GESTALT THERAPYGESTALT THERAPY

COUNSELING THEORIES -- EPSY 6363 DR. SPARROW

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