Committee “Professional Competencies and Qualitative Standards: Specific Competencies of Gestalt Therapists”

Dear colleagues,

As chair of this committee I want to inform you about our committee and our challenging and exciting activities.

The EAGT committee “Professional Competencies & Qualitative Standards” is working on the definition of “Specific Competencies of a Gestalt Therapist”.

Following the EAP project of defining a psychotherapist’s core competencies (More information here) this document describes which specific competencies are characteristic to our modality – Gestalt Therapy.

This project has started in 2010 and since 2011 in our group of Gestalt colleagues we succeeded to write a draft that has also been presented at the EAGT conference in Krakow earlier this year both in a poster session and a workshop.

The next step is the elaboration of this draft by all the interested colleagues with the goal that the final document will be an expression from our community of Gestalt Therapists about our specific competencies.

A fundamental consideration when approaching this topic and text is not to take this as a guidance of what one must do, but as a description of abilities, that a professional Gestalt therapist ought to have, is aware of and consequently is able to put into action if required.

We do not intend to describe an ideal profile that should be adhered to by a professional Gestalt therapist but we try to describe which competences come into play in this profession and modality. Not all of these competencies are of same relevance every time, they do not play a role in each moment, and some of them are bound to be inactive in the background or might even be superfluous always depending on the context of the situation.

Each Gestalt therapist embodies different and individual grades of a specific balance of competencies according to his/her own personality. The integration of this uniqueness is expressed in a specific personal therapeutic style.

This profile of competencies is not intended to be a prescribed set of skills, which have to be acquired all at once. We understand this more as a result of a constant process of development rooted in one’s own professional path and developing incessantly within one’s professional experience and on-going training.

We very much invite you to give us feedback on that document, to circulate it in your communities, to discuss it with colleagues, trainees etc.

We need to have feedback from as many colleagues as possible in order to create a document together with you that represents a good picture of what we as Gestalt Therapists are doing, how we are doing this and in which ground we are acting.

You can send your feedback to the office of EAGT – info@eagt.org

Members of our committee:

Misa Avramovic Chair

Monica Bronzini

Roberta La Rosa

Lina Jurkstaite-Pacesiene

Michele Settanni

Related documents for download: