Gestalt therapy - what is it in simple words?

• Concept of Gestalt therapy
• We explain with simple examples
• How can a Gestalt therapy specialist help?
• What methods does a Gestalt therapist use in his work?
• Who is suitable for Gestalt therapy?

Gestalt therapy is an effective direction that psychologists use in therapeutic work to work through relationships, improve the emotional background, and raise self-esteem. But due to ignorance of the specifics of this method, clients often choose more popular directions - psychoanalysis or cognitive behavioral therapy - to solve their problems. Today we will tell you in an accessible, simple language about Gestalt therapy, who it will help and in what situations it is more advisable to choose it.

Concept of Gestalt therapy

In various difficult life situations, we can lose contact with ourselves, stop tracking our emotions and desires to please others. Often this happens due to unfinished stories or unlived feelings. A course of Gestalt therapy helps to rediscover oneself, identify true feelings and thoughts, teaches one to cope with problems independently and achieve what one wants.

Fritz Perls, the luminary of German psychiatry, is considered the founder of therapy. In the 1940s, he became seriously interested in Gestalt psychology, studying the human psyche’s desire for complete completion of any relationship, image or situation. Translated from German, Gestalt means “image”.

Later, scientists discovered that the human brain actually recognizes holistic, complete images more easily. For example, if a person sees with his eyes an unfinished drawing made up of scattered or interrupted parts, then his subconscious will still see solid figures.

Gestalt in psychology is an unfinished situation that puts negative pressure on a person. That is, even if the relationship between two people has physically ended, the unspoken thoughts and emotions experienced by one of the participants in the broken couple during the process can negatively affect his psyche and quality of life.

It would seem, what would be easier, to satisfy an existing need, to realize emotions, to relieve tension? But often we do not realize the root cause of our problem, we do not know how or do not allow ourselves to show feelings due to internal prohibitions, rules, and attitudes.

Humanistic and existential direction

Humanistic psychology believes that every person has a natural need for development and self-realization, and problems arise if something interferes with it. A specialist working with this technique offers empathy, understanding and a joint search for life values ​​as help.

The humanistic school is very heterogeneous. In fact, this is a “hodgepodge” of methods that cannot be attributed either to cognitivism or psychoanalysis.

Client-centered therapy

Carl Rogers was the first to suggest that each person’s experience be considered valuable and unique, seek an individual approach and communicate as equals. At his instigation, the term “patient” (that is, sick) in psychotherapy was replaced by “client” (that is, an equal partner). Such psychotherapy presupposes an independent opportunity for a person to understand what is best for him, and the therapist must only create conditions of acceptance and support for finding a path to himself.

Logotherapy, or therapy with meaning

Another well-known direction was proposed by Viktor Frankl, a psychologist who survived imprisonment in a concentration camp. Frankl was sure that a meaningful life for man as a thinking creature is more important than basic instincts, and, unlike animals, man is always free to choose. Logotherapy takes place in the format of philosophical conversations and invites the client to understand the meaning of their life and take responsibility for it.

Gestalt therapy

It was created by Frederick Perls and also belongs to the humanistic movement. This therapy teaches you to live in the here and now and listen to your emotions, which many people are unaware of or suppress. The therapist helps the client become more attentive to himself, understand his experiences and resolve internal conflicts. This is not the most popular type of psychotherapy in other countries and not the most effective. But in Russia it has become widespread, probably due to the activity of Gestalt institutes and the relative ease of learning.

Existential analysis . Existential psychology believes that suffering and crises in life are inevitable, moreover, they are necessary for development. Everyone faces death, loneliness, inner emptiness and the need to choose. The therapist's job is to help the client understand and accept this experience.

Advantages of humanistic therapy: Support, creative search for solutions, communication with a psychotherapist as equals.

Disadvantages of humanistic therapy: Lack of ready-made recipes and methods for solving the problem.

We explain with simple examples

If the unfinished action is some simple everyday story, you can easily deal with it yourself - find, buy, fix and move on with your life in peace. But when it comes to relationships, things are worse. Such an incomplete gestalt will be accompanied by a range of negative feelings - resentment, anger, fear, anxiety, sadness and even grief - which, at best, will lead to chronic discomfort, and at worst, to illness and suffering.

Let's look at a simple example.

Ivan is already an adult, he can’t establish relationships with his elderly parents, all attempts to have a heart-to-heart talk end in mutual claims and resentments, tea parties end in quarrels, evenings end in slamming doors. Ivan is angry, but he cannot stop communicating with his parents. Together with a psychologist, they are trying to understand this situation. The specialist is interested in what specific emotions these clashes evoke in Ivan, what feelings arise in him when he calls or visits his mother and father. At first, Ivan admits that this is anger, but in the course of subsequent psychological conversations it turns out that there are other conflicting feelings, that since childhood he has been expecting support and approval from his parents, but at the same time he still feels like a schoolboy whom his mother and father ask questions about. : “4 for the test? Why not 5? I tried hard..." “Schoolboy Ivan” gets offended, the thought comes that he is bad, a loser, incompetent, if his parents do not praise him. The task of the psychologist in this case will be, with the help of Gestalt therapy, to return our hero to his significance, to help him again feel pride in his successes, regardless of the parental reaction.

More examples of common open gestalts:

• Due to lack of attention and dislike from parents in childhood, an adult will intensely seek and demand from his partner manifestations of love and attention that he lacked in childhood. Will such relationships be harmonious where there is constant pressure?
• A love union that breaks up, for example, on the initiative of a man, can cause a woman to constantly relive the breakup, trying to determine the cause and the guilty party, simultaneously proving to her former lover that everything is fine with her, and life has only gotten better without him. With such a psychological state, a happy relationship is unlikely for this woman.

All these examples indicate that the situation has not been lived through to the end and has not been mentally released. That is, the gestalt is not completed and will continue to cause suffering to the person. The well-known saying “Time heals” will not work here; qualified help from a specialist is needed.

Pearls' Gestalt approach as psychotherapy

As already mentioned at the very beginning, there is no systematic description of the method itself, nor its theoretical justification. Perls's method is described in his works "Ego, Hunger and Aggression" and "Gestalt Therapy". This is a set of practical techniques that allow the client to develop awareness of himself as an organism and as a person, and also to identify violations of the normal functioning of this system, which lead to psychological problems and blocking of development.

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How can a Gestalt therapy specialist help?

The duration of therapy in each case is different - for some, in 2-3 sessions they will be able to cope with a harmful situation and improve their psycho-emotional state, while for others, even a few months will not be enough.

During therapy, the psychologist:

• will help you understand what exactly causes you anxiety and negativity;
• will reveal your feelings and sensations associated with the root cause;
• with the help of special psychotherapeutic techniques, it will help complete the gestalt and teach you how to act in similar cases in the future.

The nature of psychological disorders

Naturally, the nature of the functioning of the individual in a system of needs that arise again and again presupposes constant psychological tension—frustration. And according to Perls, frustration is an important catalyst for personality development, since it is its presence that is the source of all human activity. This is how the child learns to interact with the world and becomes an individual precisely in order to effectively get rid of frustrations (psychological stresses).

All frustrations are caused by an unsatisfied need, and its satisfaction is associated with the assimilation of part of the surrounding world; an example of such assimilation is the satisfaction of hunger - we bite food, chew it and digest it, this is how we receive energy from the outside world and assimilate it through digestion. This process has both physical and mental manifestations, when information or objects can appear instead of a material object (food). However, according to Perls's concept, the instinct of hunger lies at the source of both processes.

Thus, it was with a violation of the satisfaction of needs that Perls associated the emergence of psychological problems.

What methods does a Gestalt therapist use in his work?

During psychotherapeutic sessions, the client is encouraged to share sincere emotions with the psychologist, answer questions and receive feedback.

Psychologists in the Gestalt approach use the following methods:

• working with feelings;
• exercises and tests to express your state through body movements;
• analysis of dreams and memories;
• creating and playing out situations and sensations with the participation of fictional characters.

According to the principle of Gestalt therapy, the main conditions for a happy life are the completion of unfinished business and the client’s awareness of his desires and actions, therefore, in the first stages of work, the therapist tries to lead the patient precisely to the moment of understanding his problem and the reasons that caused it, and at the end of therapy, to teach him take full responsibility for your decisions and actions in order to be able to independently correct difficult moments in your future life and live through events to the end.

Our course will help you master the technique of the Gestalt approach - in just 4 months, experienced teachers will tell you about all existing methods of Gestalt therapy, and after passing the final certification, you will receive a diploma of the established form and will be able to work as a consulting psychologist yourself.

Journal of Practical Psychology and Psychoanalysis

annotation

The article is devoted to the characteristics of the work of Gestalt therapists in the format of “Working with internal phenomenology” and “Working on the boundary of contact.” The structure of a gestalt session is given. The concepts of “strategy”, “tactics” and “focus” as applied to the therapeutic process are analyzed.

Key words: Gestalt therapy, strategy of the Gestalt therapist, work with internal phenomenology, work on the contact boundary, focusing

Recently, there has been a certain reduction of the multifaceted and multidirectional work of a Gestalt therapist to several recognizable stereotypes, which leads to an impoverishment of the Gestalt field and a decrease in the quality of the work of specialists. One of the striking phenomena of such stereotyping is the rather rapid, premature “exit” of the Gestalt therapist to the “contact boundary” [1] without taking into account a number of phenomena that manifest themselves in this contact. Therefore, in this article I will try to analyze the concept of “work strategy of a Gestalt therapist” and discuss its various practical applications, taking into account both my own “charge” with this topic and an understanding of the complexity of the problem at hand.

Let's start with a short excursion into history. It is known that Sigmund Freud loved military metaphors. It is with his light hand that we use such concepts as “intervention”, “defense mechanisms”, “resistance”, etc. If you try to build associative series, then it becomes obvious not only the supportive and caring part of any therapy, but also the rather aggressive, associated with intensive introduction of the therapist into the client’s inner world.

What is “strategy”? Here is a quote from Wikipedia: “Strategy is the science of war, a general, non-detailed plan of military activity, covering a long period of time, a method of achieving a complex goal, and later - any human activity at all.

Strategy as a method of action becomes necessary in a situation where there are not enough available resources to directly achieve the main goal. The objective of the strategy is the effective use of available resources to achieve the main goal” [3].

So, the term “strategy” also has military roots. We have written many times before about how the language used defines consciousness, and how the use of military metaphors suggests thoughts of psychotherapy as a struggle, a fight, a war. Accident? Hardly... At the intensive “The Art of Being with Others” in 2013, we discussed for a long time the participants’ use of this kind of metaphors, for example: “the client wets me”; “I ran into him”; “I built it”; “she blew my mind,” etc. We talked about how language creates a subjective reality in which the creator then has to live. The popular Latin phrase “Nomen est omen” (a name is a sign) is generally about what and how we name. “Whatever you call the boat, that’s how it will float,” as the famous cartoon characters sang. This is why it is so important to remember the genre-style non-specificity of the speech of a good Gestalt therapist.

However, let's return to Gestalt therapy. On the website of the Moscow Gestalt Institute in the training program for Gestalt therapists, section 3 - “Creative methods of Gestalt therapy” - contains the topic “Working with the client’s internal phenomenology”, and section 5 - “Philosophy of the Gestalt approach and methodology of practice” includes the topic “Working on contact boundary" [2]. At the same time, the 2008 standard looked a little different: Section 5 began: “Methodology of practice: basic strategies for working as a Gestalt therapist. Working with the client's internal phenomenology. Work at the contact boundary."

Interestingly, the latest program reflects the current reality. How does it manifest itself? The fact is that work with internal phenomenology often belongs to the section of “creative methods”, and work on the border of contact – to the methodology of practice.

I will try to describe what, as I think, has become a fashion, a fad and is emasculating the essence of Gestalt therapy. This is an untimely use of “exit to the border-contact”.

It is obvious that in our life everything has a beginning and an end. The same goes for the therapeutic session. The first stage of a gestalt session is orientation. Tasks of a Gestalt therapist:

• establish contact with the client;
• identify what happened: what problem/complexity brought him to the Gestalt therapist, how long has it existed, who else is involved in it, whether the client has tried to solve it before and how;
• clarify the client’s request, etc.

Essentially, at this phase, the therapist works with the client’s phenomena - with his ideas, his picture of what is happening, his feelings and experiences, expectations about therapy. Until the therapist has made it clear where to go, he carefully observes, listens, feels, and questions. Sometimes this phase lasts several meetings, sometimes literally minutes. But it is the beginning of the work, the cornerstone that is placed in the foundation of the temple... Without going through this phase, the Gestalt therapist risks being captured by his projections, ideas and fantasies, regardless of the needs and feelings of the client, as well as the actual process of interaction between them.

The second stage of the gestalt session is the gestalt experiment. Using the client’s request, his own reactions, knowledge, skills, the therapist accompanies the client on a path where something new may be encountered - a forgotten story, an unexpected realization, an unusual idea... At this stage, the client can be convinced of something important for him, understand, let go, accept, want... I described the experience of Gestalt experiments in the group in more detail earlier.

And the last, third stage is assimilation, mastering something new, moving to using this experience in life.

So: sessions, clients and contacts are very different. Sometimes the client is so self-absorbed, so preoccupied with what has happened, so anxious that he is unable to notice the Other. And then interventions like:

• I feel for you...
• do you notice that I...
• who are you telling all this to...
• you seem to me... etc.

can be simply destructive for contact.

At this moment, the therapist encounters the phenomena presented by the client - his sensory experience, his pain and anxiety, his environment, relationships, ideas... Before repairing a machine, it would be good to understand how it works - this is why phenomenological diagnosis is important. It can be either realistic and built on direct and clear questions, or metaphorical, figurative, sensual. The important task of the therapist is to get into the client’s field, to “see” his situation with a minimum number of distortions, and to hear his story.

Here is an example of supervised work.

K. I want to talk to you about my appearance...

T. (interrupting). With me ?

K. (discouraged). Well, yes…

T. And what do you want to tell me about yourself?

K. (after a pause). I don’t like myself... Ever since school... I always thought that I was ugly...

T. (interrupting). Do you notice that I am a man?

K (scared). Yes…

T. Try to address your text to me personally. I get the impression that you don't notice me...

This is the very beginning of the session. In it, the Gestalt therapist (thank God, a beginner): disrespectful, insensitive to the client’s awkwardness, and simply aggressive. Over the next 40 minutes, the client tried to convey to him a simple story: the guy liked her, he is caring for her, but she is not confident in herself, in her appearance and is very worried... The therapist constantly interrupted her and, excuse me, rudely violated boundaries - not only ethical, but also human. Although the therapist with his experiences and ideas had no place there yet, there were many phenomena of the client herself, which, unfortunately, she was never able to express, place and discuss with the therapist.

It was precisely because of such unfortunate works that I thought - maybe the word “strategy” is not the most appropriate in this context? A strategy is built when:

• it is more or less clear to the therapist what the client came with;
• the goal was discussed (dynamic, changing, but “here-and-now” important for the client);
• A fairly good contact has been established.

But the strategy itself of “working with internal phenomenology” or “working on the contact boundary” is just different ways of achieving different goals. It is interesting that in Gestalt therapy the term strategy is used, but the term “tactics” is forgotten. Let's turn to Wikipedia again: “Tactics are a tool for implementing strategy and are subordinated to the main goal of the strategy. The strategy achieves the main goal through the solution of intermediate tactical tasks...” [3]. A Gestalt therapist (like a specialist in any helping profession) studies for many years in programs, and then for the rest of his life, exactly how to solve practical problems with a client. These are techniques and microtechniques, this is honing your self as the main tool of therapy, this is reading professional and fiction literature, this is friendship and love... We learn this every second, and it would be very arrogant to say that I, as a specialist, can develop a strategy for correct therapy...

Personally, I prefer the more neutral, but very capacious concept of “focusing”.

A Gestalt therapist may focus on different aspects of the therapeutic session in his work:

• on client phenomena;
• on one's own phenomena;
• on the phenomena of contact arising as a result of interaction “here-and-now”.

If we use the ideas of system-analytical gestalt, then it is obvious that any emerging phenomenon is a systemic phenomenon and arose as a result of the contact of this particular therapist with this particular client. This is an obvious fact that does not require proof for any person who uses the principle of consistency in their work. However, in addition to the methodological one, there is also a methodological part in the training of a Gestalt therapist. And there it is necessary to “split” reality into interconnected elements for the convenience of their analysis, while maintaining the ideas of holism and interconnectedness.

Difficult? Perhaps, but that's how we are designed. To introject (assimilate) an idea, we must chew it down, bring it to a digestible form. And then the strategy of working with the client’s internal phenomenology can be described as placing the Gestalt therapist in the focus of attention:

• client's feelings;
• client's thoughts;
• customer experience;
• the client’s ideas about Others and relationships with them, etc.

Working at the contact boundary can also be described as focus:

• on the Gestalt therapist - his feelings, thoughts, reactions, past experiences, techniques used, etc.;
• on contact “here-and-now”, that is, reflection of what is happening between the Gestalt therapist and the client;
• on client responses, etc.

Focus on the therapist has been described in more detail previously as a “self-disclosure technique” [1].

The therapist’s narcissistic attempts to be greater than the whole world and the client’s experience, ignoring his current needs under the childish slogan “I took care of myself” often lead to disappointment in Gestalt therapy as a whole.

Gestalt therapy is a dynamic and rapidly developing direction. The “excesses” that occur as a result of Gestalt therapists focusing only on certain aspects of the therapeutic process are rather growing pains, like “boom-boom therapy”, which took several years to get rid of. There are many resources in Gestalt therapy, and only reliance on integrity - therapist, client, contact - allows us to move freely in the therapeutic field, relying equally on knowledge, feelings, intuition, and help this World as a whole become a little better.

Annotation

Article is dedicated to characteristics of work of gestalt-therapists as “Work with Internal Phenomenology” and “Work on Contact Border”. The gestalt session structure is given. The concepts “strategy”, “tactics” and “focusing” of application to the therapeutic process are analyzed.

Keywords: gestalt therapy, strategy of work of the gestalt therapist, work with internal phenomenology, work on contact border, focusing

[1] “Working with internal phenomenology” and “Working on the boundary of contact” are the two main ways of working as a Gestalt therapist. “Working on the boundary of contact” involves the therapist sharing with the client current feelings, ideas, experiences, impressions regarding their interaction “here-and-now” or in the past. The therapist’s “I-statements” are used as a technique.

Who is suitable for Gestalt therapy?

Therapy solves the problems of healthy people or people with a neurotic organization, and has a good effect in cases of difficulties caused by interaction with other people, misunderstandings, negative feelings, and grievances. That is, therapy will not bring relief to patients with severe mental disorders.

Such unpleasant and dangerous emotions as fear, anxiety, aggression, loss of meaning in life, loneliness, excessive anxiety, insomnia, apathy and frequent bad mood are also reasons to visit a Gestalt therapist.

The method is suitable for working with teenagers, adults, and married couples. Women open up more easily during consultations than men, who are accustomed to being guided by reason and easily ignore their desires in order to achieve a goal or success, and a thorough analysis of feelings often seems to them an unnecessary exaggeration.

Body-oriented psychotherapy

It, like art therapy, is not an independent direction of psychotherapy, but a collection of diverse practical methods. They are united by the concept of the integrity of the organism, that is, the unity of soul and body. Thus, by influencing the body, the therapist promotes the resolution of psychological internal conflicts and awareness of oneself as an integral bodily being.

The most famous technique can be called Reich's vegetative therapy. Reich suggested that suppressed emotions are reflected in the body in the form of muscle tension. By the location of these clamps you can understand what emotions you need to work with. Most often these are anger, anxiety and sexual frustration, which can be eased through awareness of repressed emotions, massage and exercise.