Gestalt Workshop - Janet's response
Janet Givens responds to articles on a Gestalt Therapy workshop in London which she co-facilitated with Woody Starkweather.

I want to thank Allan Tyrer [the BSA webmaster] for giving us this opportunity to respond to the articles posted to the BSA website about our workshop last July. I can't imagine having a more attentive audience for what I am about to write.

We always try to start out each workshop with a brief overview of how each of us came to be where we are today. Woody is the speech therapist, a Ph.D. speech scientist, researcher, and professor for the past thirty-five + years. He is the author of nine books (including our joint one, published in 1997) and 50 articles. He is a founding member of the International Fluency Association and one of its early presidents. He is also a founding member of the SID4, the division on fluency disorders of the American Speech Language and Hearing Association (ASHA). His credentials as a professional are impeccable; his reputation, international in scope. He was "called" to this profession from his days as an editor for the publisher of Charles Van Ripers' classic textbook, Speech Correction and Something or Other.

I am the stutterer of the duo. My story, a shortened version, though with more detail than we were able to give at the workshop, is attached. We actually met on STUTT-L, the e-mail list he began in 1985 for stutterers and professionals. It's quite romantic and both of us love to tell the story. So don't ask unless you have a bit of time. We were married in 1999.

I tell you my story as a way of emphasizing that in the work I do, because of my own experience, I take very seriously the need both for a safe environment and the importance of moving out of our comfort zone. The problem with denial is that you can't just shut out specific feelings. The more you use denial as a defense, the bigger and heavier it gets, until it's clouding out other feelings as well. I had used it to shut out humiliation, fear, and shame; in so doing I had shut out knowing my own courage. Our courage to face what we need to face is in us all the time, you know; it just gets buried under other baggage and we lose access to it.

In a one-day workshop, I certainly can't get to know individuals as well as I do in ongoing therapy or in a weekend workshop. However, I have never known a time when I did not feel a sense of genuine connection, at some level, with each of the individuals I work with. That was true for me in London as well. And so, if I have in any way given the impression that I was cavalier in attending to the emotional safety of our participants, I am very sorry. I cannot imagine anything more devastating to both my sense of personal integrity or my professional ethics. I don't think I was, but if I gave that impression, than I might as well have been.

Our workshops are usually 15-18 hours in length, from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. We spend the three hours on Friday night getting to know one another, with exercises specifically geared to build that sense of safety and trust that forms the foundation of the work that comes next. Our workshops generally have between eight and ten people. Our smallest weekend workshop had six participants. Our largest group of SLTs numbered close to thirty; however, we met for an entire week. Each year we do a demonstration of our work at the NSA convention. These last a little over an hour and have anywhere from 10 to 50 stutterers in them. In that case we always have a smaller circle of "volunteers" surrounded by as many other circles as needed to get everyone within earshot.

Our London workshop was our first one-day workshop. It was the third one where the professionals outnumbered the stutterers. I do not say this as an excuse, even as a defense. Frankly, I still am not sure what we would do differently, given six hours and 60 people. I mention it to try to put into context what we were faced with as we organized our day.

Let me address some of the issues that stood out to me in the three articles.

The word "gestalt", in its simplest terms, is a German word meaning "whole". Gestalt psychology is based on the belief that human beings see life as a whole - i.e., we "fill in the blanks" without our even realizing it. In the research on perception, out of which gestalt therapy has evolved, picture cards with parts of the picture missing were given to subjects. By and large the subjects did not notice what was missing; they saw the intended picture as a whole. For example, if a picture of a circle with a portion of the line missing was held up, they reported seeing "a circle" (rather than "a curved line").

There are many other tenets of gestalt therapy, most of which Woody is currently addressing in our new book, due out next year. Some of these may also be understood by reading his ISAD article for 1999, "The Experience of Stuttering", which can be accessed on the Stuttering Homepage together. [Ed. note: There are also Questions/Comments on the article.]

I have from time to time viewed gestalt therapy as leading a revolution in how people interact and communicate with one another. For me, that is the truly exciting aspect of this work.

Gestalt therapy is filled with "experiments" and it is in the nature of experiments that some work and some do not. We are not like so many speech therapists who present a set of techniques (all too often a one-size-fits-all set) intended to fix you, to make you fluent if only you follow all of the rules. That is exactly the model we are intent on exposing. This is a journey, not a destination, so the saying goes; a process, not a set of rules. We set out to go down a path and may well find that the path veers off in a direction we had not expected. That is OK. We all need to follow our path wherever it may lead us.

One other aspect of gestalt therapy to keep in mind is that it is not a "stand alone" therapy. It is not as though you'd choose "gestalt" therapy over "cognitive" therapy or over any of the new mind/body psychotherapies, etc. etc. We gestalt therapists pride ourselves on seeing that gestalt therapy can be melded easily into many other therapies. That is why it has been so easy for Woody to incorporate it into the speech therapy he provides in his own private practice and in the therapy he supervised when he was at Temple University. In my opinion there is not a therapist of any academic background whose work would not benefit by an increased emphasis on the "here and now", on the need to "follow the client", or on the use of their own instincts, reactions, and responses as an instrument guiding them in the process. We do not offer a "fix", or a package treatment model. We are not magicians or "experts"; we are midwives. We offer an opportunity to get to know yourself better, to like yourself more, and to accept yourself, just as you are. That is the essence of real growth, no matter what culture you hail from. And I can tell you there is no greater high than "feeling your fear and doing it anyway" and seeing that you not only survive, you thrive! That is rediscovering your own power, and that is what my mission is all about.

Our use of the "thought painting" - where stutterers paint a picture of their stuttering - affords a fairly quick snapshot of how a particular stutterer has "filled in the blanks" with regard to his own stuttering. This gives the stutterer an opportunity to think of his stutter in a new way. It is not "art therapy" but a cognitive exercise that introduces the "stutter" to the "stutterer" in a manner that makes it possible to see that a relationship actually does exist between the two. As you might imagine, each picture is unique to the individual. However most, initially, start out as either antagonistic (one I remember well was a Medieval warrior in full battle regalia) or isolating (as with John's glass wall). Then, we work with the stutterer to bring them more in harmony, more willing to negotiate a truce, or more at peace with their stuttering. That's just the first step, but is often all we can do in a workshop, be it a one-day or a weekend long.

The guided imagery I like to do leads the group into what I (and others) call "left hand right hand journaling". This was meant to be an introductory exercise, giving each person something that they could do by themselves at home. I did this kind of journaling daily for almost four years and used it to give that part of me that had for so long "not been heard" a chance to be heard. It was an exercise I did on my own and found it profoundly healing. My expectation in introducing it at the London workshop, was that I would lead a general discussion of this exercise, its purpose and function once each of the small groups came back together. Instead, the needs of the larger group dictated we go in a different direction. Isabel, quite courageously I thought, raised issues that needed to be dealt with "in the moment". So that was what we did and I welcomed it. Frankly, it reminded me of my very first gestalt weekend in 1990 and I felt honored to be able to see it from a different seat. I felt that Isabel was being real, true to herself, and genuine. I couldn't ask for better than that. Isabel expressed concern for the comfort of the stutterer who was currently in "the hot seat". That was John Russell, as he has written in his article. John sat patiently throughout the ensuing discussion. What would have been even more productive would have been for those individuals who felt uncomfortable to have owned up to it and let us work with that. Some important pieces of information went unspoken and as a result, we all tried to "fill in the blanks" with explanations, assumptions, projections, and suppositions.

Isabel asks where the boundary is between projection and empathy. What a great question! My answer is that, if empathy is the capacity to feel what another person is feeling, there probably isn't any real distinction. At its core, all empathy is a projection. (Empathy is the robin; projection, the bird). I recall my gestalt trainers teaching us that there is a healthy and an unhealthy aspect to projection, as though on a continuum. By calling her concern a projection, however, I wanted to turn the attention from the "somebody out there -- whoever she feels concerned for" to herself, the person having the emotion. Another way of saying this is, "empathy is still just a feeling that WE have, based on OUR experiences and OUR needs at the time." By definition, we tend to see it only in terms of the other person. So, it is a feeling that we need to own.

To call it a projection doesn't mean one shouldn't feel empathy or that it is in some way a negative or unhealthy thing. For example: Isabel feels empathy for a particular stutterer. Actually she claimed "concern" (better yet for this example). Where other groups probably would go with that, and I think where Isabel thought we'd go (do correct me here; I am assuming) was for us to DO SOMETHING so that she would no longer feel concerned; no longer need to worry or need to empathize. But, that's just not what we do. That is exactly why I resisted for as long as I could actually asking John how he was feeling. Isabel's "concern" said nothing about John; it said lots about her. And that is where we were at the time. What becomes important, to the gestalt therapist in me, is Isabel's experience of feeling concerned / uncomfortable / empathetic. There is something behind that. I don't surmise what it might be, but it could have been of interest to take a look at.

So, I hope we all have the capacity to feel empathy; it is a very important emotion to have in a society such as ours, especially these days. AND, when you do, use that feeling as information for yourself. Look at the situation in full. See what else is also there. Look at your own part. Almost always we can find more than first meets the eye.

To all the speech professionals reading this, I want to say two things: (1) that you cannot expect to help your clients with these emotional aspects of the disorder until you have dealt with and are comfortable with your own smorgasbord of emotions. This is not as easy as it sounds. (2) You do your clients no real service by enabling them to remain constrained by their emotions, whether paralyzed by their fear, isolated in their shame, or content inside their denial. Just because something is scary is not enough of a reason to shy away from it; in fact it is often the very reason we need to move into it, to "just do it". This does not mean you tear away their protective blanket of defences before they are ready; it does mean that you intentionally "heat up the room" a bit so they will remove the blanket themselves when the time comes. And that is done slowly; not in a one day workshop.

I can tell you I have learned a very valuable lesson from this exchange. I did take for granted that the stutterers who were there were of a certain sort, that they were at a place in their lives where looking at "what's beneath the iceberg" was of some definitive appeal. I assumed and did not check it out and for that I am deeply sorry. I will see that it never happens again.

Last fall I mentioned that I would love to have us return to London and work with any of the participants of the original day over two weekends. I would want to limit the number in each weekend workshop to 15. We would have to have our expenses covered, but we would come with no expectation of an honorarium. I left London with such a sense of unfinished business that I wanted to provide some venue for closure, not just for myself, but for any of the others present that day. These articles have emphasized to me the need for just such a program and I hope that we can continue a dialogue toward that end.

If I have left unanswered any other specific issues or concerns, please let me know and I will attempt to address them as well.

March 2002
© 2002 Janet Givens

See also: Janet's story