Asking yourself these five questions can help you come into this moment:

What am I doing? (what is observable)
What am I experiencing? (thoughts, feelings, sensations)
What do I want? (need or desire)
What do I expect? (futurizing)
What am I avoiding? (can often be “what is”)

Keep a practice journal and begin to note the patterns you live by. Gestalt Therapy is interested in two questions: “Now” and “How”? The assumption is that structure and function influence each other. In our work together we will rely heavily on these questions as they give us a sense of the actuality of your life: the structure of your moments (your living) and its function. From there you will be able to begin to integrate what is missing and live more wholly.

These five simple questions were stressed by my teacher, Jim Doak, in 2009. I now share them with you as direction finders in your work.

Copyright 2018 – by Claudia Dommaschk MFT – All Rights Reserved.

It is common knowledge in the field of psychology that pain or neurosis is imbedded in fear.  Most psychotherapies attempt to identify the source of fear in the hope that by understanding it intellectually, we overcome it and then are cured.  However, it is my experience that analysis and understanding alone do not necessarily evoke change because life is relationship.  Kristnamurti explains it this way: “Nothing exists in isolation, and as long as the mind is seeking isolation, there must be fear…as long as thought is judging the fact as a observer, there must be fear.”  He goes on to clarify that thinking creates fear through verbalizations, symbols, images, and previous knowledge projected on to the fact out of which fear then arises.

Gestalt Therapy attempts to bring the relationship by which we become fearful into focus; it takes a look at how we create our fear.  It begins with the premises that much of our suffering is created in our heads, in the way we view things.  However, rather than finish there, GT encourages embodiment.   It asks us to “lose your mind, come to your senses” and explore the relationship between the “me” and the “not me” or that what is familiar and therefore integrated and that what is unfamiliar and strange – a bind that cannot be overcome through mere verbal or intellectual explanation, but must be experienced.  As Kristnamurti says: “Now what are we afraid of?  Are we afraid of a fact, or of an idea about the fact?  Please see this point.  Are we afraid of the thing as it is, or are we afraid of what we think it is?”  Gestalt Therapy helps by encouraging us to get in direct relationship or complete communion with the fact:  what feelings, sensations, and assumptions do we make about the very thing that we are afraid of?  In other words, coming face to face with it allows no room for explanation.  The fact is there and we deal with it…just as it is, uninterrupted, and often quite creatively!  This is what it means “to be in good contact” and this the model of health in Gestalt Therapy.

Quotes from Kristnamurti’s On Love and Loneliness, 1993.

Copyright 2018 – by Claudia Dommaschk MFT – All Rights Reserved.