inner critic chastising you. In gestalt terms, you could be stuck in a topdog/underdog conflict

When clients talk a lot about self-sabotage, I offer an experiment: what if you reframed this self-sabotage as self-protection? Just make some I statements about how you self-sabotage ("I self-sabotage by ....") and switch out self-sabotage for self-protection. Importantly, pay attention to how you respond to yourself when you make the self-protection statement.

This doesn't mean you're making excuses for not changing behaviour that needs to change. In fact, you'll usually find it easier to change behaviour when you understand its function than when you attack yourself for doing it in the first place.



{background image of humanoid figures created by Canva's AI}

19/04/2024

I wanted to put on record my thoughts about what is going on at UKCP in relation to conversion therapy and the tacit endorsement of gender critical views. Silence after all is often taken as assent, and a gestalt therapist has no business being confluent with injustice. So here is my thinking at this time.

UKCP has withdrawn from the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy. This is my response and current thoughts.

17/04/2024

"commitment is easiest when the limitations are imposed by the actual circumstances... if you can’t or won’t take a way out, the commitment to what is possible within the confinement is life saving and life enhancing, even until death" - Laura Perls (Living at the Boundary)

Laura Perls on commitment is interesting and can be a bit of a struggle I think. Within the context of Gestalt, the idea here is to accept the current situation in order to navigate it most effectively. Which can lead us into the thorny territory of potentially arguing for the acceptance of what is unacceptable. Because why should I? Surely if I accept a situation of injustice, I collude with it and become part of the problem.

Well not quite.

Whilst, "commitment to what is possible within the confinement", does require accepting the existential facts of the situation, it does not mean endorsing them. This is the Gestalt observation that in order to deal effectively with their current situation, a person must be able to orient themselves. And orientation depends on being able to make contact with what actually is.

No one ever escaped prison by imagining they were already free.