Every psychotherapist has had to learn how to do what he or she does when they practice psychotherapy.

These days, no one just hangs out a "shingle" and starts giving advice without running into regulatory bodies tasked with the job of attending to public safety. Consequently, those who aspire to teach people how to become psychotherapists must put together credible training programmes.

Those training programmes usually stress to their students the importance of consulting current research literature so as to ascertain best practices. However, one interesting fact is that until recently there has been a paucity of research conducted to discover what makes for the best kind of training itself.

In a study by Fauth, Gates, Vinca et al that appeared in a 2007 issue of the journal Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, those writers asserted that traditional psychotherapy training practices that emphasise "didactic teaching methods, adherence to manual-guided techniques, and/or application of theory to clinical work via supervised training cases, do not durably improve the effectiveness of psychotherapists."

They further claimed that although "such trainings tend to demonstrably improve adherence to the psychotherapy model at hand, they do not enhance psychotherapist competence or effectiveness beyond the training period itself."

Pointing to the training principles explicated by noted scholars such as Hans Strupp and Jeffrey Binder, or Jeremy Safran and Chris Muran, they suggested that "psychotherapy training should focus on: (a) a limited number of 'big ideas' and (b) psychotherapist metacognitive skill development via experiential practice".

Furthermore, they stated that high levels of structure in the training programme were helpful to trainees and they pointed to a study by Safran, Muran, Samstag and Winston that showed that "experiential training emphasising experiential self-awareness and mindfulness practices were more successful than their traditionally trained counterparts in working with treatment resistant personality disorder patients¿" (they defined "mindfulness" as a moment-to-moment awareness and acceptance of one's own experience).

I remember the doctoral programme in which I received part of my formal education. It adhered to the scientist-practitioner model developed at a conference for education in graduate study that was held in Boulder, Colorado, USA in 1949. That model has remained a guiding factor in the training of psychotherapists to this day. It's been debated, but never rejected.

Unfortunately, the ways in which it has been attempted, as the studies above indicate, leave room for improvement. Again, it's ironic that in a day in which evidence-based practice is increasingly demanded, training of psychotherapists based on good evidence lags behind. Meanwhile, operating under the radar screen for most people, gestalt therapists have been training people for decades in their various gestalt therapy training institutes.

These institutes developed and spread worldwide during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s. They operate in precisely the ways that Fauth, Gates, Vinca et al indicate more helpful training ought to be conducted.

That is, the big ideas are associated with the four main tenets of gestalt therapy theory and the method of training is largely experiential, with a decided emphasis on what is now days called "mindfulness," but what every trained gestalt therapist would recognise is "gestalt 101"-an attention to awareness, on many levels.

This point is particularly relevant to people living in Bermuda, where going away to receive post-graduate quality training is the norm. The Gestalt Training Institute of Bermuda (www.gtib.org) was recently created in order to provide Bermudians, and others interested in the programme offered here, a chance to acquire quality training that can be applied to both the clinical and organisational domains.

The training programme is being designed to follow the structures inherent to the European Association for Gestalt Therapy (EAGT) and that will eventually permit trainees to acquire certification to practice in the EU. The core faculty will be drawn from experienced trainers in the UK, Australia, the USA and Sweden.

These people have written, presented at conferences, and trained internationally. This training expertise will also be directed toward ad hoc and topical issues relevant to various sectors of the business and private community here in Bermuda.

These things have been on my mind lately for two reasons: I'm editing a book that includes a chapter on the training of psychotherapists, and I'm the director of the Gestalt Training Institute of Bermuda.

I've been through six years of post-graduate level training of the kind we intend to bring to Bermuda, and I know that that will mean building relationships with people on a whole different level. Training in gestalt theory and practices, whether that be for a clinical or an organisational application, is a mentoring relationship.

As I look down the road ahead, I muse. Who will be coming through the door? What will be the journey we embark upon together? How will our lives affect one another?

For me, then, this subject of training and best practices in training is not purely academic.