Malgosia Cynker – a senior trainer at the Lodz Gestalt School – and Karolina Slifirska held a meeting with team supervisor Graham Colbourn. The consultation with Graham Colbourn was about the assumptions we have when we create the school; about the curriculum and how it is run. We were heavily “seeded” with the topic of work ethics.
Graham pointed out that the EAGT code of ethics is a set of external rules, and this is an obvious framework that every student/trainer needs to know. What is different, however, is their internalization. And the question of how to develop an attitude among the trainees of their own inner sense of ethics, so that they feel within themselves what the principles of the work of a Gestalt psychotherapist are. At the Lodz Gestalt School, we have a module planned on work ethics. However, the work on rules/rules/attitude will take place continuously, in every meeting. This is because we do not mean that the Trainees should know the code by heart, but that they should be sensitive to what is and what is not ethical in direct contact with other people: with their groupmates, with school staff, with trainers/trainers/clients. It’s very important to us that future therapists, when working with people on their open hearts, on traumas, wounds, with the liveliest pieces of souls, do so with the utmost care and in a safe manner.
