Gestalt is a Way of Caring for Human Rights

Abstract

I grew up in Cologne, a big city in Germany. During my time in high school, there were big eruptions in the social field. Willy Brand became the first social-democratic chancellor. And the war in Vietnam was a broad issue that was discussed among the younger generation. When I started to study psychology, I had personal treatment by a psychoanalytic therapist, and during my studies I had a one-year course in behavioral therapy. I was not impressed by these modalities, so I started to look for alternatives and, by chance, I found somebody who had learned the Gestalt approach. I was fascinated and did a professional training for years. At that time, I was active in different social fields, especially in the peace movement against new nuclear weapons.In 1991, I moved to Switzerland and worked in a therapeutic institution for young male offenders. I became a member of the EAGT, which had a committee for Human Rights founded as a reaction to the situation after 9/11. A main task was to raise more awareness for the international political field we live in.One important project from our committee was the work in Ukraine. In the spring of 2014, the Ukrainian Umbrella Organization for Psychotherapy asked different therapeutic organizations for help working with the many people traumatized from the shootings on Maydan Square and the beginning of the civil war in the East of the Ukraine. Ivana Vidakovic from Serbia and I went to Kyiv and offered a three-day workshop on trauma. We both had never been to Ukraine and we were working together for the first time, not knowing what they were expecting and if the situation would be safe.We started with a workshop with 28 participants, all women. That was very typical. In the former Soviet Union medicine and psychology had been mainly female professions. Most of them did voluntary work for many months after normal work of eight to nine hours, and they struggled with overwhelming feelings and burnout symptoms. After more than two hours of heartbreaking stories, we learned that this would not be a place to give lectures. All were happy to have somebody from outside who cared about them. The symptoms were all about actual shock and some sparks of panic. So, we skipped the idea to give a lot of information (my coleader had done a lot of work with war trauma during and after the Yugoslavian war), and we started to get the participants into the here and now. We functioned in small groups, sharing experiences in the war zone, and did some work around breathing and imaginations of a safe place.After a few months, we returned to Kyiv to meet again with some of the workshop participants. For them, the main result was to take better care of themselves and to have some private time. We did another three-day workshop and realized this work around trauma could not be done through other European countries, given that dozens of people were being killed every day. The demand was huge; they wanted us to do workshops in many cities all over the country. The European Association of Gestalt Therapy organized a “Train the Trainer” program for the local Gestalt therapists to take over. This was successfully concluded with about 35 participants in 2019. Some interesting experiences from participants were published