Migrant as Exile: Moving across thresholds in search of ‘home’ in Gestalt group therapy – Speaker: Billy Desmond
We come into the world moving. Our animating self is in motion for the duration of our lives. As human beings we are continually in a state of migrating as we move across thresholds in the process of navigating different life stages, and relational, cultural, social and political experiences. The migrant is a person in motion where a unique phenomenological experience of exile is co-emergent at the thresholds of the social-cultural and relational fields. The experience of the queer person who is migrating is one where ‘home’ was a place of ‘exile’, not necessarily a place of belonging. Exile emerges of and from a shuddering of community and groups evoking suffering and hope as a contact-boundary phenomenon in the therapeutic situation. The migrant leaves ‘home’ exiled from their group but continues to dwell in the world, a world of relatedness that is being co- created in the interaction of a tactile, kinetic, kinesthetic lived body with the environment. It is proposed that Gestalt therapists need to foster an embodied, hermeneutic phenomenological field orientation, a stance of embodied hospitality, when working in groups to support the exiling experience being transformed.