About this Film Screening

This is a couples therapy training workshop, aimed at helping people have more nourishing, enduring and successful marriages and other primary relationships.

The focus for this workshop is to explore and question the universally accepted paradigm that we must “fuse together” in order to be in a successful intimate relationship.

In many western countries more than 55% of all first marriages end in divorce as do approximately 75% of second marriages. Add to this what we call the remaining “secretly miserably married”– those living lives of quiet desperation based on fear of being alone, fear of damaging the children, financial insecurity, religious doctrine, social stigma, etc. — and we begin to see the magnitude of the problem.

In this workshop Rita & Bob Resnick will explore the concept that the modern idea of marriage and long-term partnerships needs to evolve – because the fusion model of yesteryear is toxic for todays’s relationships.

They will also look at the LGBTQI community and the fact that it is both blessed and cursed with the reality that there is no institutionalized, fixed model of primary relationships. Many LGBTQI couples resort to some version of the heterosexual fusion model of “two become one” – soon discovering that just as these models don’t work very well for heterosexual couples, they work even less well for same sex primary relationships.

This workshop is about looking at Relationships from a Fusion Model to a Connection Model.

ABOUT ROBERT W. RESNICK, PH.D

Robert (Bob), has been a Gestalt and Couples Therapist for 50 years and an international trainer for 45 years.

Trained (1965-1970) and personally certified (1969) by Drs. Fritz Perls and James Simkin, he is the youngest of the “old timers”. Dr. Resnick was chosen by Fritz Perls to be the first Gestalt Therapist to introduce Gestalt Therapy to Europe in the summer of 1969 where he presented both a lecture and a training workshop.

He has been presenting Gestalt and Couples training workshops in Europe and worldwide continually since that time. His interview “Gestalt Therapy: Principles Prisms and Perspectives” defining his views of Gestalt Therapy at that time, appears in the summer 1995 issue of the British Gestalt Journal. “The Recursive Loop of Shame” appears in the Gestalt Review 1997. “Chicken Soup Is Poison” (Perls Festschrift) circa 1967.

He is currently screening a series of contemporary Couples Therapy and Gestalt Therapy video demonstration and training fims. His first clinical practicum (while moonlighting as a Columbia University graduate student) was driving a New York taxicab.

Bob’s style is warm and engaging and he speaks with clarity and humour. And yes, the Resnicks are frequently happily married.

ABOUT RITA RESNICK, PH.D

Rita has been Faculty Chair of GATLA’s European Summer Residential Training Program since 1991.

In addition to her private practice, Rita is actively training psychotherapists in the United States, Australia and Europe in both Gestalt and Couples Therapy. Her professional interests include the exploration of innovative and supportive approaches to supervision (Rita has published an article with Liv Estrup, M.A. “Supervision: A Collaborative Endeavor”(Gestalt Review, Vol. 4, No. 2) and a devoted, passionate (and self serving) interest in the area of women growing older – menopause and mid-life vitality.

An interview on Contemporary Gestalt Therapy with Rita and Robert Resnick has recently been published in the Tidskrift For Norsk Psykologforening – the Norwegian Journal for Psychologists.

The Resnick’s are frequently happily married.