Gestalt Workshop – Rafael Cortina: Reclaiming wholeness: a compassionate/relational Gestalt understanding of trauma and addiction
Trauma and addiction are intertwined in complex ways, fundamentally changing how individuals view themselves, their relationships and the world. Addiction is the long-term result of creative adaptations to painful life circumstances that provide relief by numbing emotional pain or cutting the individual off from unbearable experiences. While these adaptations initially serve as necessary coping mechanisms in an environment devoid of safety, belonging and emotional support, sustained recovery requires more than just symptom management. It requires relational engagement, embodied awareness and compassionate integration of past experiences into a constantly changing environment of relationships and surroundings.
Gestalt field theory helps understand these challenges. It presents a holistic, process-oriented perspective that recognizes trauma and addiction as phenomena shaped by the entire web of human experience, from intimate relationships to broader social systems. Rather than viewing these challenges as isolated personal failures, this approach explores the complex interplay of interpersonal dynamics, cultural influences and environmental factors.
Gestalt Workshop – Rafael Cortina: Reclaiming wholeness
This workshop explores practical applications of field theory, showing how changing the therapeutic perspective from individual pathology to a dynamic field can accelerate deep healing and lasting transformation.
Workshop topics and key themes combine Gestalt relationship theory and field theory to help practitioners support clients in moving from survival to authentic connection and integration. We will explore:
A field perspective on trauma and addiction:
- Trauma and addiction as field phenomena, not isolated disorders.
- How social, relational, and cultural forces shape responses to trauma and patterns of addiction.
- Understanding interpersonal and environmental supports/barriers to healing within the client’s life experiences.
Creative adaptations and addiction:
- Addiction is a functional creative adaptation, not a pathology.
- How trauma affects the established gestalt, interrupting the smooth cycle of contact.
- Strategies to support organic transformation by expanding awareness and choice.
Healing trauma through a compassionate/relational Gestalt model of trauma:
- Supporting clients through relationship security, compassion and embodied presence.
- Integrating Gestalt principles to respect adaptive survival responses while promoting wholeness.
- Using Rafael Cortina’s model to guide trauma resolution and deepen authentic contact.
During the workshop we will work on integrating the rejected part of ourselves: working with inner antagonists through relational gestalt
What does this mean?
In the process of healing from trauma, we often come face to face with parts of ourselves that helped us survive, but now stand in the way of connection. This experiential workshop invites participants into a safe relational space to explore their inner antagonist – the part that once protected but now interferes with connection, bonding and a sense of wholeness.
Building on the compassion/relational model of trauma in gestalt therapy, this workshop focuses on the healing power of attuned relationships, embodied consciousness and compassion. Through the lens of field theory, we will explore how relational and environmental conditions have shaped these antagonistic parts and how they continue to influence self-perception, behavior and healing.
This model, based on relational Gestalt therapy, sees trauma not as a permanent wound, but as a series of interrupted moments of contact – both within the self and between people. Healing occurs when we are able to stay with what once seemed unbearable, and show compassion to the parts of us that have learned to protect ourselves through disconnection, silence or control.
Gestalt workshop – agenda
Through exercises and experiments, participants:
- They will practice embodied gestalt processing to increase awareness of internal conflict and contact boundaries
- They will explore with curiosity and compassion the emotional function of the “antagonistic” part.
- They will engage in relational experiments that provide insight into and mitigate long-standing defensive strategies.
- They will begin to build a functional and compassionate relationship with the parts of themselves that feel shame, resistance or fear.