I was thinking about training this morning. We have created this training institute (the Gestalt Training Institute of Bermuda, www.gtib.org), and we'll be training people in executive coaching and leadership, but we are also conducting community workshops and will be training people in the clinical skills of gestalt therapy. It's all exciting, and it certainly keeps us busy, but I got thinking about training itself.

Training is not just about going off to the university and getting a diploma. It certainly helps to attend a quality institution and to complete an accredited programme of study. That is one reason we've partnered with the Academy of Executive Coaching to bring a programme that is certified by the International Coach Federation to the Island, but training is not just about completing a course of study. Training, to me, is the ongoing experience of learning by doing, especially while being guided by an experienced and nurturing "elder" in whatever discipline one pursues.

You cannot simply read a book, pass a test, and consider yourself trained. That can qualify as a form of education, but it doesn't compare to training, and with regard to psychotherapy, it does not ensure that someone is a good psychotherapist. In an article published by the American Psychological Association in 2007, James Fauth, Sarah Gates, Maria Vinca, and their colleagues asserted that traditional psychotherapy training practices emphasising 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 pointed to scholarship indicating that psychotherapy training should focus on:

(a) a limited number of 'big ideas' and

(b) psychotherapist meta-cognitive skill development via experiential practice.

They further asserted that high levels of structure in the training programme were helpful to trainees and they pointed to a study by respected researchers showing that experiential training emphasising experiential self-awareness and mindfulness practices was more successful than traditionally trained counterparts in working with treatment resistant personality disorder patients. Mindfulness in this case can be understood as a moment-to-moment awareness and acceptance of one's own experience.

Gestalt therapy was one of the first clinical approaches to assimilate Buddhist mindfulness and acceptance ideas into the core of its approach. Historically, this took place starting about 1951, and it has been kept and developed ever since. Today, with increasing excitement, other clinical approaches like cognitive behavioural therapy, have attempted to adopt these techniques as well.

The point here is that the training in question, the kind that Fauth, Gates, Vinca and their colleagues advocated, is precisely the way gestalt therapists are trained, and have been trained for decades. In my training group for instance…were massage therapists and body workers, one shamanistic counsellor, a psychiatrist, several social workers, a nurse, several licensed professional counsellors, a college professor, some students like myself, and one conductor of a national philharmonic orchestra.

In gestalt training groups it is common for trainees to do actual pieces of personal work for when the trainees practice the experiential learning referred to above they do not play a role and assume an "as if" posture. No one says, "Now I'll be a depressed person and you can practice working with a depressed person". Rather, one trainee works as client and the other as therapist for about a 20- to 30-minute piece of work, and it is around the real figures of interest, the real issues in the trainee's life who is assuming the place of the client. When the piece of in situ work is done, the other trainees typically offer the impact that had on them so that those working can feel supported, and then the training group considers and discusses that piece of work so that they might all learn from it. The purpose of such an experience is so that people might learn what gestalt therapy feels like. Just as learning a foreign language is often enhanced by immersion in an environment dominated by that language, these experiential pieces of gestalt work, and the theoretical and supervisory debriefing that follows provides for a kind of immersion into the world of gestalt therapy.

Because gestalt therapy is what it is, this kind of experiential learning is a must. It is not enough to read about gestalt therapy or even to discuss it with colleagues. One must gain a "feel" for it. Here I am reminded of Schleiermacher's construct of feeling in reference to religious experience. He was against the hyper rational approach that created dry dogma detached from daily living, and he suggested instead that people needed to experience God and have a feeling to accompany any cognising about God. In gestalt therapy, one must know in one's gut where to turn in the lively encounter with the client. It's not enough to just think one's way through it. One must have a feeling to accompany any cognising about gestalt therapy, and that comes through the experience of working as therapist, working as client, conducting experiential exercises, and then debriefing the process. (From Gestalt Therapy: A Guide To Contemporary Practice, by Philip Brownell, Springer Publishing, 2010).

This is the kind of training, and the experience, that we are going to offer to a limited number of people starting in September 2010. It can make an educated counsellor or psychotherapist into someone who is a competently trained counsellor or psychotherapist. Those interested should call 296-1414.

Speaking from my own perspective, however, I know that I'm going to become attached to the people in this training group. They will inhabit my days. They will likely inhabit my prayers. I will take them on so as to support, encourage, and even to correct. I have come to regard people like these who cross my path in life as providential; no one is there by accident. This realisation makes me pause a bit when I contemplate training, but the work is rewarding, and I like contributing to the community here in this way.