Gestalt Methods

The purpose of Gestalt methods is to bring what is unawares about the client’s behavior into awareness and facilitate “contact” (genuine human interaction involving the whole person - mind, body and emotions).

Individual Therapy: one client and one therapist for one hour, dealing with whatever issues arise for the client. The therapist intervenes to create an “experiment” which is an experience whereby the client gains new awareness (an “aha”) and to experience contact with the therapist.

Group Therapy: an organic process (as opposed to a structured program of pre-defined steps) in which the Leader spontaneously creates experiments based on the group dynamic (how the group members relate to one another). The experiments allow each member to work through his or her issues and experience contact with one another, gradually making them capable of more and more contact throughout the process.

Family Therapy: individual therapy for a family unit in which the therapist uses methods from group therapy. This allows the family to become aware of how they are locked into the dynamic operating between them and to experiment with new ways of interrelating.

Couples Therapy: essentially the same as family therapy, except that a key element of the work involves the couple red-examining what it was that so attracted them to each other at the outset. This is in order to provide a counterbalance to the difficulties they are now experiencing in living together.

Workshops: group work focused on a particular theme, e.g., anger, anxiety, sexuality.

Hot Seat: this is individual therapy done in front of a group. The difference being that the therapist makes a swift intervention to create a new awareness or “aha” for the client and does not proceed further. Instead, he or she invites another group member to come up and do work and so on.

Psychodrama: group work in which group members re-enact an episode from one group member’s life, directed by the therapist.

Empty Chair or Two Chair Work: Gestalt’s application of psychodrama methods in the individual therapy situation. The client plays each role and engages in a dialogue by moving back and forth between the two chairs. From each chair, the client speaks directly to the imagined person/entity in the empty chair.

Polarity Work/Topdog/Underdog: two-chair work concerning a split (polarity) in the person’s character. The most common being topdog/underdog. The topdog is your inner dictator who tells you what you should do. The underdog plays the victim/rebel and schemes to thwart and avoid doing as the topdog demands.

Exaggeration: amplification of a behavior (usually, for example, a body movement) leads to heightened awareness and can allow the client to give voice to something that he or she had been avoiding.

Language of Responsibility: the therapist has the client use language that allows them to say what they mean and mean what they say. In other words, language that injects real feeling into their words. This includes:

• Directness - talking directly to the therapist or another group member rather than alluding to matters by beating about the bush. For example, “smoking is harmful to the environment,” may be replaced by, “I cannot breath properly and you are killing me by smoking when I am with you!”
• Checking Things Out - Instead of engaging in mind reading or guessing what another person thinks or feels, the therapist encourages the client to check it out by asking directly, “how do you feel about that?”
• First Person, Active Speech - “it is not good for people to live alone,” contrasts with “I do not like to live alone.” The latter allows the speaker to own what is being said and imbue it with personal meaning and emotion.