Post on 03-Jan-2016
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