Gestalt Therapy

Question 1

What is Gestalt therapy? What are the three cornerstones of the perspective.

Answer 1

Gestalt therapy is an existential, phenomenological and process-based approach created on the premise that individuals but be understood in the context of heir ongoing relationship with the environment.

- Awareness
- Choice
- Responsibility

Question 2

What is the initial goal of Gestalt therapy?

Answer 2

The initial goal is for clients to expand there awareness of what they are experiencing in the present.

Question 3

Relational Gestalt Therapy

Answer 3

• Contemporary Gestalt therapy, stresses dialogue and relationship between client and therapist.
  
  • More support and increased sensitivity and compassion as apposed to the confrontational style of Fritz Perls.
    
    • The focus is on the I/Thou relationship and the emphatic atonement while tapping into the clients wisdom and resources.

Question 4

How did Fritz Perls differ from Freud?

Answer 4

• Fritz Perls was influenced by Freud, though differed from him in that he took a holistic approach to personality rather than Freud’s deterministic and mechanistic approach.
  
  • Perls preferred examining the present situation rather than focusing on repressed intrapsyhic conflicts from early childhood.
    
    • Process rather than content.
    • Experiments are designed to increase clients awareness of what they are doing and how they are doing it.

Question 5

Emotion-focused therapy (EFT)

Answer 5

• Is related to Gestalt therapy. EFT entails the practice of therapy being informed by understanding the role of emotion in psychotherapeutic change.
  
  • Blends the active elements of the person centred approach with the phenomenological awareness experiments of Gestalt therapy.

Question 6

Gestalt theory is grounded

Answer 6

• In existential philosophy, phonology, and field theory.
  
  • Genuine knowledge is what is immediately evident in the experience of the perceiver.
  • The reowning parts of oneself that have been disowned and the unification process proceed step by step until clients can carry on with their on personal growth.
    
    • The process of awareness allows the client to make informed choices and thus to live a more meaningful life.

Question 7

A basic assumption of Gestalt therapy

Answer 7

Is that individuals have the capacity to self-regulate when they are aware of what is happening in and around them.

Question 8

The Gestalt theory of change posits

Answer 8

That the more we work at becoming who or what we are not, the more we remain the same.

Question 9

The paradoxical theory of change

Answer 9

• Authentic change occurs more from being who we are than from trying to be who we are not.
  
  • To be as fully as possible in ones current condition, rather than striving to be what they “should be”.

Question 10

Figure

Answer 10

Those aspects of the individuals experience that are most salient at any moment.

Question 11

Ground

Answer 11

• Those aspects of the clients presentation tat are often out of his awareness.
  
  • Cues to this ground can often be found on the surface through physical gestures, the of voice, demeanour, and other non-verbal content.

Question 12

Holism

Answer 12

• All of nature is seen as a unified and coherent whole, and the whole is different from the sum of its parts.
  
  • No superior aspect of the individual is emphasised.

Question 13

Field theory

Answer 13

• The organism must be seen in its environment, or in its context as part of the constantly changing field.
  
  • Everything is relational, in flux, interrelated, and in a process.
  • Attention is payed to what is occurring at the boundary between the person and his environment.

Question 14

Figure -Formation Process

Answer 14

• Derived from the study of visual perception.
  
  • Describes how the individuals organises experience for moment to moment.
    
    • The field differentiates:
      
      • Foreground (Figure)
      • Background (Ground)
        
        • Tracks how some aspects of the environmental field emerges from the background and becomes the focal point of the individuals attention and interest.
        • The dominant needs of the individual at a given moment influence this process.

Question 15

Organismic Self-Regulation

Answer 15

• The process of figure formation process is intertwined with organismic self-regulation, a process where the equilibrium is disturbed by the emergence of a need, a sensation, or an interest.
  
  • Actions that will restore equilibrium or contribute to growth and change.

Question 16

Phenomenological enquiry

Answer 16

• Involves paying attention to what is occurring now. To help the client make contact with the present moment.
  
  • Now awareness is promoted by asking what and how questions and not why questions.
  • Ideas, assumptions, interpretations concerning the clients experience are suspended.

Question 17

Unfinished business

Answer 17

• hen figures emerge from the back ground but are not competed and resolved, individuals are left with unfinished business, which can be manifested in unexpressed feelings such as resentment, rage, hatred pain, anxiety, grief, guilt and abandonment.
  
  • Creating unnecessary emotional debris.
  • Clutters present centred awareness.
  • Not fully present in awareness - though cloud the awareness.
  • Can present themselves in the body, so the Gestalt therapist is always checking to see how the patients body feels.

Question 18

Impasse

Answer 18

• The stuck point, the time when external support is not available or the customary way of being does not work.
  
  • The therapists task is to accompany the client in experiencing impasse.

Question 19

Contact

Answer 19

• In Gestalt therapy contact is necessary if change is is to occur: Contact is made by seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and moving.
  
  • Interacting with nature and other people without loosing ones sense of individuality.
  • After the contact experience, there is a time of withdrawal, to integrate what has been learned. Two boundaries - to connect and to separate.
  • Attention is also payed to interruptions disturbances, and resistance to contact, that prevent us from experiencing contact in a real way.
  • Operate mainly our of awareness.

Question 20

There are five identified contact boundary disturbances;

Answer 20

• Introjection
• Projection
• Retroflection
• Deflection
• Confluence.

Question 21

Introjection

Answer 21

The tendency to uncritically accept others beliefs and standards without assimilating them to make them congruent with who we are.

Question 22

Projection

Answer 22

Is the reverse of introjection. In projection we disown certain aspects of ourselves by assigning them to the environment.

Question 23

Retroflection

Answer 23

Consists of turning back onto ourselves what we would like to do to someone else or doing to ourselves what we would like someone else to do to or for us. Expressions of anger directed towards ourselves for example, or depression and somatic symptoms.

Question 24

Deflection

Answer 24

Is the process of distracting or veering off, so that it is difficult to maintain a sustained sense of contact.

Question 25

Confluence

Answer 25

Involves blurring the differentiation between the self and the environment. As we strive to get along with everyone there is no clear demarcation between internal and outer reality Involves the absence of conflicts, slowness to anger, and the belief that all parties experience the same feelings and thoughts that we do.

Question 26

The six methodological components of Gestalt therapy:

Answer 26

• The continuum of experience.
  
  • The here and now
  • The paradoxical theory of change
  • The experiment
  • The authentic encounter
  • Process orientated diagnosis.

Question 27

The main goals of Gestalt therapy

Answer 27

• Are to gain more awareness and therefore be able to make greater choice.
  
  • Gestalt therapy is basically an existential encounter out of which clients tend to move in certain directions

Question 28

The therapists role

Answer 28

• Is to invite clients into an active partnership where they can learn about themselves by adopting an experimental attitude towards life in which they try out new behaviours and notice what happens.
  
  • The client is the expert.
  • Value self-discovery.
  • Attention is payed to the body and its expressions.
  • Attention is payed to how clients verbally express themselves. Cues, “It” talk, “you” talk, questions, language that denies power, metaphors. Proving rich clues into internal struggles and unfinished business.

Question 29

There is a three stage integration sequence that characterises Gestalt therapy.

Answer 29

• Discovery: Clients are likely to reach a new realisation about themselves.
  - Accommodation: Clients recognise that they have a choice. Clients gain skill at coping with difficult situations. Out of office experiments are conducted.
  - Assimilation: Clients learn how to influence their environment. They do more than passively accept the environment. Stands may be taken on critical issues.

Question 30

Exercises

Answer 30

Are ready made techniques that re sometimes used to make something happen in a therapy session or to achieve a goal.

Question 31

Experiments

Answer 31

• Grow out of the interaction between the client and the therapist. they emerge within this dialogic process.
  
  • The very cornerstone of experimental learning.
  • A experiment is not a technique that is performed with specific learning goals. It flows from psychotherapy theory and is crafted to fit the individual as he exits in the here and the now.
  • The purpose of an experiment is to assist the client in active self-exploration.
  • The experiment aims to bring out some sort of internal struggle by making it an actual process.

Question 32

Confrontation

Answer 32

• Can be used sometimes in Gestalt therapy, however it does not have to be viewed as a harsh attack. Can be done in such a way that clients cooperate, especially when they are invited to examine their behaviour, attitudes, and thoughts.
  
  • Does not have to be aimed at negative traits. Clients can be encouraged to see how they are blocking their strengths.

Question 33

The empty chair technique

Answer 33

• Is one way of getting the client to externalise the introject, a technique Perls used a great deal.
  
  • The client swaps chairs simultaneously. One chair is the top dog, the other chair is the underdog. The introjects then surface with both sides of the clients personality. The conflict can then be resolved by integration of both sides.

Question 34

Making the rounds

Answer 34

• Is a Gestalt exercise that involves asking a person in a group to go up to others in the group and either speak to or do something with each person.
  
  • the purpose is to confront, to risk. to disclose the self, to experiment with new behaviour, and to grow and change.

Question 35

Contemporary Gestalt therapy has emerged as a culturally sensitive and diversity friendly orientation.

Answer 35

• Gestalt therapy is effective as it takes clients context into account.
• Gestalt experiments can be tailored to the specific way an individuals interprets and perceives his culture.
• The own cultural self of the therapist must be explored in order to make contact with others.
• Gestalt Therapy can assist clients in reconciling conflicts.
  
  • This is especially important with bicultural clients and their conflicting cultures.