Frequently Asked Questions
First are the questions that are quick and easy to answer. At the end of the list, there is a much longer answer to a question that many prospective clietnts ask - what is gestalt therapy like? Then, how will it be different from other therapies I have tried or know about? The short answer is gestalt is VERY different, and my style of gestalt is very distinctive, by virtue of its liveliness, playfulness and adventurousness. But for the long answer scroll down to the bottom of the page
Timescales: Session one is “Intake,” during which I will take notes on your life history and ascertain what you want to get from therapy. It is a gentle introduction to therapy in which I will also talk you through the protocoals and guidelines for our work aqnd gain your consent to proceed. After that, we really get stuck in to the work; and to really get the ball rolling, most people attend weekly for a while. Usually pretty soon therafter, the frequency will morph into sessions spaced more widely apart, once you begin to notice beneficial change.
Whatever issues you bring to therapy, be it working to overcome emotional upset or to get unstuck, you can expect to start feeling appreciable gains within the first months. The exact duration of your therapy depends on you. However, in most cases the process is complete in under a year.
Also, most peole, in my experience, get much of what they need in less than 20 sessions. Your process will proceed at a pace that you can choose - progressing towards the point at which you realize you no longer need a therapist's support and can fly solo.
Even after therapy is completed, I can and/or will remain as “your therapist” forever thereafter. This is because you have invested time, money and effort in developing the rapport we share, and this is a valuable therapeutic asset, for which there is a solid evidence-base attesting to its effectiveness. Most people that do return for a top-up, usually get what they need with a short burst of sessions.
Fees: My fee is now $180 per hour. If you have coverage and/or can afford that fee, great. My fee increase in spring 2021 (and now again in May 2023 and Sep 2025), is in response to clients and colleagues urging me to raise my rate in line with my skills and experience and compared with other therapists’ rates. Especially, because of the number of beginning therapists, RP (Q)s who set their rates at on near mine despite having comparatively little or no experience. It seems that in therapy, in Toronto, the simple addage “you get what you pay for,” does not really apply. In fact, if you are being asked to pay a great deal more than my fee, it is probably good reason for alarm. Therapy has to be a sustainable option if it is to deal with the existentuial threats that the coming generation must face. So any therapy only catering to the mega-rich elites is probably part of the problem rather than the solution.
I have a social justice outlook and want to make therapy as accessible as possible to my target clientele. So, if you can make a case for a reduced rate, for whatever reason, I’m open to persuasion. I will also apply a sliding scale if you are a struggling: artist, writer, an entrepreneur starting up, postgraduate, occasional/P/T academic, single parent, musician, marginalized person, new immigrant, refugee, member of an oppressed minority, effective altruist, bohemian, or activist. Or you have any other reason for having a low income or financial hardship or are living with precarity. Or if you seek to, “drop out, tune in, and turn on” to a sustainable, low-impact, non-consumerist lifestyle.
Lastly, if you are a returning client, we can discuss the fee, based upon what you were paying previously.
Location: I see clients in my spacious consulting room in the Hampton Therapy Centre at 175 Hampton Ave in Toronto. It’s a one minute walk from Chester Subway, just off the Danforth, in Greektown. There is ample street parking on the side streets that run off Hampton Ave.
In person vs. online therapy: In Vienna, home of the Sigmund Freud University, the city where Freud inveted his “talking cure,” online therapy does not qualify as psychotherapy within the meaning of the Austrian Psychotherapist Act. Psychotherapy there is a protected term and, under Austrian law, can only take place if it is done in person. With a holistic approach like gestalt, you will get much better value for your money and effort if you can commit to attending in person. But COVID has taught us that online therapy is a viable substitute. However, to deal with the whole person, it is much more wise to have you in the room with me.
How We Will Work Together to Change You: In a nutshell, our work will involve the creative application of my humanity to bring out your humanity. Or, it is two people in a room, cooperating and responding to each other to help one of them feel better about him/herself. Through this, our 'therapeutic relationship,' we will be able to nurture in you a more fully functioning whole human being (gestalt is a German word that is most simply translated as meaning ‘whole’). By which I mean to make you adept at drawing upon your mind AND body AND emotions in a balanced way in order that you may live a more genuine and fulfilling life.
We achieve this by working with your awareness and through the experience of having genuine human contact in the ‘safe’ environment of the therapy sessions. This builds self-confidence, self-esteem and relational ability in you - because you will experience being who you really are with another human being (me). This then means you can choose to do this, as and when you wish, in the rest of your life in the outside world. As we progress, you will become better at relating, capable of more heart-felt connection, and to gradually learn, from experience, how you can tolerate and be comfortable expressing and being your true self in the presence of another. You begin with me and then, when you realise you no longer have need of me, we can part company. It is as important to end therapy as it is to start.
Issues Not Dealt With: Since gestalt is spontaneous and creative, it can be applied to virtually any issue. However, in a private practice context like mine, it is not suitable for people with a history of psychotic episodes or schizophrenia. This is because the power of gestalt to playfully engender change, means these kinds of clients need to be looked after inbetween sessions in a wrap-around manner. This is impossible to achieve for an individual therapist tworking alone. I cannot be on call 24/7. In gestalt therapy eberythig that is imprtant and vital takes place in the crucible of the sessions. Communicating bewteen sessions is best limited to sorting out scheduling matters. There is another very good resaon for not trying to communicate highly personal matters tome in any format. That is the need for me, as stipulated by the therapy regulatory body, the CRPO, to guarantee your private bsuiness is confidentialand does not fall inti the hands of individuals that might use it for their own aggrandisement. To mangle a colloquilaism, what goes on in the therapy session stays in the therapy session, so do not try to communicate outside the safety of this scared and prrotected space.
What Can I Google/read about - to better understand the gestalt approach
I’m a trauma-informed, existential/phenomenological, humanistic, body-oriented, relational practitioner of gestalt therapy, with a bio-psycho-social and model of mental health founded upon neuroplasticity and attachment theory. It’s a bit of a mouthful, so now I am going to elucidate more on each of these keywords in turn and give you pointers to places where you read/listen or watch material to augment what I have to say below …
Trauma-informed: like in the work of Gabor Maté, especially his Wisdom of Trauma. Trauma is sometimes earth-shattering events, for example if your mother dies when you are five, or falls sick with schizophrenia. Or it can be slow and incremetal like the dripping of a tap. For example, when the responsible adults in your life are not paying sufficient attention to you in your early development, so you don’t learn valuable life lessons about emotions or how to soothe yourself once anxious or agitated. Then, there is plain old common-or-garden neglect, when the self centredness of those around you means that your needs are not appreciated nor met.
Existential: drawing, for instance, from the work of Irvin Yalom - see his book, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to the New Generation of Therapists and Their Clients. In our work together, the influence of exitential ideas mean that we are working to find truths that are true for you. You are not coming to me to receive advice or wisdom, but so I can help you think AND feel your way to new ways of being that are right for you personally. That means that you are always in the driving seat. If I ask you a question you do not want to answer, you can decline to answer. If I ask you to do something experiential, you are completely at liberty to decline. I will often then use the refusal as grist for the mill of the therapy - and to influence the direction we take next.
It is also important to understand that although this permission to refuse is there to give you the power to keep yourself feeling safe in the therapy space, there is an important caveal that you should keep in your back pocket. Realise that the more risk you are willing to take, the more you will learn about what you instinctively avoid. So, if you can tolerate the discomfort that something unfamiliar brings up, the more chance there is that you will learn what lies on the other side of this discomfort that you habitaully turn away from. Remember, it is my job as your therapist to “do therapy” on you. This involves a skillful combination of challenging you and supporting you. In my own therapy, for instance, my therapists supported me and held me in a place when I experienced painful anxiety in front of groups. Slowly, and painfully, I grew to learn that there was something that was eluding me by withdrwaing in these moments. And when the breakthrough came for me it involced an explosion of movement, energy and emotion that made me a captivating and charismatic group leader. Thereafter, I was finally able to dispose of my long-held notion of what a group leader “should” look like - a TV anchrman essentially - cool, calm and collected no matter what. That’s great for the worlds’ great TV anchopersons. But not for me. My style is more ragged, and fizzing with energy. When I was “neurotic”, I was trying to contain this explosive force within my very being and it wore me out. When, I was helped to face my fears, I let all this contained energy flow out towards my audience - granting me relief and them something real and interesting. So, to conclude, I cannot promise that your therapy process will be pain free. But I can promise that I will be as gentle and supportive as possible in the moments when it really counts, so that you too can grow into the person that is struggling to emerge from behind your armouring.
Phenomenology: this is a a branch of Continental (European) philosophy that presents us with a way of understanding the complexity of human interaction. Most importantly, it is an alternative to the scientific method of understanding. The scientific method works well and good to prove what causes an effect, when all other variables involved in the cause and effect process can be held steady For instance, in chemical reactions. But it has never been very effective as a means of explaining highly complex situations, like human interactions. Two people coming into contact with one another brings so may differences to the boudary between the two individuals that science cannot tease out and narrow down what is most important in what is going on. You can write a manual telling you how to mend a particular make of car. This is because emachines lendthemselves to the scientific method. Every one of a particular make of car is like every other. But it is impossible to write a manual telling you how to mend a human being in relationship with another human being. That’s because each of these two indivduals is so unique and different. So, science lets us down just when we need it most - in understanding ourselves. Phenomenology in contrast does offer a way of understanding better such complexity. This is done by the application of the phenomenologocal method of description. And this means working towards gaining a more and more precise description of what exists. Or, in other words, what is clearly obvious in what is going on in a particualr circumstance. As such, it is a constantly evolving process of knowing because nothing stays constant - everything changes. What we want to do in therapy is use what is obvious about what you are doing in your life, to understand and see that it does not have to be that way - that you have a choice to do things differently. Sometimes this will be straightforward. But sometimes it will be rather terrifying and need a great deal of courage and support to make the change. The support I can provide. The courage will have to come from you - if you decide that change you must.
Relational: in the simplest terms, gestalt has two “cures” for what people bring to therapy. Awareness raising is one. The second are moments of genuine human contact. I’m certain you already know what these fleeting moments of contact are, because we all have them in life. When you were a toddler, most of you will have had a great many more of these experiences - because most toddlers have not been bent out of shape yet. Another word for genuine human contact is intimacy, and I mean not just not sexual intimacy, but the feelings of connectedness you get when you and another person let the masks drop and relate to each other authentically. It is my role to effectively remind you of the power of these experiences and the ease with which you made them happen when you were very young. So, in other words gestalt therapy, involves a kind of re-engineering of your neural pathways, or a kind of re-parenting. It is by fostering the ability to make contact that gestalt offers most potential for change - towards an enlivened life, of richer friendships, and with more love. You will see contact written about wherever you encounter books, blogs, podcasts, or videos on gestalt. Other places it is often mentioned are in the writings of the Dalai Lama. Also, in Esther Perel’s works, and in those of Stan Tatkin. Our gestalt notion of contact in relationships is drawn from the ideas of Martin Buber, who distinguished between, “I & thou” interactions and “I & it” interactions. In I & thou, you and the other person “see” each other as human beings (with all your differences). In an I & it interaction, one party no longer sees the other fully as a human being, but more as an object. It was a mass “I & it” phenomenon that made the Holcaust possible, via the Nazi de-humanization of whole groups of people.
Humanistic: gestalt has its feet firmly planted on this earthly planet, in the here & now, and in the space between I & thou, with a concern for human welfare, values, and dignity.
That does not mean that you cannot have spiritual, transpersonal, or religious beliefs of your own. If you do, we can work with them as integral parts of who you are and how you exist in the world. However, my gestalt work is not theoretically imbued with any spiritual connection of its own. Some gestalt therapists might use their individual spiritual beliefs as part of their unique style of gestalt. That is part of the adaptability of gestalt, that makes it ideal for individual self-expression, self motivation, and self-growth. Gestalt could be combined with virtually anything (that does not conflict with the I & thou relational principle), to make it uniquely fitting for therapist and client. For instance, you could meld gestalt and soccer, or gestalt and baseball, or cricket. No one has, that I have heard of… but you could. I do know of gestaltists who combine their work with horses. And with tarot cards. In my practice, you will notice that my style is very much influenced by my background in writing for film and other creative endeavours, like collage, and poetry (you will see me using metahpor, analogy, and word play all over the place).
Body-oriented: gestalt work is constantly refering to what is going on in the body to better understand what it is to be human. We are mind-body complexes so, sorting out in therapy what you think is not enough. You have to sort out what you think and what you feel. The most effective therapy must incorporate the corporeal, by enaggaing in sensory awareness and developing emotional intelligence to balance the intellect. See the work of Bessel Van der Kolk on trauma stored in the body, Stephen Porges about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and Wilhelm Reich on body armouning - how muscle tension relates to anxiety. Most people in western societies tend to be very much stuck in their heads. That’s why the founding personages of gestalt used the term, “get out of your head to come to your senses.” Being highly effective cognitive orgaisms, has reseluted in many of us cutting ourselves off from most of the signals coming from parts of the body from the neck down. If you are not receiving messages loud and clear from your body and senses, you cannot effectively think AND feel your way to making choices in life. If you make decisions based largely (or solely) on what logic tells you, you may find that you lack much conviction or motivation. That’s because doing something has to feel right as well as make sense.
Bio-psycho-social: this model is just one of the modern models of mental health. To get a grasp on the bio-psycho bit see, you can watch Robert Sapolsky’s Stanford Lecture on depression. Also, for just how diversely/differently/bizarrely the human brain can morph biologically, see the nerurological case studies written about by Oliver Sacks, beginning with his book, ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.’ For the social aspect - know that your therapy issues are not all down to you, despite what existential philosophy says about individual responsibility in a world in which the guiding hand of God has been removed. Nor are they all your own fault. Nor are all the answers entirely within your grasp in therapy - because there are systemic barriers to mental health. See Creating Mental Illness, by Allan Horowitz, on how our current conceptions of mental illness as a disease fit really well, for only a small number of serious psychological conditions. Most conditions currently regarded as mental illness are cultural constructions, normal reactions to stressful social circumstances, or forms of “deviant” behavior. All of these need to be understood in light of the cultures in which they are embedded. So, any work on intersectionality, oppression, marginalization, prejudice, inequity can shed light. See Oliver James again - in his book, Affluenza. Or Allain de Botton on the epidemic of Status Anxiety in Anglo-American culture.
Attachment Theory: much of what will influence your everyday relationships with other human beings is set in place in the time between your conception and the age of three. And there are very few people who can remember much from this time in their life. So, in some senses, your attachment syle in later life comes from within this black box of experiences to which no one has easy access. See Stan Tatkins’ books for a simple intro. to attachment (and what you can hope to do about it with your significant other). Or Oliver James’ books on what you can do as a parent regarding your childrens’ attachment style. Or Phillipa Perry’s, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read.
Neuroplasticity: as in Norman Doidge’s, The Brain that Changes Itself. Neuroplasticity serves us as a good reason to have faith in therapeutic change. No matter what neural pathways were cemented in place early on, by upbriging and trauma, you can reasonably hope to make life-enhancing change. Your brain is plastic and can change. Even leopards can change their spots. Now wouldn’t you like to too?