Theories of Counseling Chapter 8

Question 1

Overview of Gestalt Therapy

Answer 1

• Existential, phenomenological, and process-based approach created on the premise that individuals must be understood on the context of their ongoing relationship with the environment.
• Awareness, choice, and responsibility are cornerstone of practice.
• Focuses on the here and now, the what and how of experiencing, the authenticity of the therapist, active dialogue inquiry and exploration, and the I/Thou of relating.

Question 2

Paradoxical Theory of Change

Answer 2

• We are constantly moving between who we “should be” and who we “are”
• Authentic change occurs more from being who we are than from trying to be who we are not.

Question 3

Goals of Gestalt Therapy

Answer 3

• Awareness of what they are experiencing in the present moment
• Awareness and contact with the environment, which consists of the external and internal worlds
• Looking at the quality of contact with aspects of the external world and the internal world are monitored.
• The process of “reowning” parts of oneself that have been disowned.

Question 4

Therapist’s Role in Gestalt Therapy

Answer 4

• Therapists put themselves as fully as possible into the experience of the client without judgment, analyzing, or interpreting, while concurrently holding a sense of one’s independent presence.
• Therapists devise experiments designed to increase client’s awareness of what they are doing and how they are doing it moment to moment.
• The therapist’s job is to invite clients into an active partnership where they can learn about themselves by adopting an experimental attitude toward life in which they try out new behaviors and notice what happens.

Question 5

Contemporary Gestalt Approach

Answer 5

• Stresses dialogue and the I/Thou relationship between client and therapist.
• Emphasize the relationship and work collaboratively with clients in a search for understanding.
• Places much less emphasis on resistance.
• It is best to observe what is actually and presently happening rather than trying to make something happen.

Question 6

Perl’s Agenda for Gestalt Therapy

Answer 6

1. Moving the client from environmental support to self-support
2. Reintegrating the disowned parts of one’s personality

-Confrontation

Question 7

Components to Gestalt Therapy

Answer 7

1. Holism
2. Field Theory
3. Figure-Formation Process
4. Organismic Self-Regulation
5. Contact/Resistance
6. The Now
7. Unfinished Business
8. Blocked Energy

Question 8

Holism

Answer 8

• All of nature is seen as a unified and coherent whole, and the whole is different from the sum of its parts.
• Interested in the whole person, they place no superior value on a particular aspect of the individual.

Question 9

Field Theory

Answer 9

-Asserts that the organism must be seen in its environment.
1. Figure:
(those aspects of the individual’s experience that are most salient at any moment)
2. Ground:
(those aspects of the client’s presentation that are often out of his awareness)

Question 10

Figure-Formation Process

Answer 10

• Tracks how the individual organizes experience from moment to moment as some aspect of the environmental field emerges from the background
• Focal point of the individual’s attention.
• The dominant needs of the individual at a given moment influence this process.

Question 11

Organismic Self-Regulation

Answer 11

• Process by which equilibrium is disturbed by the mergence of a need.
• Organisms will do their best to regulate themselves, given their own capabilities and the resources of their environment.
• With change, individuals may take actions to restore equilibrium or to contribute to growth and change.

Question 12

Contact

Answer 12

-Effective contact meanings interacting with nature and with other people without losing one’s sense of individuality.

Question 13

Resistance

Answer 13

• Typically adopted out of our awareness and when they function in a chronic way, can contribute to dysfunctional behavior.
• Coping processes but end up preventing us from experiencing the present in a full and real way.

Question 14

The Now

Answer 14

• Emphasis on learning to appreciate and fully experience the present moment.
• Focusing on the past and the future can be a way of avoid coming to terms with the present.
• As clients direct their energy toward what was or what might have been or live in fantasy about the future, the power of the present diminishes.

Question 15

Phenomenological Inquiry

Answer 15

• Paying attention to what is occurring now.

- Suspending any preconceived ideas, assumptions, or interpretations concerning the meaning of a client’s experience.

Question 16

Unfinished Business

Answer 16

• When figures emerge from the background that are not completed and resolved
• Unacknowledged feelings create unnecessary emotional debris that clutters present-centered awareness.

Question 17

Impasse

Answer 17

• Struck point, occurs when external support is not available or the customary way of being does not work.
• The therapist’s task is to accompany clients in experiencing the impasse without rescuing or frustrating them.

Question 18

Blocked Energy

Answer 18

-Manifested by tension in some part of the body, by posture, by keeping ones body tight and closed, by not breathing deeply, by looking away from people when speaking to avoid contact, by choking off sensations, by numbing feelings, and by speaking with a restricted voice.

Question 19

Mechanisms of Resistance

Answer 19

1. Introjection
2. Projection
3. Retroflection
4. Deflection
5. Confluence

Question 20

Introjection

Answer 20

• Tendency to uncritically accept others’ beliefs and standards without assimilation them to make them congruent with who we are.
• Passively incorporate what the environment provides rather than clearly identifying what we want or need.

Question 21

Projection

Answer 21

• We disown certain aspects of ourselves by assigning them to the environment.
• Those attributed of our personality that are inconsistent with our self-image are disowned and out onto, assigned to, and seen in other people
• Blaming others for lots of our problems

Question 22

Retroflection

Answer 22

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 for us.
-Inhibit themselves from taking action out of fear of embarrassment, guilt and resentment.

Question 23

Deflection

Answer 23

• Process of distraction or veering off, so that it is difficult to maintain a sustained sense of contact.
• We attempt to diffuse or defuse contact through the overuse of humor, abstract generalizations, and questions rather than statements

Question 24

Confluence

Answer 24

• Blurring the differentiation between the self and the environment.
• Involves the absence of conflicts, slowness to anger, and a belief that all parties experience the same feelings and thoughts we do.

Question 25

Gestalt Therapy and Language

Answer 25

• Paying attention to clients’ body language.
• The therapist needs to be alert for gaps in attention and awareness and for incongruities between verbalizations and what clients are doing with their bodies.
• Therapists might direct clients to speak for and become their gestures or body parts.

Question 26

It Talk

Answer 26

• Clients say it instead of I, they are using depersonalizing language.
• The counselor may ask them to substitute personal pronouns for impersonal ones so they will assume an increased sense of responsibility.

Question 27

You Talk

Answer 27

• Global and impersonal language tends to keep the person hidden.
• The therapist often points out generalized uses of you and invited the client to experiment with substituting I.

Question 28

Questions

Answer 28

• Questions have a tendency to keep the questioner hidden, safe, and unknown
• Therapists often ask clients to experiment with changing their questions into statements.

Question 29

Language That Denies Power

Answer 29

• Clients have a tendency to deny their personal power by adding qualifiers
• I cant, I guess, etc.
• Encouraging clients to substitute often assists them in owning and accepting their power by taking responsibility for their decisions.

Question 30

Metaphors

Answer 30

Beneath the metaphor may lie a suppressed internal dialogue that represents critical unfinished business or reactions to a present interaction.

Question 31

Listening For Language That Uncovers A Story

Answer 31

Clients often use language that is elusive yet gives significant clues to a story that illustrates their life struggles.

Question 32

Polster’s Sequence of Growth

Answer 32

1. Discovery: reach a new realization about themselves or to acquire a new view
2. Accommodation: recognizing that they have a choice.
   - Clients try new behaviors in the supportive environment of the therapy office, and then they expand their awareness of the world.
3. Assimilation: learning how to influence their environment
   - Clients develop confidence in their ability to improve and improvise.

Question 33

Client-Counselor Relationship

Answer 33

• Involves a person-to-person relationship between therapist and client.
• The therapists are responsible for the quality of their presence, for knowing themselves, and the client, and for remaining open to the client.
• It is important that therapists allow themselves to be affected by their clients and that they actively share their own present perceptions and experiences as they encounter clients in the here and now

Question 34

Experiments

Answer 34

• Grow out of the interaction between client and therapist,
• Flows directly from theory and is crafted to fit the individual as he/she exists in the now
• Spontaneous and relevant to a particular moment and a particular development of a figure-formation process.

Question 35

Exercises

Answer 35

-Exercises are ready-made techniques that are sometimes used to make something happen in a therapy session or to achieve a goal.

Question 36

Internal Dialogue

Answer 36

• Integrate functioning and acceptance of aspects of one’s personality that have been disowned and denied.
• A main division is between the top dog and the underdog, and therapy often focuses on the war between the two

Question 37

Empty Chair

Answer 37

• Role revisal, bringing into consciousness the fantasies of what the other might be thinking or feeling.
• This role playing technique in which all the parts are played by the client.
• Using two chairs, the therapist asks the client to sit in one chair and be fully the top dog and then shift to the other chair and become the underdog.

Question 38

Future Projection

Answer 38

• An anticipated event is brought into the present moment and acted out.
• It is designed to help clients express concerns they have about the future.
• A client creates a future time and place with selected people, brings this event to the present, and gets a new perspective on the problem

Question 39

Making Rounds

Answer 39

• An exercise that involves a person in a group to go up to other in the group and either speak to or do something to each person.
• The purpose is to confront, to risk, to disclose the self, to experiment with new behavior, and to grow and change.

Question 40

Reversal Exercise

Answer 40

• Certain symptoms and behaviors often represents reversal of underlying or latent impulses.
• Clients take the plunge into the very thing that is fraught with anxiety and make contact with those parts of themselves that have been submerged and denied.

Question 41

Rehearsal Exercise

Answer 41

• Clients share their rehearsals out loud, they become more aware of the many preparatory means they use in bolstering their social roles.
• They become increasingly aware of how they try to meet the expectations of others, of the degree to which they want to be approved, accepted, and liked, and of the extent to which they go to attain acceptance.

Question 42

Exaggerated Exercise

Answer 42

-The person is asked to exaggerate the movement or gesture repeatedly, which usually intensifies the feeling attached to the behavior and makes the inner meaning clearer.

Question 43

Gestalt’s Dream Work

Answer 43

• There is no interpretation, instead the intent is to bring dreams back to life and relive them as though they were happening now.
• Each part of the dream is assumed to be a projection of the self, and the client creates scripts for encounters between the various characters or parts.

Question 44

Application to Group Counseling

Answer 44

-Heighten awareness and self-regulation through interactions with one another and the group itself.
-Encourages direct experience and action as opposed to merely talking about conflicts.
-The now focus enlivens the group and assists member in vividly
exploring their concerns.

Question 45

Gestalt Strengths

Answer 45

• Experiments can be tailored to fit the unique way in which an individual perceives and interprets his or her culture.
• Clients experience an ongoing struggle to reconcile what appears to be diverse aspects of the two cultures
• In cultures where indirect speech is the norm, nonverbal behaviors may emphasize the unspoken content of verbal communication.

Question 46

Gestalt Limitations

Answer 46

• Can lead to a high level of intense feelings if experiments are utilized too quickly.
• Individuals have strong cultural injunctions prohibiting them from directly expressing their emotions to their parents