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 clietns ask, what exactly is gestalt therapy is like, and how it will 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 toget from therapy. It is a gentle introduction to therapy in which I will also talk you through the protocoals and guidelines for our work. After that, we really get stuck in and, to get the ball rolling, most people attend weekly. Usually, pretty soon therafter, the frequency will morph into meetings 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 almost all cases the process is complete in uder a year.

Most people get 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.

I can/will remain as “your therapist” forever there after, because you have invested time, money and effort in developing the rapport we share, and this is a valuable asset. Most people that do return for a top-up, get what they need with a short burst of sessions.

Fees: My fee is now $160 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), is in response to clients and clleagues urging me to raise my rate in line with my skills and experience and compared. Especially, because of the number of beginning therapists, RP (Q)s who set their rates at on near mine despite having comparatively little rxoerience. It seems that in therapy, in Toronto, the addage “you get what you pay for,” does not really apply. In fact, if you are being asked to pay a great deal, it is probably good reason for alarm, because therapy has to be a sustainable option if it is to deal with the existentuial threats that coming generations must face. So any therapy that only caters to elites is probably part of the problem rather than the solution.

However, I have a social justice outlook and want to make therapy as accessible as possible to my traget 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 an: 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, activist. Or you have any other reason for having a low income or financial hardship or are livig with precarity. Or if you seek to, drop out, tune in, and turn on to a sustainable, low impact, non-consumerist lifestyle.

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, 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.

In person vs. online therapy: In Vienna, home of the Sigmund Freud University, in the city where Freud inveted his “talking cure,” online therapy does not constitute psychotherapy within the meaning of the Austrian Psychotherapist Act. Psychotherapy is a protected term and, under Austrian law, may only take place in personal contact. 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. 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 humanity to bring out the humanity in another. Or, 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 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 putside world. As we progress you will become better at relating, capable of 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 will 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, because the power of gestalt to playfully engender change, means they need to be looked after between sessions in a wrap-around manner that it is impossible for an individual therapist to provide.

What Can I Google/Read - to better understand your “gestalt” approach?

I’m a trauma-informed, existential, humanistic, body-oriented, relational practitioner of gestalt therapy, with a bio-psycho-social and model of mental health founded upon neuroplasticity and attachment theory. So, to elucidate more on each of these in turn:

Trauma-informed: like in the work of Gabor Maté, especially his Wisdom of Trauma.

Existential: drawing 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.

Relational: gestalt has two “cures” for what people bring to therapy. Awareness raising is one. The second are moments of genuine human contact. You know what these fleeting momentds of contact are, because you still have them in your life, occaisionally. When you were a toddler, most of you will have had a great many more - because most toddlers have not been really bent out of shape yet. Another word for genuine human contact is intimacy - not sexual intimacy - but when you and another person let the masks drop and relate to each other authentically. It is by fostering this ability that gestalt offers most potentil for change, for an enlivened life, for friendships, and for love in your life. You will see contact written aboyt wherever you encounter books, blogs, podcasts, videao on gestalt. Other places are in the writing of the Dalai Lama. Also, in Esther Perel, and in Stan Tatkin’s work. Our notion of contact in relationships i sdrwan from the ideas of Martin Buber, who distinguished between, “I & thou” intercation and “I & it” interaction. In I & thou, you and the outher person “see” ecah other as human being (with all your differences). In an I & it interaction, one party no longer see the other as a human being, but as an object. It was a mass “I & it” phenomenon that made the Holcausrt possible, because the Nazis de-humnized whole groups of people.

Humanistic: gestalt has its feet firmly planted in this earthly world, in the here & now, and in the soace between I & thou (see Martin Buber), 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, gestalt is not theoretically imbued with any spiritual connection of its own. Some gestalt therapists might use their individual spirirual 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 - stemming from the therapists interests, and blendig with the client’s. For instance, you could meld gestalt and soccer, or gestalt and baseball, cricket. No one has, that I have heard of but you could. I do know of gestaltists who combine the 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, poetry (you will see me using metahpor, analogy, and word play all over the place).

Body-oriented: to understad why sorting out what you think is not enough. The most effective therapy must incorporate the corporeal. 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.

Bio-psycho-social model of mental health: for the bio-psycho bit see, 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, begiining with ‘The man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.’ For the social aspect - your issues are not all down to you. 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 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, morginalization, 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 all your relationships with other human beings is set in place from conception to the age of three. 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. Serves as a tonic for understanding that no matter what neural pathways were cemented in place early on, by upbriging and trauma, you can reasonably hope to make life-enhancing change, becuase the brain is plastic - it can change, leopards can change their spots.