It altered the therapeutic relationship from" disengaged analyst as expert" to a cocreated and very personal

dyadic interaction. It shifted the power to the from the therapist’s knowledge of health to trusting the inherent organismic capacity to self-regulate and knowing what is best for us. It saw “defenses” not as inaccessible unconscious processes but as physical and somatic manifestations of our adaptations to life challenges. Gestalt saw the projections of the client onto the therapist (transference) as a co-created phenomenon rather than a pathology of the client and understood “self” not as a fixed entity but as an emergent phenomenon related to the context of the situation in which “self” is aroused.

    Gestalt therapy owes much to psychoanalysis, existentialism, field theory, phenomenology, Buber’s “I-Thou” understanding of relationships, and Gestalt psychology, which understood the processes of figure/ground formation, closure, holism, and other integrating processes.

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The I-Thou Relationship

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​           Gestalt therapy, as Fritz Perls practiced it, did not initially look like it does today. While powerful and dramatic, Perls put aside some of the principles discussed in his 1951 book ‘Gestalt Therapy, Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality.” Current gestalt therapy sees a therapeutic relationship as co-created (field theory). There has been a great recent emphasis on the understanding that the therapeutic relationship is a 2-way street, and the client is best met when the therapist is present, real, and engaged, which Perls seemed to overlook.

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​Transference and Countertransference as part of a co-created dynamic in the therapy

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​     Current Gestalt therapy sees the importance of the therapist recognizing that they participate in and somehow trigger transference issues for the client. When the therapist begins to recognize that something they did or said in therapy is part of the client’s reaction, the therapist can own this and support the client (and themselves if needed) in deepening an experience to increase awareness of what was triggered.

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​Awareness, not insight

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    The Gestalt approach has always distinguished itself from psychoanalytic thinking with the recognition that in- sight alone does not lead to change. Instead, the focus is on supporting the client in bringing the unaware to aware- ness to move from operating out of habit to out of choicefulness. Choice is a “superpower” of the human being.

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Safe Emergency

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​     Gestalt therapy recognizes that clients are somehow stuck. We do not think it is useful to “blast through” defenses and resistances; instead, we provide just enough support for the client to take the next step in their growth edge. We set up experiences in sessions that a client tends to avoid in real life to support them in finding some clarity, safety, and comfort in taking the next step for themselves.

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​Content to process

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​     Gestalt therapy, unlike many approaches, is much less focused on a client’s story and more focused on the emotional impact of the story. We often direct clients to attend to their breathing, somatic experiences, and musculature to broaden awareness of how the “story” is experienced and how meanings are given to the story. Focusing on inner experience rather than words opens deeper levels of emotional experiencing and awareness.

Meaning giving

    As humans, we tend to give meaning to our lives in ways we don’t think other animals do. We have an experience, judge it for ourselves in one way or another, and create a story around it. The story's meaning remains fixed unless deeper emotional experience is uncovered, experienced, and reintegrated. Integration occurs most deeply after the emotional experiences are processed so that new meanings can emerge.

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Self-talk

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​     We all do this. While not a great focus of Gestalt therapy, our stories, our self-judgments,

and our histories, including the messages we received from parents, siblings, and friends,

all impact our emotional processes. More about this will be discussed below.

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​Deepening emotional process

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​     We recognize the importance and centrality of our emotions in giving meaning, directing our behavior, and impacting our inner sense of distress or peacefulness. When working with clients who become stuck in emotional processing, we may ask things like: “As you breathe right now, what do you notice in your body (chest, stomach, muscles, breath?” “Finish this sentence: ‘Right now my body is telling me’…” “Right now, I want…” “Right now, I need…”

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Empty chair work

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​     Ambivalence: The empty chair can be used to assess the client’s ambivalence in life decision-making. A client can investigate each side of a decision by separately embodying each part and having a dialogue between the parts. A skilled therapist will be able to guide this toward the client’s deeper sense of the direction they wish to go.

    Unfinished Business: When a client has a figure from the past or present that they have been unable to address directly, they may find some sense of release, clarity, emotional depth, or understanding by having a “conversation” with this person in the empty chair. This promotes a safe way to unravel the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that the client has suppressed. Again, a skilled and experienced therapist can work with a client on deeply intense experiences, moving the client toward better closure.

    Inner Splits: We briefly discussed self-talk earlier. A skilled therapist will be able to work with a client to clarify the nature of the client’s self-talk and what messages clients have “introjected” from others in their lives. The therapist will also support the client in reevaluating these messages. We have all grown up with messages from others, such as “If you do that, you’re going to hell.” As adults, we have the capacity to “re-digest” this kind of internalized message in our adult minds rather than living with this belief without deeper examination. The empty chair can help us evaluate the current relevancy of these kinds of messages. Also, an inner split is the part that judges us and the part that resists (Top Dog, Underdog).

     An example of this can be seen in procrastination. Part of a person’s self wants and intends to complete a task; the other part finds anything but this to do. We’ve all seen this and probably done this! The empty chair dialogue between these aspects of self can lead to better integration.

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Dreamwork

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​     Gestalt therapy is a very expressive, potentially dramatic, and powerful approach to supporting a client to understand their dreams. This occurs through an embodiment of the relevant aspects of the dream and noting where the conflicts and energies reside. Again, it takes a skilled and experienced therapist to do this impactfully. Clients are often surprised by the directions and meanings they may glean from this work.

    Something not well understood outside of Gestalt therapy is the theory of self. In Gestalt therapy theory, there is not a “fixed” self, but one that emerges and configures itself in the context of what is current. As self-adapts to life, sometimes fixed patterns of response occur. These fixities lead to automatic reactions rather than aware, chosen responses to life. When working with any of the processes discussed above, we typically work with some fixed sense of self that has become maladaptive, though it served a client well when adopted. Gestalt therapists seek to help clients free themselves from fixed aspects of self that are no longer adaptive. Again, a perceptive, experienced therapist will note these fixities and support the client in more spontaneous and free living.