About Us: our ethos
The Gestalt Centre Belfast is committed to creating an understanding of psychotherapy as an approach for helping us to live more satisfactorily by exploring our lives and relationships.
While of course, psychotherapy has a specific role to play in the field of mental health, equally important is its crucial role in fostering a general sense of well-being.
Each of us lives in a complex web of relationships. We believe that the purpose of psychotherapy is to support and enhance those relationships, whether intimate or social.
GCB is committed to supporting the development of health by which we mean:
- acknowledging how we came to be the way we are, and what current needs arise out of that
- the capacity to live through and learn from difficult experiences
- an understanding of how we impact on those around us
- the openness to being influenced and experience change
- the capacity to act and influence the world around us to effect change
- and to do so at all levels of human functioning (intimate, social and in the wider field of political life).
GCB maintains that affordable, accessible and needs-based psychotherapy is rooted in social justice. GCB is committed to good practice in regards to equality and inclusion. In the context of Belfast, the north of Ireland and Ireland as a whole, GCB aims to develop an understanding of the relationships of oppression – including inequality, emigration, poverty, the absence of social justice and issues of cultural identity.
GCB agrees with the World Health Organisation’s definition of Mental Health and Well-being in their fact sheet, 'Mental Health: strengthening our response'. GCB abides by the BACP’s Ethical Framework for the Counselling Professions (2018).
To quote the WHO: "An environment that respects and protects basic civil, political, socio-economic and cultural rights is fundamental to mental health. Without the security and freedom provided by these rights, it is difficult to maintain a high level of mental health."
