Supporting healing in times of war and conflict.
British Gestalt Journal warmly invites you to Seminar Day 2022.
Saturday 26 November, 11am - 4.30pm
This experiential day, led by Rosie Burrows and Martina Čarija, facilitates support for awareness in relation to living in times of manipulation and conflict and will provide connection and opportunities to process living through polarising times. We will explore a field-sensitive approach to relational and social trauma and its consequences, and support holding onto self-experience in the face of forces which undermine this. A practical focus on practitioner and client resilience for living through polarised times, will include building contact and coherence across differences, both within and between ourselves.
This event will take place via Zoom Meeting.
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Gaslighting
Martina Čarija
11am – 1pm
Even though it is organismic, it is possible to manage our awareness. This means that our awareness can be covertly controlled by other people, even though it is so personal that it is hard to imagine someone else taking control of it, without us being aware of it. When this happens, our field is no longer only our own, it splits into two realities that can't coexist at the same time in our awareness. One is our organismic self-regulation reality that is being interfered with, the other is the in-organismic figure covertly imposed by somebody else. This covert mechanism of control, blocking contact and abuse that permeates our lives at different levels, in different close and relevant relationships is called gaslighting. Situations like the refugee crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, Brexit, and the Trump presidency all vividly display a splitting field that manifests as polarization among the people without clear figure and clear facts they can trust.
In understanding gaslighting and psychotherapeutic work with victims of gaslighting, some of the central concepts of Gestalt psychotherapy are key: awareness, organismic self-regulation, and contact. On this Seminar Day, we will raise awareness about recognizing gaslighting in our own lives and our clients' stories. We will, also, jointly explore the political dimensions of Gestalt therapy in a split field in the post-truth era.
Martina Čarija is a psychologist, a gestalt psychotherapist, supervisor and works as a trainer internationally. For the last 15 years she has been working in civil society organisations on providing support to vulnerable persons. This is how she found herself in the midst of the refugee humanitarian crisis in 2015. Field work in the transit camps was a very formative experience that inspired her, among other things, to develop training for interpreters in psychotherapy and to explore psychotherapeutic work with gaslighting as a form of psychological abuse. Martina is based in Zagreb where she works in her own private practice.
Address for correspondence: martinacarija@gmail.com
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Conflict in a splitting field: ‘In Dangerous Times Hold Onto Love’
Rosie Burrows
2pm – 4.30pm
Having explored conflict in aspects of our field that carry most significance, the afternoon will be practically focused on trauma-informed, embodied and creative practices as a way of supporting ourselves, others and the wider field. This has involved working therapeutically as well as using research and other group, community and societal interventions to support personal and social change (Kato, Klaren and Nevi, 2019) in the north of Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka, and ancestral legacies of war in Europe.
Possibilities exist within even the worst of times, for people to hold on to the best in themselves and each other and together to co create sanctuaries of sanity, resistance and creativity. Drawing on awareness and developing ‘extraordinary skills for extraordinary circumstances’ (Burrows and Keenan, 2004), this Seminar Day will offer the following:
- Field-sensitive theoretical approach for working with relational and developmental trauma and betrayal that is past or ongoing, with default survival styles/strategies supporting our growing edges
- Experiential everyday practices that restore practitioner and client resilience – live working with a volunteer client and debrief, and the use of singing as a tool for building contact and coherence across differences, within ourselves and/or between
- ‘In Dangerous Times Hold Onto Love’: Self as integrator, singing and music as a counter force for joy, liberation, light, humour and authentic self expression, to polarization, hatred, and rejection. Restoring Self is Gestalt, and is radical relational process.
Rosie Burrows, PhD, is a Gestalt psychotherapist, supervisor, trainer, researcher, and Gestalt practitioner with community, organisation, and societal levels, based in Belfast, in the north of Ireland. She has authored and co-authored research practice, including BACP award-winning research on transgenerational trauma. Through phenomenological and other Gestalt research inquiry, personal and professional experience since 1990, she regards evolving embodied, compassionate and creative witnessing and intervention our most vital integrative capacity, alongside ecological practices and leadership to support less suffering, and enhance more just relational transitions, whether individual, couple, group, and/or societal situation with humans and other than humans.
Address for correspondence: drrosieb@gmail.com
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British Gestalt Journal Seminar Day 2022 takes place Saturday 26 November 2022, 11am - 4.30pm
Tickets are £25 per attendee (plus booking fee) and can be purchased via Eventbrite.
This event will take place via Zoom.
Any enquiries may be directed to admin@britishgestaltjournal.com