I would like to invite you in to the present moment: What are you aware of? What is most concernful at this moment (check inside for body processes or thoughts about past, present and future; check also outside through contacting the world through your five senses)….This is figure.
All these figures arise from your particular background, your accumulation of experiences….This is ground.
The way figure and ground hang together is a gestalt.
Check if you can detect a beginning, middle, and end to your experience toward need fulfillment….This is the contact completion cycle. According to GT, all life is cyclic: like the seasons or a human life.
As a Gestalt Therapist, I essentially help clients become aware of how they create their moments – to give them a sense that life is a continuous string of moments or gestalten and happens now.
If we stay with your moments long enough, tracking the patterns/gestalten, we would identify your conditioning and the symptoms that it creates. These symptoms can lead to problems, dissatisfaction, or a feeling of stuckness – a feeling of being stuck somewhere in the cycle of life.
What I mean by conditioning is: We have all adjusted to an imperfect world early on. These solutions or creative adjustments were established long ago are now codified, rigid, and outdated. They are the interruptions to contact to the natural rhythm and flow of life. Gestalt Therapy attempts to analyze the most recent manifestation of these gestalts/conditioning, shift them, and thereby integrate new (of lost) capacities. This is done through experience (as a way to be grounded in what is real), experiment (as a way of shifting it), and existentialism (as a way of “thought-framing” our arisings or what theme is the work being organized toward). In this process we pay attention to what amount of support is currently available and find ways of increasing it because support is necessary for completion, for integration, and for growth.
This is why Gestalt Therapy is considered a growth model. It is a shift from psychoanalysis which is linear and causal to one which is relational and process-oriented, and where the therapist is actively involved, in the dialogue, to further the growth of the client but the therapist is invariably changed, on account of being human, by the interactions as well.
Copyright 2018 – by Claudia Dommaschk MFT – All Rights Reserved.
