Why I Still Believe in the Creative When Everything is On Fire
Let me tell you about Gestalt Therapy, which is a terrible name for something quite beautiful, like calling the ocean "the wet place" or love "the heart sweats."
The word means "whole" in German, which already sounds like a lie. Whole? Have you met a person? We're not whole. We're a committee of selves in constant disagreement, wearing a trench coat, pretending to be a unified entity at the DMV. But that's actually the point. Gestalt therapy says: yes, you're a mess, and the mess is the message. You're not broken parts waiting to be fixed - you're a dynamic, chaotic, living system trying to make contact with a world that is also a dynamic, chaotic, living system.
The founder was Fritz Perls, a German psychoanalyst who fled the Nazis, grew a magnificent beard, and eventually told Freud's ghost to fuck off (I'm paraphrasing, but only slightly). He said: stop digging around in the past like an archaeologist looking for the childhood moment that ruined you. The trauma isn't back there. It's right here, in how you're sitting, in how you're breathing, in how you just interrupted yourself mid-sentence because some ancient voice whispered nobody wants to hear this.
Gestalt therapy is theatre without a script. It's paying attention to what's happening now - not what happened when you were seven, not what might happen next Tuesday when your boss reads that email you should not have sent. Now. This breath. This clench in your jaw. This way you just made yourself small. Informed by the past and the present, but actually smack dab in the here and now.
And here's where it gets weird (better): Gestalt says you don't exist in isolation. You're not a brain in a jar having private thoughts about whether you're enough. You exist in a field - a relationship with everything around you. Your anxiety isn't just yours; it's co-created with your job, your family, your culture, the 24-hour news cycle screaming that the world is ending (which, to be fair, it might be). You and the world are making each other, moment by moment, like two (perhaps terrible) improvisers who forgot to establish the scene.
The goal isn't to "fix" you. It's to help you notice how you're interrupting contact - with yourself, with others, with reality. How you hold your breath when you want to cry. How you agree when you mean no. How you've turned yourself into a pleasant automaton because being real felt too dangerous.
Gestalt therapy wants you to be a whole, messy, contactful disaster. It wants you here.
Why This is a Wild Time to Be a Therapist
I became a therapist because I wanted to help people. Then I realized: people don't need help. They need witnesses. They need someone to sit across from them and say, without flinching, "Yes, the world is on fire. Yes, you're not crazy for noticing."
It is a wild time to be a therapist because the field assumes a stable world. Therapy was invented for people who had "problems" - bad marriages, irrational fears, unresolved childhoods. The world was fine; you were the glitch.
But what do you do when the world is the glitch?
When your clients come in and say, "I can't focus because the planet is dying," I cannot, in good conscience, teach them breathing exercises and send them back to their lives. When they say, "I feel hopeless about the future," I can't just reframe it as cognitive distortion. They're right. The future is a coin flip between fascism and climate collapse, and we're all pretending it's fine because we have dental appointments.
My job has become: hold space for the apocalypse. Normalize existential dread. Validate that caring about the state of the world isn't a symptom - it's sanity. And then, somehow, figure out how to help people live anyway.
Because here's the thing therapy schools don't teach you: most of my clients aren't depressed because of serotonin or childhood attachment wounds — at least not completely. They're depressed because they work soul-crushing jobs to pay rent in a system designed to extract their labor and leave them hollow. They're anxious because the social contract is shredded and nobody knows the rules anymore. They're lonely because we've replaced community with Instagram and called it connection. They are justifiably overwhelmed as they witness many of the world’s systems system-ing in the wrong direction and there is no simple way to way to make them do an about-face.
Therapy pretends to be apolitical, but every session is political. When I validate climate grief, I'm saying the problem isn't in their head - it's in the world. When I help someone set boundaries, I'm disrupting capitalist productivity culture. Grandiose? Maybe. Still something? Yes.
It's wild because I'm supposed to help people "cope" and "adapt," but what if the thing they're adapting to is killing them? What if resilience has just become another word for compliance?
So I sit in my office and I try to do something harder than fixing: I try to be with. I try to say: your despair is rational. Your grief is appropriate. Your rage is information. Now what?
The Wild Time of Being a Person (A Field Report from the Trenches)
Let's be honest: being a person right now is like being asked to assemble IKEA furniture in a house that's actively burning down, and the instructions are in Swedish, and in this scenario you most definitely do not speak Swedish.
You're supposed to:
Have a meaningful career (but also no job is safe or sacred)
Build authentic relationships (but everyone is exhausted and overscheduled)
Take care of your mental health (as if mental health exists in a vacuum separate from economic precarity and climate doom)
Create purpose (in a world that insists nothing matters except your productivity and purchasing power)
Stay informed (but not too informed or you'll spiral)
Make a difference (but also you're just one person and the systems are vast and indifferent)
It's a hell of an assignment.
And the loneliness - god, the loneliness. We've built a world of constant connection that has made us more isolated than ever. You can have 1,000 followers and zero friends. You can be in a room full of people and feel like a hologram. We've replaced contact with content.
Gestalt would say: we've interrupted contact at a societal level. We've turned toward our phones instead of each other. We've traded presence for productivity. We've made ourselves into brands, into performance, into curated selves that are easier to package and sell.
And we're tired. Tired of optimizing. Tired of hustling. Tired of pretending everything is fine. Tired of the emotional labor of holding it together while the world unravels.
The meaning crisis is real. When the old stories (religion, career ladder, nuclear family, meritocracy) stop making sense, you're left with a void. And the void asks: what's the point?
Some people fill it with consumption. Some with numbing. Some with rage. Some with increasingly niche hobbies (no judgment - I respect a person who is really crushing their sourdough game).
But a lot of people are just... searching. Trying to figure out how to be human in a world that has forgotten how to make space for humans.
Why I'm Leaning Into Hope (Against My Better Judgment)
Here's where I'm supposed to pivot to inspiration, to tell you it all works out, to offer you a neat solution. I won't insult you like that.
Hope is not a guarantee. Hope is not optimism with better lighting. Hope is not a motivational poster that says "you've got this" and costs $40.
Hope is more like this: I keep showing up to work even though I know I cannot fix the world. I keep believing that contact matters even though we live in an age of terminal disconnection. I keep trusting in the creative magic of therapy - and of humans in general - even though every headline suggests I'm a fool.
The "creative magic" isn't woo. It's Gestalt's term for what happens when you actually make contact with another person, or with yourself, or with reality as it is. It's the moment when the performance drops and something real moves between people. It's when you stop trying to be who you think you should be and just... are. Messy and broken and sincere.
I've seen it happen. I've seen people who were numb for years suddenly feel something. I've seen people who were certain they were beyond repair discover they were just beyond pretending. I've seen the moment when someone stops fighting their existential questions and starts living them.
And here's the heresy I believe: that creative magic - that capacity for genuine contact, for presence, for meaning-making in the face of meaninglessness - might be the only thing that saves us.
Not productivity. Not innovation. Not another app or lifehack or self-help framework. Just: humans being bravely, foolishly present with each other. Witnessing each other's pain without trying to fix it. Creating small pockets of sanity in an insane world.
I believe in therapy not because it cures anything, but because it's one of the last places in our culture where you're allowed to be fully human for 50 minutes. Where your pain doesn't have to be productive. Where your questions don't need answers. Where you can fall apart and someone will sit with you in the rubble and say, "Yes. This. Let's start here."
I believe in Gestalt because it refuses the fantasy of the isolated self. It says: you are not a broken individual - you are a response to a field of forces. And if the field is toxic, your symptoms are sanity. And if we can change how we make contact - with ourselves, each other, the world - we change the field itself.
I believe in people because I have to. Because cynicism is just despair with better posture, and I've already been there, and it's boring. Because every day people walk into my office carrying impossibly heavy things and they keep walking. They don't give up. They don't turn away. They keep trying to figure out how to be human in inhuman circumstances.
That's not Pollyanna hope. That's fuck you hope. It's hope that says: I see how bad it is, and I'm going to care anyway. I'm going to make meaning anyway. I'm going to show up anyway.
Is it enough? I don't know. The systems are vast and cruel and they will not be hugged into submission. But maybe, if enough of us have the fuck you type of hope. If enough of us lean into that creative magic. It's what I have. It's the work.
The Work (A Closing Liturgy)
So here's what I do, and what I invite you to do, in this wild, terrible, beautiful time:
Show up. Not as the person you're supposed to be. As the person you are right now - exhausted, confused, angry, tender, whatever. Show up in your whole messy field.
Make contact. Real contact. The kind that costs something. Look at people. Let people see you. Risk being boring, being too much, being wrong. Interrupt the interruptions.
Feel the feelings. Your climate grief is rational. Your rage at injustice is appropriate. Your despair about the future is sane. Don't perform wellness. Don't spiritual-bypass your way to false peace. Feel it. Let it move through you. Let it become fuel.
Create anyway. Meaning, beauty, connection, resistance. Not because it will save the world, but because the alternative is death by a thousand small numbnesses. Make the thing. Have the conversation. Plant the garden. Write the terrible poem. Build the tiny pocket of sanity.
Stop trying to be whole. You're not a self-improvement project. You're a verb, not a noun. You're always in the process of becoming, of contacting, of creating. The mess is the message.
Remember you're not alone. Even when you feel like a ghost, you're part of a field. Your pain is connected to others' pain. Your hope is connected to others' hope. We're all in the burning house together, trying to figure out how to be human.
The creative magic isn't a miracle. It's just what happens when you stop performing and start living. When you interrupt your own interruptions. When you risk contact.
And maybe - maybe - if enough of us do it, we change the field. We create new ways of being together. We build the world that comes after this one.
Or maybe we don't. Maybe we just make each other a little less lonely while the house burns.
Either way, I'm here. In my office. On the Zoom screen. Sitting with the apocalypse and the hope, both at once, because that's what Gestalt taught me: you hold the paradox. You don't resolve it. You live it.
The world is not okay. You are not okay. I am not okay. And that is in fact, okay.
Let's be not-okay together. Let's make contact. Let's do the work.
The house is burning, but we're still here.
That's something.
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If you're looking for therapy that takes your existential dread seriously, that sees you as part of a world-field and not just a collection of symptoms, that believes in the creative magic of genuine contact - I'm here. Let's figure out how to be human together.