Gestalt Therapy

1
Gestalt Therapy

• Fritz Perls
• Born in 1893 into a Jewish Berlin family
• Medic in WWI for Germany, MD in 1920
• Trained as a psychoanalyst
• 1933, fled Germany to Holland S Africa
• 1946, went to America
• In Out of the Garbage Pail - 1972

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Gestalt Therapy

• Wholeness completeness
• Trust the inner wisdom of people
• Live integratively productively
• People are able to change and become responsible
• Persons are more than the sum of their parts

3
Gestalt Therapy

• Individuals are actors, not reactors
• The now is what matters
• Discovery of self occurs thru experience rather
  than talk due to an overdependency on
  intellectual experience
• Unfinished business earlier thoughts, feelings
  reactions that still affect personal
  functioning interfere w/present

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Gestalt Therapy

• No unconscious just a lack of awareness
• The more aware more healthy
• Body signs awareness of a need to change
  behaviors
• Needs are brought to the fore and then placed in
  the background when a new need will come to the
  fore

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Gestalt Therapy

• Difficulties
• Lose contact w/environs its resources
• Overinvolved w/environs loss of touch with self
• Failing to put aside unfinished business
• People become fragmented scattered in many
  directions

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Gestalt Therapy

• Conflict between top dog (what they think they
  should do) and the underdog (what they want to
  do)
• Dichotomies of life are problematic love/hate,
  pleasure/pain, masculinity/femininity
• Neurosis occurs when one does not take care of
  ones self fully or depend on others

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Gestalt Therapy

• Counselors create an atmosphere that encourages
  clients to explore growth
• Therefore, counselors are personally involved
  w/clients are honest
• Counselors are exciting, energetic and fully
  human
• Always use the present tense
• Address all conversations directly

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Gestalt Therapy

• Using I in place of it, especially when
  talking about ones body
• Focus on how and what rather than why
• Convert questions into statements
• Do not diagnose

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Gestalt Therapy

• Goals
• Here now, immediacy of experience
• Action, experience feelings behaviors
• Now experience awareness reality
• Past is no more, future does not exist. Only the
  now exists

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Gestalt Therapy

• Five layers of neuroses
• Phony layer pretending to be
• Phobic layer denying parts of ones self
• Impasse layer no sense of direction
• Implosive layer Feel vulnerable to feelings
• Explosive layer have intense feelings of joy,
  sorrow or pain

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Gestalt Therapy

• Exercises are ready made techniques
• Experiments are made on the spot
• Dream work become parts of the dream, discover
  what is missing in the dream
• Empty chair
• Confrontation point out incongruities
• Asking what how, why leads to
  intellectualization

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Gestalt Therapy

• Group techniques
• Making the rounds specific them is faced by
  each group member
• I take responsibility end statements with this
  phrase
• Exaggeration accentuate movements or gestures

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Gestalt Therapy

• May I feed you a sentence? - having the client
  repeat a certain sentence that makes the clients
  thoughts specific
• Making statements clients is not allowed to ask
  questions