Gestalt Key Terms Flashcards
What is Awareness?
The process of attending to and observing one’s own sensing, thinking, feelings, and actions; paying attention to the flowing nature of one’s present-centered experience.
What are Blocks to Energy?
Paying attention to where energy is located, how it is used, and how it can be blocked.
What is Confluence?
A disturbance in which the sense of boundary between self and environment is lost.
What is Confrontation?
An invitation for the client to become aware of discrepancies between verbal and nonverbal expressions, between feelings and actions, or between thoughts and feelings.
What is Contact?
The process of interacting with nature and other people without losing one’s sense of individuality. Contact occurs through seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and moving.
What is the Continuum of Awareness?
Staying with the moment-to-moment flow of experiencing, which helps individuals discover how they are functioning in the world.
What is Deflection?
A way of avoiding contact and awareness by being vague or indirect.
What is Dichotomy?
A split in which a person experiences or sees opposing forces; a polarity (e.g., weak/strong, dependent/independent).
What is Dream Work?
In Gestalt therapy, dreams are not interpreted but are relived as though they were happening in the present.
What is the Empty-Chair Technique?
A role-playing intervention in which clients play conflicting parts, often engaging in a dialogue between different sides of themselves.
What are Exercises?
Ready-made techniques designed to make something happen in a therapy session or to achieve a goal.
What are Experiments?
Procedures encouraging spontaneity and creativity by bringing possibilities for action into the therapy session.
What is Field?
A dynamic system of interrelationships.
What is Field Theory?
Exploring the boundary between the person and the environment to understand what is occurring.
What is Figure?
The aspects of an individual’s experience that are most salient at any given moment.
What is the Figure-Formation Process?
Describes how an individual organizes the environment moment to moment, focusing attention on what is most relevant.
What is Ground?
Aspects of an individual’s experience that tend to be in the background or out of awareness.
What is Holism?
Attending to a client’s thoughts, feelings, behaviors, body, and dreams as a whole.
What is Impasse?
A stuck point where individuals are unable to support themselves and seek external support.
What is Introjection?
The uncritical acceptance of others’ beliefs and standards without assimilating them into one’s personality.
What is Organismic Self-Regulation?
An individual’s tendency to take actions or make contacts that restore equilibrium or contribute to change.
What is the Paradoxical Theory of Change?
The notion that authentic change occurs from being who we are rather than from trying to become someone else.
What is Phenomenological Inquiry?
A technique to help clients notice what is happening in the present moment by asking “what” and “how” questions.
What is Projection?
The process of disowning certain aspects of oneself by attributing them to the environment or others.
What is Relational Gestalt Therapy?
A supportive, kind, and compassionate approach emphasizing dialogue in the therapeutic relationship.
What is Retroflection?
Turning back onto oneself something intended to be directed toward others.
What are Techniques?
Exercises or interventions designed to bring action into therapy, often with a prescribed outcome.
What is Unfinished Business?
Unexpressed feelings (e.g., resentment, guilt, anger, grief) that linger and disrupt current functioning.
