Gestalt psichotherapy

"I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped."

Fritz Perls

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Psychotherapy is a method of dealing with a client’s psychological, social or other problems through direct contact with the therapist using verbal and non-verbal communication. Gestalt psychotherapy is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on seeing the need for and possibilities of change, making changes experimentally and managing the process of change appropriately.  The experimental approach refers to an experience that a person consciously undergoes during the therapeutic contact, which results in a change in the person’s inner self and in their relationship with the surroundings.

Gestalt psychotherapy does not aim to break or forcibly change learned psychological defence strategies or contact styles, but rather helps the client to see the need for change, to understand how the person works, and to make conscious and purposeful change. Gestalt’s “paradoxical” theory of change (Arnold Beisser,1970) states that in order to change, one must first fully experience and become aware of who one is and what one is, before trying to be what one is not (yet), to achieve what is not (yet).

Gestalt psychotherapy, as being the holistic approach, views the human being as a whole organism consisting of many dimensions or parts that interact and exist only in relation to each other, and a change in one part leads to a change in all the others.

Holistic approaches define three major dimensions: body, mind and spirit. In Gestalt therapy, special attention is given to working with the body and body processes. Gestalt therapy seeks to integrate all aspects of the human being into a unified whole, so that the person can live a conscious life minute after minute, in wholeness and harmony, both within oneself and in relation to one’s surroundings:

·        restoring contact with body processes

·        understanding the senses and non-verbal processes

·        reconnecting the broken/separate parts of one’s personality

·        integrating the parts of the personality into a unified whole

“Human and all being as a whole” is one of the main principles of Gestalt therapy. “This means that our physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual aspects are constantly working to achieve balance with each other and with the world around us”.

The main purposes of Gestalt therapy:

1. Increase human awareness, consciousness and a deeper knowledge of one’s personality.

2. Help the person to see their habitual, traditional ways of behaving, their stereotypes, resistances, in order to increase awareness of themselves and their relationship to their surroundings, and thus help them to change.

3. Complete unfinished business/situations/Gestalts.

4. Become aware of one’s own resistances (lack of contact with body and feelings, destructive beliefs, unconscious projecting, imagining, intellectualising, rationalising, joking, not being able to say no, putting oneself above others, suppressing one’s feelings, self-harm, etc.), and to modify one’s own behaviour on the basis of an adequately understood reality.

5. Recognise and resolve internal conflict.

6. Help people see their lives as the result of their own creativity and take responsibility for their lives.

7. Increase self-confidence by integrating perception, awareness and action.

8. Encourage people to move from dependence towards adequate autonomy.

9. Expand the range and scope of human behaviour.

10. Enable the use of logical and non-logical forms of activity in therapy in order to help people to know themselves better and to adapt creatively to a constantly changing environment.

According to many prominent Gestalt therapists, Gestalt is the Western way to awakening, to a more real and harmonious life.

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