This is a guest blog post from Brian O'Neill, Clinical Director of Lives Lived Well. Brian is conducting two professional Gestalt Therapy Masterclasses for Relationships Australia Queensland next week in Brisbane.
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Gestalt therapy works from the existential space where to Know something is Knowledge, to Understand it is Intelligence and toLive it is Wisdom.
My own sense is that a great strength of gestalt therapy is its thinking about polarities, and the need to acknowledge both poles and hold the contrasts within a single overarching view. People come to therapy at war with themselves, blaming and shaming a part of themselves they want to get rid of. Gestalt works to hear and then heal both parts in order for us to become whole again.
Initially people enter the therapy process struggling with life, feeling out of control and needing to gain control again. Many therapies have developed to support this aim. Yet the nature of gestalt therapy, instead of offering control per se over the experienced symptoms, is to heighten awareness, contact and dialogue with the faith that through being present to “what is”, change happens. This change is a developmental change, not a cure for an illness.
Gestalt therapy is as much a way of life, like Buddhism, as being a psychotherapy. A gestalt therapist has trained in awareness, relationship and the field perspective. The field perspective is similar to system theory and its basic premise, like Chaos theory, is that everything is connected however we are often unsure how. What we do know is nothing unconnected ever happens.
In Couples work there two “realities” at play - the reality of the two separate people and the subtle, invisible reality of the “relationship”. It’s like two people in a rowing boat where the boat is the relationship- when one moves the other is moved. When the therapist comes to therapy they also are “in the boat” and affect and are affected by the couple and their relationship. Understanding this means we can work with the relationship and the impact it has on the two people and explore this with the couple.
While the Gestalt therapy literature is complex the principles and practice of Gestalt therapy is profoundly simple. The principles guide the practice and there are four simple principles – Awareness, Relationship, Experiment and Authenticity. These translate to the practice of being: ”Here and Now”, “I and Thou”, exploring “What and How”. The final practice is Authenticity which means being spontaneous in response to the other person – like a dance teacher or Aikido instructor learning to be attuned to the other.
The fields Gestalt therapy writing covers today vary from current interventions in mental health; working in couples and family therapy; child inclusive practice; domestic and family violence; substance misuse; working with trauma and war veterans; as well as group work; working in court settings; communities; and management practice and service development. It incorporates areas such as spirituality; quantum physics; creativity; poetry; political science; supervision and ethics and our developmental journey from childhood through to older age. This is a rich tapestry of threads interwoven into a multifaceted view of the application of gestalt therapy in the 21st century.