As human beings, we are all on the move as ‘travelers through our own lives’. We shape our lives and are shaped by life. We have dreams, ideas, and desires that give us direction along the way. Sometimes we lose our way, get out of balance, an insurmountable obstacle comes our way, we feel the ground disappear under our feet, or we get ‘stuck’ in a certain situation (in our work, our relationships, or simply in ourselves). Sometimes we have learned to survive instead of to live. When sharing this with family or friends is difficult or insufficient, a therapist as a guide can be helpful to find direction together again and regain the “freedom” we have lost along the way.
Gestalt
Gestalt psychotherapy is also called the therapy of contact: it focuses on the connection or relationship between a person and their environment. When people experience psychological, emotional, physical, or existential problems, it can be seen as a kind of “disturbance” of this contact. A disturbance that needs healing. In doing so, gestalt therapy assumes that there is immense wisdom in our bodies and that we have an incredible ability to re-establish ourselves in any situation (to re-establish ourselves in any situation).
A gestalt therapist will try, in the here and now and from your concrete situation, to gain insight into how you experience the world and the interactions with your environment and where you are stuck. Things from the past or the future are brought to life in the reality of here and now, where feelings genuinely exist, and where choices can be made. From the awareness and realization of ‘what is’, the self-healing capacity is addressed and new possibilities for movement are explored and space for a fresh breath is created. With the therapeutic relationship as the ground, from where new experiences can be lived to break fixed patterns, allowing you to be creatively adjusted and resilient to that which comes your way.
To understand a person, it is important to gain insight into the connectedness in and with the broader field in which you function as an individual. We cannot be isolated from our context. Even though you are mostly 1-on-1 in the therapy room, you bring huge baggage: your culture, family, skills, experiences, values, norms, or the broader society that affects you as an individual. The whole “field” that makes you who you are. And the same goes for the therapist: The therapeutic relationship between client and therapist creates an interaction in which an equal dialogue can occur: the therapist does not take on an expert role, but brings himself and his sensations or experiences with him in order to fully feel and embody the experience of the situation. The therapy room is seen as a safe environment where you learn to look at yourself from within, to dwell on how you relate to others or to situations. Learning through experience with the temporary help of a gestalt therapist brings you naturally in motion, inwardly and outwardly, to be empowered in the here and now to address things differently. You determine the course and speed of this process.
Gestalt psychotherapy is seen as an experiential form of therapy and thus differs from psychodynamic therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and systemic therapy. From lived experiences, a felt and embodied insight can be formed, a “knowing” or “awareness” that transcends purely rational understanding or cognitive explanation. Gestalt psychotherapy is experimentally becoming self-wise.
Gestalt is welcoming yourself and ‘the other’ with everything that is there, how it is at the moment it is there, and also with everything that is not there.
luk helsen 