Gestalt Publishing Ltd Director Helen (Tal) Moss interviews Sonny Hallett ahead of British Gestalt Journal's Autumn 2026 Seminar Day - Neurodivergence, queerness & storytelling.
You are warmly invited to join us for the British Gestalt Journal’s Autumn 2026 Seminar Day — an online gathering for practitioners across all modalities, trainees, and anyone curious about deepening their relational work.
Whatever makes us different – whether we are neurodivergent or neurotypical, cis or trans, our cultural backgrounds or individual experiences – our lives are shaped by stories. These stories can oppress and invalidate, but they can also liberate and forge connections. What stories have we been told, what stories do we live by, and what stories can we tell with our clients? Participants will be invited to explore the stories that make up our lives, and that can limit or expand our imaginations and sensitivities.
The first half of the day will focus on exploring normative expectations, the stories we tell about therapy, and their impact on minoritised clients and therapists, as well as the broader impacts on all of us. The second half will take some of these ideas further, with opportunities to experiment and play with different ways of telling, reclaiming, and reimagining those stories.
Neurodivergence, queerness and storytelling with Sonny Hallett
Saturday 7 November, 11am - 4.30pm
Online, via Zoom
Interview transcript
Hi, Sonny. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me ahead of the British Gestalt Journal seminar day, which will take place online on Saturday, 7th November. I've really been looking forward to this conversation with you.
Glad to be here.
I first got to know you through your writing: your essays on autism, gender, nature, and what it means not to really fit the shapes we're handed made a big impact on me as a clinician. You're a person-centred counsellor, supervisor, and trainer based in Edinburgh, working predominantly with clients and supervisees who are neurodivergent, queer, or who have other intersecting minoritised experiences.
I think it's that combination, writing and ideas, that sit with difference, and your clinical work built around it, which is a big part of why we at the BDJ were so glad you agreed to facilitate this upcoming autumn seminar day for us. So I have a few questions for you, hopefully that will give us a flavour of the day.
I believe that intersectionality will be a central theme, so my first question is, how do you understand that term in relation to neurodivergence and queerness, specifically?
Yeah, thank you, that's an important question. I think it's something that I've had to repeatedly remind myself of, is that intersectionality as a concept still needs a lot more understanding in the broader community, because it's a really important concept. So, I feel it's important to say that the roots of the idea of intersectionality is about oppression, so it's about the ways in which oppressed groups experience oppression, and if your experience is being part of multiple oppressed groups, then your experience of oppression is going to be different, and it's going to be impacted by the fact that you're at that intersection.
Having said that, I think beyond… well, it's not really beyond oppression, but sort of, in a broader sense, intersectionality is also really important to understand, because what we're sort of saying is, if you're part of multiple experiences, multiple communities, then your experience is going to be different than being from only just one of those communities. Our queerness and neurodivergence, I think, are both somewhat… they are overlapping and connected terms to me, because they are both, describing ways of being different from an expected norm. So, when you are both neurodivergent in whatever way, and queer, then your experience is going to be really different, right? And also, if you're multiple types of queer, or multiple types of neurodivergent, then your experience is going to be different than just one simple story. So we're already talking about stories here, and I'm setting this up for the theme of our day. So I think to me, intersectionality is a great way to start to think about complexity.
And maybe to take away some of the overwhelm, hopefully, of complexity, of going, oh, what do I do with all of these different labels and identities? It's like, well, we're just telling a slightly different story.
Yes, I love that. I think that really brings me on to the next question that I had, because you talk about overwhelm there, and I think that it can be overwhelming for some clinicians to think about these labels, and so I wanted to ask who the workshop is for, and is there anything you'd say to someone who worries this isn't my area, I don't really have very much knowledge? What would you say?
Please come! You know, this is important to me, this is important to everyone, because we, every single being on this planet, certainly humans, are impacted by the normative stories that we tell. And, I guess, in a way, for those of us who are minoritised, I don't want us to call it a privilege, but, I've not been able to look away from the ways in which I don't fit the norm, it was always very apparent to me that I don't fit. But that has also meant that I've spent a lot of time, and I have a lot of experience having to tell different stories, or trying to interrogate the stories that I was told about how to be a person. And, in a way, that means that it's familiar territory for me. For people who haven't, sort of, had to interrogate that, it can be really difficult and scary, both telling new stories for themselves, looking at the ways in which norms impact them. I remember talking to somebody at one point, a cis person, who, you know, hadn't thought about what it was like to not be cis, and to start to think about it was actually quite a frightening process. So I think it's a challenge, and it's a really important one, and for us, both as individuals, because we're all oppressed by normative expectations. All of us. And also for us in supporting our clients, it can be such an important process to go through, to start to go, hang on, which stories am I telling myself? Which stories am I telling my clients? What stories are we telling together? That's really important.
Yes, definitely. And I love how you're framing it around storytelling. That's going to be a big element of the workshop. Yes, I had a couple of questions around storytelling. One is around using a narrative lens and what you feel that provides for us in our client work that other framings might not?
I was thinking about… because you sent me a sneak preview of these questions, so I'm not just being super articulate in the moment. I'm not sure I'm being that articulate, but I was quite excited by this question, because, sort of cheekily, I want to say, I'm not saying that it's providing something that's different from other… because it's just another way of telling a story, right? Every way of approaching something is a story. And I could see somebody listening to this and going, well, that's just another… that's very broad then, you're just kind of using a word. For me, storytelling makes sense of something. It's not just saying that we have a narrative… we're finding a way to describe what's happening. It's also giving us an opportunity to take some control and agency over the story, so we can go, okay, well, this is a narrative, can we change it? Do we want to change it? We're also going, wait, this is a narrative, what does that mean? Like, we can be curious about it, we can ask questions about it. And I think it helps us to step back a little bit, and to both look at where we sit in this narrative and the broader context of the stories that we're telling.
So, to me, it's a lens that works for me. I sort of think sometimes of how I think about…
because when I was training – I did an integrative training with a sort of person-centered core – and something I realised when I looked at… when we looked at all of these different modalities was, oh, each of them is actually telling a story about how people are, and how people grow, and how people change. And a lot of the stories are describing very similar things in different ways. So what I say to, prospective supervisees, for example, now, particularly if they don't share a modality with me, is I say, “the person-centered approach is a story that I feel I have the most space in to grow and that I'm able to be myself as a practitioner. That might not be your story. That might be a different one”. And I guess, that's why using a narrative metaphor, if you like, or an approach makes sense to me. It might not make sense to you, but my invitation, I guess, on the seminar day is to try it on for size, see if it works. And if it doesn't, maybe you need to tell a different kind of story, maybe you need a different framework altogether, and that's okay.
Yes, that sounds exciting. I can imagine this creating some discussion in the Gestalt community, where we do have a focus on the meaning-making that clients do, and that we do with clients.
I was looking again at the workshop description, where you talk about stories, and you mention experimenting with different ways of telling, reclaiming, and reimagining stories, which is something you've been kind of introducing us to. But I don't know if it's possible to give us a little taster of what that might look like in the workshop?
Yeah, so I'd like to give a little bit of a description of ways that I sort of apply that, and then maybe I can give a bit of an example. So, one of the ways I apply it is I think about what stories we tell about – I go a bit meta – what stories we tell about therapy, about who we are as therapists, and what we're doing when we're doing therapy. And for me, I find that, on a personal level, quite useful, because it reminds me of what my responsibility is, in a way. So I see myself as a collaborator in the story unfolding for my client, you know, and that might mean that my client tells the story and I listen. It might mean that I go, “and then what? And then what happens?” It might mean that I go, “wait, so the dragon goes into the cave? And then what happens? Like, and then who goes in there with them?” So, there's something about what level of collaboration is there for me? And the bit that, for me, in terms of my approach, is I try not to tell the story for my client, and I try not to get in their way.
So, this doesn't give so much of a preview, but it's capturing some of how I use storytelling to think about therapy. And once we sort of start thinking about it, like, as our idea of who a therapist is as a protagonist, we can start playing with it, right? And what therapy is as a context, we can start playing with it. So we can say, well, once upon a time, there was a therapy session, and it didn't last 50 minutes. What does that mean, right? And why didn’t it last 50 minutes? Why did it go longer? What, you know, what's the reason? Who are the characters? What are we getting from this story? And we can start playing with the form of the session, what we do, what therapy means, what the therapist's motivations are, and I think it can help us to sort of challenge some of the dominating ideas around therapy as well. We can start to say, well, okay. Why do we do therapy like this, and who does it serve? Who is telling the story? And why is it that they only get to tell the story?
The other half of how I'm answering your question is sort of more in a practical sense, something I quite enjoy doing is… storytelling gives us an opportunity to be creative and to play, and I think that that allows us to… it can give us an opportunity to meet each other, in a way that we might not get to, if we're just kind of… I kind of want to say, directly talking, I can't quite find the right description for it.
So… an example of that might be, I think that there are lots of stories around the way we talk about emotions, for example, or feeling states. So, there are stories around who's allowed to be angry? How much? In response to what? What kinds of anger are acceptable? There's stories around how long you're allowed to be sad for, and in response to what? And I sometimes think that, well, okay, so if we already have stories around these feeling states and words, why don't we just tell the story without the word?
So one of the things we might do, I'm still in the process of planning the day, but is to potentially play with how do we describe a feeling without the feeling word? And how can we help each other to get closer to meeting on that feeling, to understanding each other's feeling without the feeling word?
I hope that's sort of… so that's one way we might play with it. A game I play with myself, and with clients sometimes, that we might also play with a little bit is, instead of a feeling, is to sort of take a situation and turn it into a story. So, an example of that for me, I was writing a talk a few years ago, and I was really, really stuck. And I thought, well… okay, what is the situation? I kind of, like… it's a bit like I'm stuck in… a wet clay urn. And I can't get out of it.
And then I thought, well, okay, once upon a time, there was a writer who was stuck in a wet clay urn, and they couldn't get out. What did they do? They started pushing at the walls. And… at some point, they made a hole in the wall. And I'm like, oh, there's a new hole! There's another entry point, and air is coming in, and it's really nice, and it feels cool. And at that point I sat up and I thought, oh, I'm wearing a jumper and I'm too hot. I need to take my jumper off, this is very uncomfortable. And… and I also thought, wait, I'm feeling too constrained in this piece I'm writing, and maybe I need to come at it from a different angle. And that's an example of, like, I think I needed to step away and tell a story away from the sort of literal reality of what I was doing, to help me figure out if there were other solutions that were possible.
So, I need to do a bit more thinking about how we're gonna do some of this, but this gives you an idea of the kinds of play we hopefully will do on the day.
Oh, it sounds amazing. I can feel real energy in my body when I'm hearing you talk. And it sounds like there'll be opportunities to kind of, yeah, play, get involved practically, you know, it's not just going to be talking, so that sounds great.
Yeah, and I should say, you know, storytelling isn't just words. There are lots of ways to tell stories without words. I mean, if you think about, like, what is it? Like, a picture tells a thousand words or something, so… Yeah, there's lots of ways of telling stories.
Yes. Just to move us on a little bit, there was a question that I had about the word “queer” that you use in the workshop title, because I know that for some people, that's a kind of reclaimed, expansive term, and for others, it's still problematic, so I thought it might be good to just, ask you how you're using it and what it means to you.
Yes, thank you for that. For me, it is… I'm using it in the reclaimed, expansive sense. And I think… I guess what I would add to that is, to me, it's analogous to neurodivergent in that – I think I said this a bit earlier – but it describes what it means to be outside of the expected norm. So, to me, it describes the social situation, not an objective, physical, incontrovertible reality, if that makes sense. I know that some people also dislike the term neurodivergent for different reasons, but about, kind of, feeling like that it describes diverging, and it means, like, that it could mean abnormal. And to me, it's true there isn't such a thing as an objective normal, but society insists that there is. So, to me, it is really important that we have words where we can describe that experience of being told that we are different, and that we are not what people expect. Because we have to acknowledge that context in our lived realities. We can't pretend that that's not true. We can fight against it. But in order to fight against it, we need to describe that experience. So that's what queer and neurodivergent mean to me. They're… I think they're quite important, for me. And at the same time, I can understand the hurt that they might carry for other people as well. And I think that's a difficult thing in our communities, the hurt is also relevant in terms of that experience of being different, right? And I think reclaiming is, in disabled communities as well, and mad communities, that process of reclaiming is really important, but it's not easy.
Yes, yeah, I agree. Thank you so much for going into that and explaining it, that feels really important.
So, is there anything else you'd like people to know before they book a ticket about you, maybe about the day, or what to bring, literally or otherwise?
I guess… maybe what I'd like to say is something that I say before trainings that I run quite a bit is that I'd like it to be, as much as possible, an accessible space. And for me, that means that we don't have to tell the story of a typical training, right? Like, maybe that is a thing that I could potentially challenge folks to think about in advance, is: what is the story that you have about how you must attend, how you must dress, for example, or be in a space like this?
And, does that have to be true? Because I'm okay with people moving around and having a snack. I mean, just turn the mic off, you know, or make sure that your camera's not flashing, but that's about how we look after each other, right? But, yes, attend to your needs, do some doodling. So my invitation is: tell a different story with how you need to show up, so that you can be comfortable.
That's great, thank you so much.
You're very welcome. I'm looking forward to it.
Yes, me too. And this has been such a great conversation. I think even in this short space of time, I've got such a good idea of what you'll be bringing, and how much depth you'll bring too. So, I hope that everyone watching this also feels just as much energy, and will join us on the 7th of November for “Neurodivergence, Queerness, and Storytelling”, and to spend the day learning with you, Sonny.
I hope to see you there.