Yuliia Zhelezniakova

EAGT certified gestalt therapist. Supervisor. Trainer. Psychosomatologist. PhD in psychology, associate professor

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Instead of endlessly looking for causes in the past, gestalt focuses on how I organise my life right now. That gives real instruments for change, because you can only work with what is available to awareness in the present moment.

The central idea of gestalt is how we interact with the world around us. Therapy teaches you to notice where we interrupt contact — through fear or shame, for instance — and how we can build more honest and deeper relationships with other people while remaining ourselves.

Issues Yuliia works with:

• relationships and closeness

• the body, psychosomatics and emotions

• choice, responsibility and crises

• self-esteem, identity and visibility

• money, sufficiency and the right to receive

• guilt, shame and self-forgiveness

Training in psychotherapy: Kyiv Gestalt University, gestalt therapist.

Lead trainer: Svitlana Pokhodenko and the senior trainers of KGU (levels one and two).

Level three, «Working with groups in the gestalt approach». Teaching supervisors, international GATLA trainers: Jay Levin (USA), Irena Holuba (Latvia), Anna Tanalska-Duleba (Poland), Olha Dolhopolova, Oleksandr Yeremeiev (Kyrgyzstan).

Level four, «Theory and practice. Supervision of the therapist’s work». Teaching supervisors: KIGiP director Nataliia Turbovets and international GATLA trainer Jay Levin (USA).

Higher education: Classic Private University. Degree in Psychology, qualification «Psychologist, lecturer in higher education».

Postgraduate study. Defended a dissertation for the degree of Candidate of Psychological Sciences (Ivano-Frankivsk, Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University: «The feeling of loneliness as a factor in addictive behaviour in adolescents»).

Specialisations in psychotherapy:

• Theory and supervision course «Psychosomatic medicine — the art of the possible», Ukrainian Union of Psychotherapists (UUP)

• Institute of Higher Psychology and Body Therapies, «Propaedeutics of psychiatry»

• Zaporizhzhia State Medical and Pharmaceutical Institute of Postgraduate Education, «Clinical psychology»

• Wesleyan University, «A somatic and cognitive approach to processing traumatic experience in soldiers»

• Wesleyan University, «Somatic and psychosomatic decompression for building stress resilience in the military»

• USAID, «Running psychological support groups in practice»

• Ukrainian Union of Psychotherapists (UUP), «Depressive personality disorder and psychosomatics»

Yuliia about herself and about gestalt: Having travelled a considerable distance in the gestalt approach, I see its main value in gaining wholeness. It is a process in which we learn to make out our own voice in the noise of other people’s expectations.

What matters to me is helping a person not merely to see what they lack, but to find that «creative adjustment» which turns bare existence into a life of one’s own authorship.