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Goals How do people change? Therapeutic alliances Empty chair technique Current use Strengths and limitations About
Levels of contact • To become psychologically mature, individuals must strip off each of the five layers. • The phony layer refers to reacting to others in unauthentic or patterned ways. • At the phobic layer is an avoidance of psychological pain. • Impasse is the point at which we are afraid to change or move • At the implosive level we experience our feelings. • Contact with the explosive layer is authentic and without pretense.
Contact Boundaries • Contact boundaries are the process of connecting to or separating from other or objects. • one person and another, a person and an object, or the person and a quality of the person • Body-boundaries • Value-boundaries • Familiarity-boundaries • Expressive-boundaries
Contact Boundary Disturbances • Introjection refers to swallowing whole or accepting others’ views without reviewing them. • Projection refers to the dismissing or disowning of aspects of ourselves by assigning them to others. • Retroflection consists of doing to ourselves what we want to do to someone else.
Deflection refers to varying degrees of avoidance of contact The person who does not get to the point, who is overly polite, or talks constantly is deflecting avoiding contact • Confluence occurs when the boundary between one’s self and others becomes muted or lessened.
Awareness of oneself is an important part of gestalt personality theory, identify types of awareness.
Goals • Emphasis on self-responsibility, helping patients depend on themselves rather than on others. • Therapy should assist patients in seeing that they can do much more than they think they can. • Maturity and growth is that of achieving integration. • Integration implies that a person’s feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and body processes are part of a larger whole. • When a person is not fully integrated, there are voids and the individual is likely to experience contact boundary disturbances.
Change occurs by exploring the patient’s wishes. • Reluctance to follow a suggestion for exploration by the therapist, the therapist gently explores the reluctance. • Fear of what might happen: No progress. Therapeutic Change
Stages of change Discovery patients may get a new view of themselves or of an old problem or situation. Accomodation patients learn that they have choices and can try out different behaviors. Assimilation patients progress from choosing and trying out new behaviors to learning how to make changes
As the therapy progresses Individuals gradually feel more comfortable in experiencing their own energy and using it in a productive and complete way. Who is it for ? Individuals who are inhibited. Those who are perfectionistic, phobic, or feel depressed may be inhibiting their awareness of themselves and others.
Empty chair technique OR two-chair approach • Self-dialogues can be done by having an individual take each role of the polarity and express it from her chair. • Clients can experience separate two important parts of herself and experience these two aspects of herself. When using the two-chair technique, therapists should be careful to assess the client’s readiness to work in this way.
Reducing guilt in adolescents • Anxiety of bullying victims • Couple and family therapy • Explore relationships • Increasing self awareness Conflict
The Therapeutic Relationship For gestalt therapy to be effective, a good therapeutic relationship is important. Focus on ways to understand the client and to communicate this understanding to the client. Gestalt interventions are used within the context of the client–therapist relationship. Being genuine and showing the client that you understand is an important aspect of therapy.
Inspired by Carl Rogers: empathy and non directiveness. • Intersubjectivity theorists have written within the framework of psychoanalysis to emphasize the importance of a two-way relationship between patient and therapist.
Current trends • There is a continuing trend in gestalt therapy to focus on relationship issues with clients and to use softer rather than abrupt or abrasive methods in helping client bring issues into the present. • Emotion-focused therapy combines the relationship-building aspects of person-centered therapy with the attention to emotion and active phenomenological awareness experiments of gestalt therapy. • Demonstrates ways for working with forgiveness in gestalt therapy.
