Gestalt Psychotherapy
The historical roots of Gestalt Psychotherapy
Gestalt Psychotherapy is a psychotherapy practice which originated from Germany. In the 1930’s Fritz Perls, and his wife, Laura Perls began to develop the approach which was later formalized with John Goodman with the publication of the seminal text, Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. The authors observed the postwar years of the mid-20th century as being saturated with consumerism, mass industrialization and rigid anti-communism. They saw the danger of how classic analytical forms of psychotherapy could become a tool for conformism and social passivity. Rather, the Founders had a vision in which psychotherapy would restore its place as a primary agent for human freedom, social progressivism and a new potential for deeper passion, meaning and human satisfaction.
“the Founders had a vision in which psychotherapy would restore its place as a primary agent for human freedom, social progressivism and a new potential for deeper passion, meaning and human satisfaction”
Gestalt Psychotherapy is a holistic, humanistic therapy that believes that people are born with the resources and abilities to lead a rewarding and creative life and to make meaningful and fulfilling contact with others.
GESTALT PSYCHOTHERAPY IS DYNAMIC, POWERFUL AND LIFE CHANGING.
We make sense of the world by interacting with our environment, selecting, interpreting and organizing whole pictures of what is happening. We then base our behavior or actions on this organized picture. This process often occurs automatically without any conscious awareness such as driving a vehicle as an experienced driver. Or it can sometimes occur more consciously where we are interpreting, evaluating, making decisions and taking action with awareness such as driving a vehicle as a learner driver.
As we grow throughout childhood, and sometimes in our adult life, our experiences can sometimes be too overwhelming, or perhaps our emotional needs are not being met for example. So, rather than feeling the enormity of the situation because we don’t quite yet have the support to feel it, or to receive the emotional support we seek, we adjust to the situation by creatively managing it. In Gestalt Psychotherapy, these adjustments are called, creative adjustments. At times, these creative adjustments are completely out of our awareness and yet can still be influencing our lives significantly if they become a fixed way of being and responding to the world.
In Gestalt Psychotherapy, we support you to bring more awareness into how you are doing your life in the here-and-now. As you increase your awareness of how you are doing your life, you will begin to understand why you do life this particular way. With this awareness and understanding, you are able to more fully love and accept yourself as you are now and you can then begin to make changes in your life as you desire.
How I work with you
Fundamentally, Gestalt Psychotherapy is premised in the relational. That means that the relationship between the client and the therapist is pivotal. Once a relationship has developed between the client and therapist, the therapeutic relationship becomes a safe container, in which you have the opportunity to deconstruct tightly integrated behaviors (for example, creative adjustments) that have become very much unconscious or conscious but we feel we are powerless to change. Through the therapeutic relationship you increase awareness of how you do life, access greater meaning and knowledge of self to allow you to enjoy greater freedom and joy.
As a Gestalt Psychotherapist, I employ a holistic view of you and consider all aspects of mind, body, emotion, past and present circumstances, spiritual, cultural, economic and political influences as potentially relevant. This holistic perspective holds that we are always in relationship with others, being shaped (with or without presence) and shaping, and we are always influenced by the weight of our historical relational memories.
Gestalt Psychotherapy is phenomenological. Put simply, phenomenology is a method where both the client and the therapist investigate the client’s subjective meaning and experience as it is, in the here-and-now. In other words, as a therapist, I stay as close to your experience as possible, without interpretation, to support you to explore and increase awareness of how you make meaning and sense of the world. One way of increasing awareness is through the exploration of your physical experience or bodily awareness. Bodily awareness is when we are able to notice things about our body which may include for example, the pace of our breath or if we hold our breath at different times, how our muscles may tense, how we hold our body in time and space to name a few. Bodily awareness supports you to move closer to the direct experience of a situation, rather than a perceived experience and is a powerful way to let go of unhelpful patterns of thoughts and behavior.
GESTALT PSYCHOTHERAPY IS EXPERIENTIAL AND, WITH YOUR CONSENT, WE MIGHT EXPERIMENT, WITHIN THE SAFE CONTAINER OF THE THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP, WITH DIFFERENT WAYS OF BEING IN THE WORLD.
This could be as simple as asking you to say something louder, slower, quieter for example or using your breath in different ways. Using experiments is a profound way of uncovering unconscious patterns which can lead to some “ah ha” moments and experiencing a different way of being in this world.