Jim Robinson. What is Gestalt Therapy? Some theoretical background about the Gestalt approach

Summary of the Gestalt approach (Nov 09)

Gestalt started in the 1950’s, as revision of Psychoanalysis, but developed into an original holistic approach in its own right. It saw no separation between mind and body and understood how the humanistic triad of heart, head and body are aspects of a whole and how this whole, the self, is not a ‘thing’ that sits inside us, but our creative process of survival and synthesis and growth. It took its name from Gestalt Psychology and its insights around how we have an instinctive need to make meaning and that we always organise our field of experience in the simplest and best way we can, and how a whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. The awareness of our needs is instinctively hierarchical, the most important at any particular moment are those we attend to, this is also Maslow’s hierarchy of needs going from survival, to security, to our need for love and acceptance.

So, Gestalt says that we always make the best we can of any situation, that there are no absolute morals, no ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’. What determines our ability to live in a healthy and satisfying way is the degree to which we can let the natural creativity of our self function through making ‘contact’ with our environment and meeting our needs. Problems happen when, from fear, we inhibit this process of being ourselves. Our insecurities, anxieties, depressions, obsessions, compulsions etc., are descriptions of the different processes that happen when we cannot meet our needs. This is largely because we have made ourselves unaware of them.

These problems usually arise, often in childhood, when there was some experience of an essential need not being unavailable to us. When this happens and it is too painful to bear we repress the pain of it and split the self, separating heart, head and body in order to deprive ourselves of the awareness of the pain or distress that was in danger of destroying us. It is a ‘creative adjustment’ in that it enables us to survive, albeit in a diminished way.

Gestalts’ two most important contributions to therapy have been firstly how awareness is fundamental. How, the most important step in healing ourselves is becoming more aware of what our needs are and the way we have ‘adjusted’ ourselves to their ‘deficit’. Secondly, understanding the vitality of the here and now. How we maintain the structure of ourselves at every moment (sometimes at great costs in energy used in the internal conflicts that our splits cause) and how the here and now is the only place we can become aware of ourselves. To enter the here and now is to become present, which is where momentarily the self becomes integrated, not split.

Gestalt tries to help this integration by reconnecting head, heart and body back together permanently. The anxious, over distressed person needs to remember and use their head (as in CBT), the thought dominated person needs to become aware of their feelings, we all need to develop our awareness of our bodies. But for these re-connections to happen we need to provide an empathic and supportive environment where the client can feel safe enough to start to face the pain and distress which caused them to split in the first place.

Summary of the Gestalt approach (March 09)

My training has been in Gestalt counselling and psychotherapy, a humanistic approach which sees our lives as full of potential for growth and understanding. Increasing our awareness of ourselves and our relationships is the key to realising this potential. We all try to live the best way we can in our own particular circumstances, there is no blame, only a need for greater awareness and understanding. Through this we can find a more satisfying and enjoyable relationship to our lives.

If we are suffering, often the sense of not understanding what’s going on can be very disconcerting or distressing. Fear can turn into panic, with its associated fight, flight or freeze response. Panic is often the enemy of psychological health and the cause of ‘symptoms’.

Counselling and Psychotherapy are concerned with helping to increase awareness of our reactions, motivations and fears. We all naturally avoid what is painful in our lives, but it is through deeper awareness of ‘what is’, especially around those areas we habitually avoid, that we have a chance to resolve the internal conflicts that can keep us powerlessly suffering and wanting happiness.

Gestalt is a holistic approach; we are heart, head, body and spirit, and getting to know how these aspects of ourselves work within us is very important. Very often one part is developed more than another, and this is an aspect of how we keep parts of ourselves out of awareness. Increased awareness of ‘what is’ helps to integrate the different aspects of ourselves in a powerful process. It helps us see how we relate to the world, to others, to our work, to our creativity, to all aspects of our lives.

Working in the here and now, with attention on what our actual current experience, is the key to raising awareness. Through this we have a chance to face and understand our fixed repetitive patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour and how these revolve around unaware aspects of ourselves.

Gestalt works through support, dialogue, experimentation, contact and challenge, to raise awareness of how we are, here and now, in our emotional world, our bodies, our thoughts and our sense of meaning in life. Seeing, acknowledging, accepting and allowing ‘what is’, enables us to grow, it is this gathering and processing of this extra information that leads to greater self-knowledge and understanding. With this we can be freer to be ourselves, instead of fearfully trying to maintain a mask of who we should or ought to be.

Often there is the sense of failure or weakness around seeking help. Most of us have taken in something of the view that we should be strong and self-sufficient. But we all need help to find better ways of living. It takes courage to embark on what can be, especially to start with, the scary journey of understanding ourselves; in the end though, nothing is more satisfying and meaningful.

Summary of Gestalt (July 07)

To me, Gestalt is fundamentally concerned with the here and now; your and mine experience right now. This is Gestalt’s starting place and the ground that supports the exploration of ourselves and our relationship to our lives, it is this ground that I am always trying to return to. It is the only place that our actual, subjective, perceivable reality exists.

‘Gestalt’ is a German word with no precise English translation; it means something like, a whole process. We are always trying to make sense of things, to grasp the whole. Unfinished situations of all sorts, whether in relationships, ideas or practical problems always call us to try and resolve them; if we can’t there is frustration. We are ‘wired’ to want to complete and finish whatever we are concerned with. Gestalt psychology has proved through its experiments with perception and cognition how we always have to try to make sense out of what we perceive; we are meaning makers and can’t be otherwise.

Through time we experience life as sequential; one thing occupies our attention, then another. Our current doing, or concern, or interest arises out of the interaction between ourselves, which includes our past history, and our environment. We attend to this concern and it then recedes into the background again. When I’m hungry I eat (in the way I’m accustomed to) and when I’m full I forget about food and attend to my next interest.

If we are unable to finish what we were interested in, say, like when we’ve lost something we need to accomplish a task, it is very disturbing. We try very hard to resolved and finish the situation. Each one of our concerns can be seen as a Gestalt, or a wave, or circle of attention. A concern may last seconds, or minutes, or years. I also see days, weeks and years as wholes, as gestalts.

Gestalt psychotherapy aims to help people try and finish what has been left un-finished. Our depression, anxiety, compulsions etc. often centre around a partially aware, partially unaware struggle within us. We are often going around in circles, finding ourselves at the same conflicted place time and time again, unable to finish or resolve the conflict. We might move on after a few hours, days, weeks or months, only to find ourselves stuck again next time.

Many of us hold (sometimes for a lifetime) pushed aside hurt and pain, out of our awareness. We pushed it aside when it was too much to cope with. We then develop habits around these repressions, which form our character and which limit our relationship to our lives. This relationship is always expressing itself, here and how, right now at this moment. Perls referred to this as the ‘structure of the situation’.

It was Fritz and Laura Perls' inspired contribution to psychotherapy to understand this. Our adaptive, fixed, or as they called them ‘neurotic’ ways of being may have been formed a long time ago, but it is in the here and now that we continue to maintain the defensive structures, without even being aware that we are doing it. Perls saw that the most effect method of facilitating a return to healthier living was through becoming aware of how we are maintaining these fixed patterns of relating to our world, in the here and now.

My 'now' has many aspects conditioning it. The quality of my feeling; am I rushing, anxious, tired, laid back, loved, not loved? My thoughts and attitudes; how am I assessing this situation, is it good or bad? The needs of my body; how relaxed or tense or ill, am I? How integrated am I? Can I feel what I’m feeling? Am I aware of my body, to what degree? Am I stuck in just one part of me? Any ‘now’ contains a myriad of aspects which can usefully be explored and it is only in the here and now that the energy and aliveness exists for a meaningful exploration of our “situation”.

There is a process by which we choose, (however automatically) what to give our attention to, out of all the demands and stimulus in any of our nows. We can only choose one, i.e. the most important for us at that moment. This selection process we call “Organismic Self-regulation”, which is the instinctive, inherent wisdom within us that decides what is our most pressing need, now. This wisdom also knows what we need in order for our self to grow and mature. This process is life itself, every organism on earth is doing it, it is our inherent evolutionary wisdom at work. If we can sufficiently trust and listen to this wisdom within us we don’t need therapy.

An exciting aspect of this is that the world is so much more permeable, flexible and full of possibilities than we can imagine. The here and now is the ‘quantum’ aspect of life, where our consciousness creates the world we perceive (please see, ”What the bleep do we know”). Life is not fixed; modern physics now understands that at the quantum level matter is insubstantial; it's almost like a temporarily fixed thought (to paraphrase "What the Bleep"). It seems that by changing our awareness, our consciousness, we re-configure the world in a far more literal sense than previously understood. The process of Gestalt psychotherapy is an attempt to live closer to now, to this place where the energy of consciousness with its possibilities of change reside.

However in order to get closer to this place we need to work through our “unfinished business”, otherwise it just keeps getting in the way, pre-occupying and distracting us. There is the long hard process of becoming aware of our fixed patterns around our denial of our suppressed / repressed hurt or pain and the fear that surrounds it. Working through our unfinished business allows us to ‘be’ freer and to live more and more in the now; less distracted by needs relating to the past, or anxieties about the future.

The ‘how?’ of this process can fundamentally be seen as one of integration. Our past adjustments to coping with overwhelming difficulties and pain in life meant that we had to split ourselves up. Very commonly in our western culture this meant we had to keep our emotions buried, the British “stiff upper lip” is the classic example. But we also had to desensitise out bodies and curtail our thinking in order to keep those repressed aspects of ourselves from re-emerging (which would entail us having to face what we’d push away). However our “organismic self-regulatory wisdom” is always working to try to re-integrate us, with the result is that we end up living in a semi-unending state of internal conflict and tension.

So the role of the therapist is to facilitate increased awareness of the fixed habits, and provide support for the scary work of re-contacting our needs (with their associated hurt and pain). Therapy is not about ‘doing’ anything; it is about allowing our wisdom to work. Although the task of the therapist can sometimes be to challenge and experiment for the sake of bringing awareness to what is happening now, the task for the client is just to see and become aware of, “what is”. Gestalt has the idea of the “Paradoxical nature of change” (Beisser) which says that we change, not by trying to be different, but by becoming who we are.

As we get to understand ourselves better, get to know the mysterious and sometimes frightening forces that seem to control us at times, we can start to relax more. We can start to trust ourselves, trust that we are O.K. Increasing self-worth supports our hearts to open more and more in a virtuous circle of growing freedom. We may even start to trust and enjoy life.

This process of re-connecting our heart, head and body together allows us to have a presence we didn’t have before. It is through this presence that we can move increasingly into contact with the here and now, re-finding our excitement and joy in living, and in being.

References

I plucked these out of the many influences in formulating the above:

Beisser A.    -
The Paradoxical Theory of Change - a chapter in "Gestalt Therapy Now"

Naranjo C.   -
“Gestalt Therapy” - a more transpersonal approach to Gestalt

Lao Tsu -
“Tao Te Ching” - ancient Chinese wisdom

Perls, Hefferline & Goodman -
“Gestalt Therapy” - this is the standard Gestalt text and most people find it a difficult read.

Wysong J. (Ed)   -
“Gestalt Therapy Verbatim” - Perls' later writings.

Yontef G. M.
Awareness Dialogue & Process - Essays on Gestalt Therapy

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