Drugs, Lies and Email Groups

• Gestalt Therapy and Mental Health Care: Part 1 by Brian O'Neill, 11/3/96
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    • Little white lies... by Dale R. Smith, 7/19/97
      
      

Dale,

Hello again. I have already been accused, by someone who is now a friend, of being an unreliable correspondant via email. My answer then was ... sometimes I'm unreliable and sometimes I'm not. This time with you I have been very slow to respond and seem to have offended you... Is this so? My slowness in responding was not related to you or your posting but to a number of issues for me at the moment.

I spent the week before last in Sydney running a Dual Disorder program and while I have also been busy this week I have felt very withdrawn with all my email messages, including this list, and not felt the urge to write. Yesterday I emailed a friend about doing a panel about the internet at a conference... and paradoxically said that I'll write to him later as I feel jaded and withdrawn at present with internet communication.

Also I will be saying goodbye to this forum soon and will be replaced by Joe Wysong of the Gestalt Journal. I hope to be setting up a new forum here at BOL on Substance Abuse and Dual Disorder, so your comments and postings would be most welcome there.

The other reality of these forums is that they remind me of fishing. I post a letter and wait for a reply and sometimes I get an immediate response and sometimes none and sometimes they come a week or two later. I find email groups to be quicker and more responsive.

Reading your second post about Gestalt Therapy and the 1st Step of AA reminded me of the Borg in Star Trek were they all have a single identity .... I had not made this discrimination before ..... that this is not I but we. I need to consider this more but I cannot yet grasp what you are saying.

I agree with your current post that to work in a gestalt approach with anyone requires an appreciation of them and the broader field of their disorder. I have been challenged from time to time on my potential inability to work with people because I hadn't abused the substance they had. This judgement is usually made without any understanding or knowledge of me or my background and frequently by stereotyping me in someway as straight or naive. As with all of us, there1s a lot more to me than meets the eye!

Now if you ARE annoyed with me about being slow to respond, then the best way to punish me is to keep calling me MR O'Neill :-)

As for rudeness well my initial response to that is along the lines of what I've posted here on thie forum on aggression and spontanaeity. I believe if my rudeness to you is I - It, then no gestalt approach. However if my rudeness is I - Thou, then gestalt approach. In other words if I am spontaneously rude with a sense of responsibilty for what might be next then I sense this is rudeness in the field, in relationship... just a bit of theory though... what do you think?

Brian

• We have engaged the Borg... by Dale R. Smith, 7/23/97