Side by side
Lineage · Anatomy · Among the therapies · Side by side
How Circling compares with the practices it draws on or resembles. Each row asks every practice the same question; each practice has a page with the detail and the sources.
| Circling | Gestalt therapy | Focusing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Connection to Circling | The practice itself. | An early influence, named in two practitioners’ histories of Circling. No Circling school’s own pages mention it. | A resemblance: Circling’s histories don’t name it, though Deep Relating, an offshoot, says it grew from both. |
| Setting | A practice, not a treatment; its schools say they don’t offer therapy. | A therapy: someone works on themselves with a therapist, one to one, in a group or at a workshop.Different from Circling | A method in therapy, and a peer practice in pairs and walk-in groups.Partly the same |
| Aim | The connection itself, with nothing to fix. | Awareness of what you do and how you do it. In the founding book, the here and now is the method, not the goal.Partly the same | To let an unclear bodily sense of a situation come into words that fit.Different from Circling |
| Attention | What is happening between people, moment by moment. | The client’s experience as it happens, above all how they make and break contact, and the old patterns alive in it.Partly the same | Inward, to one’s own felt sense.Different from Circling |
| How people speak | Owning experience, staying with sensation, telling people how they affect you. | In the present, saying “I”, to people rather than about them, down to what the body feels.Same as in Circling | Words come from the felt sense and are checked against it.Partly the same |
| The leader | Takes part, and says what they notice and feel. | In Perls’s hot seat, works with one person while the group listens; in later, dialogic Gestalt, also shares their own experience.Partly the same | The companion listens and reflects back what they hear.Different from Circling |
| Evidence | One ethnography and two student theses; no controlled trial. | Thin. Few studies test full Gestalt therapy on its own, and the main review of its family pools it with psychodrama. | Deeper experiencing, which Focusing trains, goes with better therapy outcomes. |
| Risks | Not yet studied. | We found no study of harm in Gestalt groups as such. The best-known study of 1960s groups tied harm to a style of leading, not to a school. | We found no study of harm. |
| To borrow | Not applicable. | Its rules for speaking, as a way to code what people say in recorded circles. | The Experiencing Scale, an established measure of how deeply people work with their experience. |