According to the founder Fritz Perls, Gestalt is a branch of the Humanistic Therapie
Gestalt is just as effective as a process of personal development, giving new impulses to your life as a method in clinical psychology.
Your Gestalt therapist has undergone a specialized and intense four-year training. The encounter between therapist and client in Gestalt is characterized to be human and on the same level.
The Therapy centers in the present, in the “here and now”. By focusing on the present, the anxiety we generate with the creation of future scenarios dissolves. By focusing on the present, blames about the past disappear. We do consider matters of the past, whenever they directly influence the present moment.
We do base on the premise that every person acts in the best way and with the best intention, even though the results obtained are often neither satisfactory nor desired. We do get out of guilt or blame!
Gestalt means assuming our part of responsibility for what is happening in our life. When we see our part of involvement in events, we stop being victims and change to a position from where we are able to act and thus able to change.
Gestalt means to be in charge of our life. The only people we can work with in the therapeutic process are ourselves. If we change something about ourselves, our environment cannot be the same with us. Therefore, instead of focusing on what others do, we focus on our own process.
If you look at the emblematic image of the cup and the two faces, you will notice that we can just focus at one image at a time. One image comes to the front and the other moves to the background.
The same thing happens in our life. A subject, a thought, an emotion or a bodily sensation comes to the foreground, making itself notice and pushing us to take care of it.
For example we can notice that we are thirsty and the sensation will not disappear until we drink something. Or we may notice a discomfort because of a conflict with another person and it does not disappear until we have spoken with the person or solved the situation.
In Gestalt we know that a subject, a situation or determined type of relation reappears over and over in our lives until it finds a satisfactory solution. We all know the vicious circle of repeated situations. We can change the work or our partner and meet again with the same type of person as before. You can also repeat a situation in which we leave the same way and with the same feeling repeatedly. If we recognize the pattern or our theme on which situations are based, we can solve an internal conflict, dissolve a dysfunctional belief, break patterns and end a situation without it coming back.
The therapeutic process seeks change. For this, each person has their own solutions and paths. The Gestalt Therapist supports and encourages the individual process of finding each person’s own solutions.
Gestalt Therapy is an integrative therapy in which the learning process not only passes to the cognitive level and to the understanding but is integrated directly and in the moment through the experience. The difference to cognitive and behavioral therapies is that Gestalt considers the body, emotion and its corresponding forms of expression and integrates them into the therapeutical process.
Gestalt aims to understand how we function, how we react, how we act, how we think and how we interpret what happens to us in life. The question of HOW does it replace the complex causal question of WHY? Only if we understand how something works can we change something consciously.
The Gestalt process is usually a dynamic, active and sometimes even a fun process.
We can call the Gestalt process the path to our authenticity and the way to live who we are.
We do apply Gestalt mainly in our individual sessions and in group therapy
