My summary of the Gestalt approach

Gestalt Therapy started in the 1950’s, with Fritz Perls’ attempts to revise Freud’s Psychoanalysis, but it quickly developed into an original holistic approach in its own right. To my understanding, its holism is unique amongst the many different therapy modalities, with its deep philosophical roots providing a rich, broad foundation that remains very modern, process orientated and still evolving.

Gestalt sees no separation between mind and body and understands 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, synthesis, integration and growth, in the here and now.

Gestalt Therapy took its name from Gestalt Psychology with its insights around how we have an instinctive overriding need to make meaning, how we always organise our field of experience in the simplest and best way we can, and how the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

The awareness of our needs is instinctively hierarchical, the most urgent needs at any particular moment are those we attend to first. This is Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”, which go from survival, to security, to our psychological and social needs including love and acceptance, to our need for wholeness (“self-actualisation”). Our ability to attend to our ‘higher’ needs is usually dependant on the ‘lower’ needs having been addressed.

We all survive in the best way we can. We follow, as far as we can, life’s orientation towards “wholeness” with it’s impulse towards increasing consciousness. This, together with our unique gifts, as human beings, of awareness and choice, gives us the possibility of healing our splits and inner conflicts and moving towards finding ever greater satisfaction in life. We embody the history of creation over 13.7 billion years and as such are surely a testament to the force in the universe towards ever more complex wholes. Our consciousness itself is surely one of the more miraculous of these wholes.

There are no absolute morals, no ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’, only process and responsibility. Our ability to live in a healthy and satisfying way is the degree to which the natural creativity of our ‘self’ functions through making ‘contact’ with our environment to meet our needs. Problems happen when, from fear, we inhibit this process of being ourselves. Our insecurities, masks, anxieties, depressions, negative feelings, stress, obsessions, compulsions etc., are all descriptions of the different compensatory processes that happen when we have restricted or stopped our awareness of, and therefore our ability to meet, our needs.

These problems often arise from some experience of having had to ‘adjust’ ourselves (often through trauma of some sort), where in order to survive we pushed aside the loss, pain, hurt or distress (repressed it), necessarily diminishing our awareness of ourselves in the process. This avoidance splits the self, separating heart, head and body in order to maintain that unawareness. Gestalt call this ‘creative adjustment’, it enables the ‘self’ to survive and not go mad, but it is at a price.

As I understand it, Gestalt Therapy’s three most important contributions have been firstly, how awareness and responsibility are fundamental. How, the most important step in healing ourselves is acknowledging the truth of what and how we are. Taking responsibility for ourselves at this existential level is a lifelong and ever deepening process. Having acknowledged some aspect of ourselves, we can then work to become more aware of what our needs around it are, and then understand how we have ‘adjusted’ ourselves to living in our particular limited way, with the fear that inevitably arise from our un-faced losses, avoided hurt or ‘deficits’. In the end, of course, we all have to face the fear of the loss of our self, in death.

Secondly, how, the best way to increase our awareness of ourselves is through a “phenomenological investigation” of ‘what is’, by observing our experience in more detail, without pre-conceptions we can start to see what is going on within us and how it all works. This is pure data gathering and a skill that we often need help with, to learn.

Thirdly, the understanding of the vitality and primacy of the ‘here and now’. Seeing how we maintain the structure of ourselves at every moment, sometimes at great costs in terms of the energy we use to maintain our splits and all the resulting internal conflicts. How the here and now is the only place where we can become aware of the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of ourselves. How entering the here and now is about becoming more present and integrated in the moment and how this supports our growth and being.

All three are obviously interrelated and Gestalt therapy tries to support this process of growth by helping people to reconnect head, heart and body back together. The anxious, over distressed person needs to remember to use their head (as in CBT), the thought dominated person needs to become aware of their feelings, and we all need to deepen our awareness of our bodies. For these re-connections to happen many of us need to be in a supportive environment in order to feel safe enough to start to face the pain, fear, distress, shame, negative feelings, alienation, etc., behind our fixed split patterns of 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 at first.
Wysong J. (Ed) – “Gestalt Therapy Verbatim” – Perls’ later writings.
Yontef G. M. Awareness Dialogue & Process – Essays on Gestalt Therapy