Theory and Practice of

Counseling and Psychotherapy

Psych422
Chapter8: Gestalt Therapy
Questions?
 What key concepts do you know in
terms of Gestalt therapy?

View of Human Nature
 Self-reliance and reintegration
 Dialogue b/w client and therapist (therapist has no agenda
 Spontaneous; here and now experience
 Human nature is rooted in existential philosophy,
phenomenology, and field theory
 Individuals have the capacity to self-regulate in their
environment
 The process of “reowning” parts of oneself that have been
disowned
The Now
 Existential & Phenomenological – it is
grounded in the client’s “here and now”
 Initial goal is for clients to gain awareness
of what they are experiencing and doing
now
 Promotes direct experiencing rather than the
abstractness of talking about situations
 Rather than talk about a childhood trauma the
client is encouraged to become the hurt child
The Now
 Ask “what” and “how” instead of “why”
 Our “power is in the present”
 Nothing exists except the “now”
 The past is gone and the future has not yet arrived
 For many people, the power of the present is lost
 They may focus on their past mistakes or engage in
endless resolutions and plans for the future
Unfinished Business
 Feelings about the past are unexpressed
 These feelings are associated with distinct memories
and fantasies
 Feelings not fully experienced linger in the
background and interfere with effective contact
 Pay attention on the bodily experience because if
feelings are unexpressed they tend to result in
physical symptom
 Result:
 Preoccupation, compulsive behavior, wariness
oppressive energy and self-defeating behavior
 Solution: get in touch with the stuck point.
Contact and Resistances to Contact
 CONTACT – interacting with nature and with
other people without losing one’s individuality
 Contact (connect) and Withdrawal (separate)

 RESISTANCE TO CONTACT – the defenses we

develop to prevent us from experiencing the
present fully
 Five major channels of resistance:
 Introjection • Deflection
 Projection • Confluence
 Retroflection
Contact and Resistances to Contact
 Introjection: uncritically accept others’ belief and
standards without thinking whether they are
congruent with who we are
 Projection: the reverse of introjection; we disown
certain aspect of ourselves by assigning them to
the environment
 Retroflection: turning back to ourselves what we
would like to do to someone else
 Directing aggression inward that we are fearful to
directing toward others.
Contact and Resistances to Contact
 Deflection: A way of avoiding contact and
awareness by being vague or indirect.
 e.g., overuse of humor
 Confluence: less differentiation between the self
and the environment.
 e.g., a need to be accepted---to stay safe by going
alone with other and not expressing one’s true feeling
and opinions.
 Clients are encouraged to become increasingly
aware of their dominant style of blocking contact
Questions
 Please provide examples for each five
resistance to contact?
Energy and blocks to energy
 Pay attention to where energy is located, how it is
used, and how it can be blocked
 Blocked energy (resistance):
 Tension some part of the body; numbing feelings,
looking away from people when speaking, speaking
with a restricted voice
 Recognize how their resistance is being expressed
in their body
 Exaggerate their tension and tightness in order to
discover themselves
Therapeutic Goals
 Increasing Awareness and greater choice
 Awareness includes knowing the environment,
knowing oneself, accepting oneself, and being
able to make contact.
 Stay with their awareness, unfinished
business will emerge.
Therapist’s function and Role
 Increase clients’ awareness
 Pay attention to the present moment
 Pay attention to clients’ body language,
nonverbal language, and inconsistence b/w
verbal and nonverbal message (e.g., anger
and smile)
 “I” message
Client’s Experience in Therapy
 Therapist  no interpretation
 Client  making their own interpretation
 Three-stage (Polster, 1987)
 Discovery (increasing awareness)
 Accommodation (recognizing that they have
a choice)
 Assimilation (influencing their environment)
Relationship Between Therapist and Client
 The quality of therapist-client relationship
 Therapists knowing themselves
 Therapists share their experience to clients in the
here-and-now
 Therapist Use of self in therapy
Therapeutic techniques and procedures
 The experiential work
 Use experiential work in therapy to work through the
stuck points and get new insights
 Preparing client for experiential work
 Get permission from clients
 Be sensitive to the cultural difference (e.g., Asian
cultural value: emotional control)
 Respect resistance (e.g., express emotionsfear of
lose control, could not stop, or weakness)
Therapeutic techniques and procedures
 Increase awareness about the incongruence
between mind and body (verbal and nonverbal
expression)
 The internal dialogue exercise
 Making the rounds
 Rehearsal exercise
 Exaggeration exercise
 Staying with the feeling
 The Gestalt approach to dream work
Therapeutic techniques and procedures
 The internal dialogue exercise
 Top dog (critical parent) and underdog (victim)
 Empty-chair (two sides of themselves)
 Making the rounds
 Go around to each person and say “What makes it
hard for me trust you is……”
 Rehearsal exercise
 Reverse the typical style (e.g., behave as negative as
possible)
Therapeutic techniques and procedures
 Rehearsal exercise
 May get stuck when rehearsing silently or internally
 Share the rehearsals out load with a therapist
 Exaggeration exercise
 Exaggerate gesture or movement, which usually
intensified the feelings attached to the behavior and
makes the inner meaning clearer.
 Staying with the feeling
 Go deeper into the feelings they wish to avoid
Therapeutic techniques and procedures
 The Gestalt approach to dream work
 Not interpret or analyze dreams
 Bring dream back to life as though they were
happening now
 The dream is acted out in the present to become
different parts of the dream
 Projection: every person or object in the dream
represents a projected aspect of the dreamer.
 Royal road to integration
 Dreams serve as an excellent way to discover
personality
 No remember-refuse to face what it is at that time
From a multicultural perspective
 Contributions
 Work with clients from their cultural
perspectives
 Limitations
 Focus on “affect”
 Asian cultural value: emotional control
 Prohibiting to directly express the negative
feelings to their parents.
Summary and Evaluation
 Contributions
 Present-centered awareness
 Pay attention on verbal and nonverbal cures
 Bring conflicts or struggles to actually experience
their conflict and struggles
 Focus on growth and enhancement
 See each aspect of a dream as a projection of
themselves
 Increase awareness of “what is”
 Empirical validation for the effectiveness
Summary and Evaluation
 Limitations
 Ineffective therapists may manipulate
the clients with powerful experiential
work
 Some people may need psycho-
education