GESTALT
THERAPY
COUNSELING THEORIES -- EPSY 6363
DR. SPARROW
Background
• We have seen how existential-humanistic
therapies share common ground, but may
emphasize different factors in therapy.
• Existential therapy -- focuses on choice
and responsibility as the “first cause”
• Rogers -- focuses on self actualization and
the impact of therapist factors in activating
a person’s own capacity to move toward
self actualization.
Background
• In contrast, Gestalt emphasizes awareness
as the central force in fostering individual
healing and growth. Awareness precedes
choice and responsibility and is the
necessary and sufficient catalyst to a
person’s self-initiated and self regulated
process of self actualization.
GOALS and principles
• Focus on process rather than content
• To gain awareness of what you are experiencing -- genuine
knowledge
• To foster change as an outgrowth of intensified awareness
• Paradoxical: Change occurs by experiencing more intensely
what we are, rather than striving for what we’d like to be.
• Clients have a capacity to “self regulate” if they are fully
aware
• Moving client to self support rather than environmental
support
GOALS and principles
• Holism and integration -- no superior value placed
on particular aspects
• Field Theory -- a person is himself or herself in
context, everything is relational
• Figure formation -- foreground and background
• Organismic self-regulation -- similar to homeostasis
in family therapy, but seen more positively, because
of a person’s ability to choose growth and change,
not just the status quo.
The Importance of the Now
• The present is all we have, and focusing
on past and future is a form of
avoidance.
• “What” and “how” questions bring the
person into the present -- not “Why?” or
“What do you think?”
• Most of us talk about our feelings.
Gestalt emphasizes getting into feelings
all the way.
• Past can be finished through
reenactment; intensification assists
release
Unfinished Business
• The past “seeks” completion, and will
persist under dealt with - actualizing urge
requires resolution and integration of the
past.
• The “stuck point” is when our ability to
resist unfinished business does not work
any longer, or when the environmental
support is no longer there.
Contact and Resistances to Contact
• Various forms of resistance
• Projection
• Introjection
• Retroflection, example is anger making
depression
• Deflection, such as humor, change of subject
• Confluence
• Blocks to energy
Energy and Blocks
• Clients will resist feelings by storing
tensions or blocks in the body
• Strategy is usually to “go into the block,”
and to experience it fully
• Describing the feelings around a
certain bodily region
• Giving tension “a voice” and dialoguing
Therapeutic goals
• Attaining greater awareness and choice
• Assume ownership of experience (existentialist)
• Meeting needs without violating rights of others
• Sensory awareness
• Accepting respons-ability
• From external support to internal: locus of control
• Be able to ask for help, and to give help to others.
Therapist’s Role
• Engagement
• Helping client become aware of what
they are doing
• Paying attention to body language
• Challenging patterns of communicating
Challenges to
Communication
•
Converting depersonalizing “it” language into using “I”
•
Converting “You” to “I”
•
Converting questions into statement
•
Going more fully into metaphors
•
Power-denying language
•
disclaimers or qualifiers, e.g. “kind of,” “you know”
•
can’t -- won’t
Client Experience of therapy
• No interpretations given -- increased
awareness through engagement with
feelings and therapist gives rise to
meaning.
• Three stages (Polster)
• discovery -- ahas!
• accommodation -- strategizing new
behaviors in relationships
• assimilation -- learning the influence
the environment
The Therapeutic
Relationship
• Therapist must know herself and the client, and
must remain open
• Therapist allows herself to be affected by client,
and shares her reactions
• Since Perls’ death, less confrontiveness and
more empathic engagement
• use of oneself
• decreased use of exercises
• focus on relationship
Techniques
• The Experiment -- tailor made exploration
that emerges within the therapeutic process.
Client must be prepared for them, and trust is
essential. Resistance is respected.
• collaborative
• spontaneous
Techniques
•
Examples of experiments
•
reenacting a profound past experience
•
setting up a dialogue with a significant other through
journaling or two-chair technique.
•
dramatizing the memory of a painful experience
•
(From Dr. Sparrow’s practice) planning some event that can
take a client beyond a point of arrested growth. (e.g. going
to the graveyard to say goodbye to someone; wearing black
to properly grieve the end of a relationship. All designed to
intensify the feelings and further one’s development.
Techniques, continued
• Confrontation -- Perls was especially harsh
• No longer in vogue; compassionate style is
more popular now
• Charlatan shadow can emerge when
confrontation is used too much
• Rule of the day: sustained emphatic inquiry
paired with crisp and relevant focusing of
awareness.
Gestalt Interventions
•
Internal dialogue -- integrating parts; top dog and underdog
•
Two chair technique
•
Making the rounds -- direct and personal
•
Reversal exercise -- dramatizing the feared opposite
•
Rehearsal exercise -- “What would you say if he were here right
now?”
•
Exaggeration exercise -- bodily, language
•
Staying with feeling
•
Dream work -- everything is a part of oneself, dialogue leads to
integration