Gestalt therapy is about presence — showing up to what you're actually feeling, not what you think you should feel. I've been learning about it as a practice, not just a concept.
In early 2026 I went deep: a course on the Gestalt approach to therapy and living at the Bay Area Gestalt Institute, and Stanford's How to Think Like a Shrink (PSYC 230). Alongside the courses, I interviewed dozens of working therapists to understand the field from the inside — I started the year with zero therapist friends and ended it with a few close ones.
The reason I went this deep: for years, friends and even acquaintances have confided in me about their personal problems without my trying to be useful, and kept telling me the attention I bring to conversations is rare. I wanted to know whether that was a real, buildable skill — so I tested it the way I'd test a product: take the courses, interview the practitioners, and see what holds up.
What it left me with is now load-bearing in how I build. Listening without an agenda is a skill, and it's exactly what user interviews for Folia demand — PCOS is emotionally loaded, and presence is what gets people to tell you the truth about their day instead of what they think you want to hear.