Review on “Positive conflicts” Training Course

Erasmus+ Training Course
July 21th – 29th 2021 I Cortemilia, Italy

European Cultural Epicenter Bitola in cooperation with our partners from Italy and The Netherlands have organized a training course for Gestalt Therapy in Cascina di Monteoliveto (Cortemilia, Italy). The training course was attended by 24 participants from Macedonia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Slovenia, Greece, Spain, France and Serbia.

The training course was an opportunity for youth organizations to explore concepts more deeply and to improve conflict resolution capacities while promoting civic participation of young people in their communities.

The training used a methodology that reconstructs the daily conflict situations in which the participants can meet and connect with the conflict situations in which they can find themselves daily and become aware of the causes of the conflict and possible solutions.

The Theater Experience seeks to create spaces of trust where participants can play different roles they acquire and build characters from improvisation. Part of the methodology is recreating daily conflicts with the objective of stimulating the emotional memory of the participant, to help them reconnect with real life situations where conflict management is still blocked and thus to become aware of where the problem is and of course how to fix it and what tools are needed for that. Experience Theater helps participants to analyse their own strategies (conscious and unconscious) to address conflict situations, how to extract lessons from them and how to help others to experience the same learning process.

The trainng course have provided the participants opportunity to better understand themselves in order to better understand the others (through facing their own inner conflicts, they will be better able to understand others’ conflicts). As core benefits for the participants (most of them were youth workers working with young people with fewer opportunities) were developing their skills in the area of prevention, resolution and conflict transformation. The participants acquired skills for dealing with causes of conflict, promoted diversity, intercultural dialogue through democracy, tolerance and respect for human rights, and acquired competencies for resolving conflicts such as emotional skills, empathy and assertiveness.