John Gillespie

I practice a trauma-informed and body-aware gestalt psychotherapy. Gestalt lends itself well as a therapy for people who have struggled with being put into boxes. As a therapist I am guided by my senses, or what’s called ‘phenomenology’. This can give a lot of freedom since it makes possible a ‘letting go’ of limiting beliefs about what I ‘should’ do and whom I ‘should’ be. There’s a ‘rightness’ shaped instead by ‘in-the-moment’ experience that comes up in the meeting between therapist and client.

Gestalt is naturally a ‘body oriented’ approach. This does not mean I will necessarily probe you around what is going on in your body, or what I notice. Being in our bodies can be extra-complicated for many LGBTQI+ people. It does mean I believe that a lot of the ‘oppression’ in normative culture comes from an overly cognitive way of seeing the world that alienates and oppresses bodily experience.

My approach is trauma-informed which means that I acknowledge the ways that trauma resides in our nervous-systems. Nervous systems sometimes need a lot of convincing that it’s safe, before we are able to meet the world from a new place. Defences built to keep us safe are always there for good reason, and modern therapy  places emphasis on befriending ‘defending’ parts, rather than seeing these as the enemy to be broken through.

A significant part of my training experience was gained at London Friend (the LGBT therapy charity based in Kings Cross, London). I have also worked for One in Four, a charity set up to support adult survivors of child sexual abuse. And I apprenticed at the Cassel Hospital therapeutic community for treatment of ‘personality disorders’.

From 2017-21 I was CEO of New Gestalt Voices, www.newgestaltvoices.org a collaborative organisation set up to explore applications of gestalt to social justice agendas. In 2023 I co-edited my first book, Queering Gestalt Therapy