Gestalt therapy

How it connects to Circling

Two histories written by practitioners name Gestalt among Circling’s early influences. Adam Coutts lists Fritz Perls’s Gestalt work on presence among the influences of the 1960s human potential movement, next to Carl Rogers’s encounter groups, and the Circling Guide lists Gestalt among the approaches that inspired the early practice. Both are practitioners’ own accounts; no Circling school’s own pages mention Gestalt. The resemblance shows first in the vocabulary. Gary Yontef and James Simkin sum up Gestalt’s method as the meeting of I and Thou, attention to what and how, and the here and now. Claudio Naranjo titled an early essay on Gestalt “I and Thou, Here and Now”. Jason Digges recalls a version of the phrase as the mantra of the early T-groups and says Circling’s ground rules mirror it, though we found no T-group source that uses it.

The setting: a hot seat and a birthday circle

Gestalt therapy is a therapy. It is practised one to one, with couples and families, and in groups, workshops and growth centres (Yontef and Simkin). In every form someone is working on themselves with a therapist. At Esalen in the 1960s Fritz Perls introduced the hot seat (O’Leary). A group member who wants to work on something sits with the therapist, and the two work together, for twenty minutes on average, while the others stay silent. Afterwards the others tell the person how the work affected them, what they noticed, and what in their own lives is similar. By the 1980s, Yontef and Simkin report, Gestalt groups were doing less one-to-one work and more with what happens between members, and the one-to-one work had come to include awareness work with no problem attached.

A birthday circle has a similar outline: one person at the centre for a set time, and in some formats a closing round of impact from the others. What happens inside is different. Nobody is there to be fixed, the others speak throughout, and the leader holds the frame while speaking from their own experience too. Two of Circling’s schools say it isn’t therapy: the Circling Institute leaves psychotherapy to licensed professionals, and Transformational Connection, the successor to Circling Europe, calls its method educational. The Circling Institute’s page on the International Circling Federation’s site does describe an advanced stage of its training as a way into coaching or therapy.

Aim

Gestalt aims at awareness: that clients notice what they do and how they do it, and come to accept themselves as they are (Yontef and Simkin). Change is meant to grow out of that awareness, not to be pushed for. Arnold Beisser’s essay puts the paradox at the method’s heart: people change by becoming fully what they are, so the therapist gives up trying to change them. Circling shares the refusal. The Circling Institute says it gives no advice and doesn’t try to fix anyone.

Where the two can part is in what the present moment is for. Introducing the 1994 edition of the founding book, Isadore From and Michael Vincent Miller stress that the here and now tells therapist and patient where to put their attention, so that both can see where contact breaks down; the book offered it as a method of therapy, not as a way of life. They write this as a correction. By their account, the best-known Gestalt of the 1960s had become a way of life known simply as Gestalt, with the word therapy dropped, and Perls’s later work and the mood of the decade made it look like a teaching about living in the moment. That is the period, and the Perls, that Coutts names. On our reading, Circling sits closer to that Gestalt than to the book’s: being present with another person is the point, and it isn’t offered as therapy.

Where attention goes

Gestalt follows the client’s experience as it happens, and above all how they make and break contact, which in the founding book means the meeting of a person with their surroundings, other people included. The present is often a way into old patterns of character and development. In one of Yontef and Simkin’s examples, a woman in a Gestalt group says she is angry with a man in the room; the therapist follows the anger, and it leads to her father.

A circle attends to the same moment in another way. Attention stays on what is happening between the people present, the circlers’ own experience included. Stories are allowed, the Circling Guide notes, but the Circling Institute describes the facilitator’s job as holding, not steering: staying with what comes up instead of moving it on.

How people speak

This is where the two are closest. The rules of Gestalt groups ask people to speak in the present; to address one another directly, as an I to a Thou; to say “I” rather than “it”; to follow their awareness down to what the body feels; not to talk about someone present instead of to them; and to say what lies behind a question. Circling Europe’s principles of owning your experience and staying with the level of sensation restate two of these, and Authentic Relating’s practice of revealing what you notice restates a third. Speaking to people rather than about them is simply how a circle runs. The difference is who keeps the rules: in Levitsky and Perls’s account they are asked of the client, while in a circle everyone keeps them, the leader included.

The rules came with games (Levitsky and Perls; Yontef and Simkin): talking with a part of yourself, or with someone absent imagined in an empty chair; exaggerating a gesture; finishing unfinished business; going round the group saying the same sentence to each person; working with dreams. They are experiments the therapist proposes, to sharpen awareness. On our reading, Circling kept the rules and left the games: a circle sets up no experiments like these.

The leader

In the hot seat the therapist worked with one person while the group listened. By the 1980s many Gestalt therapists had moved towards dialogue (Yontef and Simkin). Yontef and Simkin call the relationship horizontal, unlike the usual one between therapist and patient, and name four marks of dialogue. Inclusion: entering the other’s experience as fully as possible, without judging or interpreting it, while remaining yourself. Presence: the therapist shares their own observations, feelings and experience. Commitment to dialogue: letting contact happen between the two instead of steering it. And dialogue that is lived rather than talked about.

Three of these marks have close counterparts in Circling: being with the other in their world; a leader who takes part and says what they notice; and a commitment to the connection that, in a Surrendered Leadership circle, binds the leader too. The difference that remains is the patient. Gestalt therapy, Yontef and Simkin write, centres on the patient, as every therapy does; in a circle nobody is the patient. Their account was in a standard psychotherapy textbook in the 1980s, years before Circling began. No source we found links the two.

Evidence, and what it doesn’t show about Circling

Gestalt therapy’s own evidence is thin. The largest recent review of its family of therapies reports Gestalt only pooled with psychodrama: 17 samples, with change from the start of therapy to its end of d = .78. The family as a whole did about as well as other therapies. A 2026 evidence map by a Gestalt researcher finds that the field now has evidence but can draw few firm conclusions from it; only 9 of its 40 main outcome reports clearly tested full Gestalt therapy. None of this is evidence about Circling. It concerns therapy for clinical problems, and Among the therapies explains why such findings don’t carry over.

Known risks

We found no study of harm in Gestalt groups as such. The best-known study of harm in groups of that era, Stanford’s study of 1960s encounter groups, had two Gestalt leaders among its eighteen. Sixteen of the 170 students who finished were left with lasting harm, most often under forceful, charismatic leaders, and a leader’s school said little about how they actually led. An early account placed both Gestalt leaders in the riskiest style (Smith); Yalom later wrote that the two were no more alike in how they led than any other pair. One finding carries over directly: the leaders were poor judges of who had been hurt, and the other members were better ones.

What research could borrow

• The rules as a coding scheme. In a recorded circle, how many turns are in the present tense, in “I” language, addressed to the person? Comparing newcomers with experienced participants would show whether the rules are followed or only recited (Authenticity as a social script).
• The hot seat as a comparison. The two formats share an outline, so setting one against the other isolates a single ingredient: whether the group takes part throughout or speaks only at the end (Active ingredients).
• Beisser’s claim as a hypothesis. Does attention without a push for change lead to more change than feedback aimed at it (A controlled trial of Circling)?
• The casualty method. Ask the other members, not only the facilitator, who had a hard time (Safety, facilitation and harm).