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

I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to the articles written on the BSA website. First, I was quite gratified that, for the most part, the articles were extremely positive, and I am happy that we made such a good impression. I would like to spend the rest of my space here on a response to the negative notes and other questions that were raised.

On the issue of safety, there are several things to say. First, I completely agree with Janet that we did not first establish a feeling of acceptance among the entire group. We usually do a number of things to achieve this feeling, but were unable to do what we usually do because of some equipment difficulties. But, even if the equipment had been available, I am not sure we could have achieved the desired result for a group so big.

But the foregoing is not the most important thing to say about feeling safe. One of the tenets of our treatment is that it is difficult to recover fully from stuttering unless one is able to take some risk. Because of this we do not prepare for these workshops except in a general sort of way, and to be fully aware of our own feelings as we conduct them. So, it is always a kind of experiment, as therapy is, and it doesn't always work. But it is always spontaneous. So, we were, in a way, being true to our principles in asking people to do things which made them uncomfortable. Learning that it is possible to feel uncomfortable and still function anyway is a basic principle of all forms of recovery. Anyone who has ever given up smoking has learned this lesson, and stutterers need to learn it as well. In the case of stutterers it often takes the form of realizing that they can feel afraid, or embarrassed, and talk anyway.

I was interested, in this connection, to see that the speech therapists present were more concerned that the stutterers might be made to feel uncomfortable than the stutterers were themselves. I am hopeful that one of the lessons we may have taught to the therapists in the audience is that therapy is not all about making your clients feel good. Sometimes it is vital that they feel uncomfortable, afraid, embarrassed, sad, or angry. Therapy consists of providing support and challenge. Support should always come first, and I agree with Janet that we didn't provide enough support for the challenges that followed, but the challenges were an integral aspect of the treatment. Most of the stutterers that we spoke to afterwards were very grateful that we had challenged them in ways that helped them to grow.

I would also like to respond to some of Isabel's issues, which are very insightful and to the point. I think I have already responded to her first issue. The second point suggested that we might have used speech therapists working on their own issues in order to demonstrate therapy techniques. We have done this in the past (usually there are few stutterers in a workshop for professionals), and we have encountered confusion and uncertainty from those SLPs present concerning how they can alter what we have shown them so that they can better apply it to stutterers. So, it is much better if we can show therapy techniques with stutterers; the issues are exactly the right ones to work on. People who stutter are different from those who don't in that they stutter, and when the emotional and cognitive reactions are included that constitutes a rather large difference, enough of a difference at least so that others attending our workshops when there were no stutterers complain about the difficulties of making a "translation."

Isabel's third issue is a simple question about the difference between empathy and projection. Like all the resistances to contact, projection has both a healthy and an unhealthy form. Empathy is the healthy form of projection. When Janet suggested that Isabel was projecting, she didn't mean it as a criticism or a shortcoming on Isabel's part; it was simply an observation. Unfortunately, "projection" is often used in a quasipejorative way, and so people often react negatively to the suggestion that they may have been projecting. Isabel was in fact putting herself in the shoes of the stutterers and thinking that, were she in them, she would have felt nervous or embarrassed. She showed some clinical skill in noting this, which was borne out by her later work with one of the stutterers.

Her final issue too deals with an important question: What is the balance between risk and safety? It is the same issue as discussed previously - the balance between support and challenge. We have seen many people rise to meet difficult challenges successfully, and I have often said that I think stuttering trains a person to deal with challenge and to be brave in the face of fear. Perhaps that is why we may believe that stutterers, and people in general, are less fragile than is sometimes assumed. And to reiterate my previous position on this, I think speech therapists will serve their clients ill if they provide support but no challenge.

And finally, the training question. It is relatively easy to obtain training in Gestalt therapy. There are Gestalt institutes all over the world, and many in the UK. Having obtained that training and then incorporating the results of it into one's therapy for stutterers will result in a different pattern of treatment than we tried to demonstrate, which was, after all, our adaptation of Gestalt therapy to stuttering therapy. Yours will be different. But I believe that your treatment of stutterers will be greatly improved if you obtain training in Gestalt or some other form of experiential therapy. Whether your employer will feel as convinced as you do about the extent of that improvement is not a question I am able to answer.

Thank you again for the opportunity of responding.

March 2002
© 2002 Woody Starkweather