‘Be your true self and have faith in your inner self.’
Fritz Perls
At the beginning, this movement was called Concentration therapy. It was thought that concentration is the most efficient means in treating neurotic and paranoid disorders…A quality life is based on a person’s awareness of their life and behavior, and people are capable of being aware of their sensations, thoughts, emotions and perceptions. Due to their self awareness they are capable of choosing and being responsible for their choices.
Natural Resources
Gestalt therapists believe that people potentially have all necessary capabilities to solve their problems and to deal with difficulties. Sometimes people get stuck and they need help. This is a humanistic – existential therapy which believes that people were born with resources and a capability of being in good relationships with others, and the therapist is there to help you see the situation more clearly, to find out how you participate in that and to experiment with finding new solutions. A person is capable of symbolizing all aspects of their experiences. The symbolizing represents the essence of mental life, it helps us remember past experiences, predict future events, make some changes in present and determine their meaning…
Contact with other people
This movement prefers authentic contact with others, dialogical relationships, creative adaptation of an organism to the whole, as well as awareness of reactions that repeat and habits we don’t need any more and which we can change. It emphasizes our processes of blocking or interrupting of a normal cycle and reveals our avoiding, fears and rigidness as well as our illusions. In Gestalt therapy health is featured by activity, awareness, choice and authenticity and unhealthy states are depicted by halts, resistance, rigidness and control and very often anxiety as well.
Gestalt- form-shape
The goal of this method is ‘regain the feeling of oneself ‘. The word Gestalt itself means the whole, form, shaping; and the change itself, inside the whole is not the same as that part when it is singled out or joined to another whole – because that part takes on certain qualities arising in that place and its own role in different systems…That is why the whole is bigger than its consisting parts…Gestalt approach is holistic and it includes the person’s entire life experience (physical, psychological, emotional, interpersonal, spiritual). In an original way Gestalt fits and combines a range of various verbal and non verbal methods and techniques: awakening of senses, work on energy, breathing, body and voice, emotion expressions, work on dreams, dreaming… creative work…Techniques in Gestalt are as follows: empty chair, dialogue, exaggerating, role playing…
A uniting perspective of a human being is developed in Gestalt. This perspective integrates sensory, affective, intellectual, social and spiritual dimensions and in this way it enables global experience in which ‘the body can talk’ and ‘the words can come alive’.
The goal of therapy
The goal of Gestalt therapy is not to explain the origin of our difficulties, but it tends to experiment with new ways of solving them. Everyone is responsible for their own choices and avoidances and everyone works at their own rhythm, at the level that suits them.
‘Thinking waves make the mosaic of my life.’
The therapy consists of searching for new personal experience and a different evolving of a personal way of perception and mental depiction of reality. The goal of any therapeutic processes is not to change the outer situation, things, people, events. The therapy is about changing the client’s inner perception of things, their relationships and possible meanings.
Gestalt therapy inspires us to get to know ourselves better and to accept ourselves the way we are. We avoid the word ‘patient’ in Gestalt, since this word implies passivity of a person as opposed to doctor’s recommendation. We use the word ‘client’ as a person who is looking for something for themselves, as someone who is free and responsible for their choices.