Gestalt Therapy

Gestalt is extremely useful for people who can explain themselves beautifully and still have no idea what is happening to them in the room.

Developed principally by Fritz Perls, Gestalt therapy focuses on the whole person and their present experience: thoughts, feelings, body, behavior, environment and the relationship unfolding with the therapist. Rather than spending the entire hour reconstructing the archaeological record of why you are the way you are, the therapist may interrupt to ask what is happening in your chest as you say that, why you started smiling while describing something painful, or what you are avoiding by telling the story so well.

Gestalt is German for something close to “whole” or “form,” and the approach is built around the idea that people cannot be meaningfully understood as a collection of isolated symptoms. We exist through contact—with our bodies, environments, needs and other people. Problems emerge when that contact becomes interrupted, distorted or organized around patterns we are no longer aware we are repeating.

Gestalt therapists generally use “experiments” rather than following one fixed procedure. Some of the better-known methods include:

The empty chair: Speaking to an imagined person—or another part of yourself—sitting in an empty chair, then sometimes changing seats and responding from that position. It sounds theatrical because it is theatrical. It can also reveal far more than another lap around the same explanation.

Exaggeration: Repeating or amplifying a gesture, posture, tone or movement so that its emotional significance becomes more apparent.

Dialogue: Creating a conversation between conflicting parts, such as the part that wants intimacy and the part that finds everyone intolerable after forty-eight hours.

Staying with the feeling: Rather than explaining, minimizing or immediately regulating an emotion, the therapist helps you remain present long enough to understand what it is doing.

This modality can be extremely useful for over-intellectualizers (guilty), emotionally avoidant people (yet again), clients with recurring relational problems and anyone whose verbal sophistication has become a highly effective method of remaining untouched by their own therapy (have heard this from more people who have given up on talk therapy than I can count).

It's not interested in helping you become the world’s foremost scholar of your own problems because who cares if you still don't know what happens when that problem enters the room.