Gestalt Psychotherapy is a form of therapy that focuses on supporting all parts of a person (AKA Parts Work)— body, mind, emotions, and ways of being in relationship with the world. It’s built on the belief that humans are inherently designed with the propensity to heal and move their life in a full & fluid way.

However, when faced with overwhelming experiences, we can become stuck and lose access to all parts of our selves — resulting in fixated patterns, beliefs, thoughts, or nervous system adaptations. In Gestalt, we call these “creative adjustments”

Whether or not they’re how we’d hope to cope, all of these responses are our best way to tolerate what feels intolerable in the moment and often happen automatically and out of conscious awareness.

Using Gestalt approaches, we’ll work together to broaden your awareness of how this stuckness manifests in your life and to support the possibility of experiencing it differently.

To do so, we'll explore what happens for you in the here-and-now as a a result of what was experienced there-and-then. We'll get curious about the felt side of your story, the meanings you make, places you feel stuck, and ways of actively engaging with your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours to support the possibility of feeling something in a new way.

In my clinical experience, including the body with a Somatic Experiencing lens allows us to work with what might "make sense", but doesn't quite add up with what our bodies sense and ultimately leave us feeling disconnected. It provides the tools to explore ways of releasing stuck survival energy and expand your window of capacity enough to unstick fixed nervous system patterns, which supports a deeper integration of body & mind.