What are the Elements of Gestalt Practice
Relationship
In Gestalt Therapy the relationship between client and therapist is absolutely crucial. It is a healing and reparative relationship, in which the therapist seeks out the deficits of the client’s early life and repairs the holes or teaches the client how to do this for him/herself. There is a saying in Gestalt: “It is never too late to have a happy childhood”.
Gestalt Therapy has continued to develop and grow apace since the death of its founder and many people associate the confrontational and challenging approach of Fritz Perls with the practice of Gestalt. This is an erroneous association and the majority of Gestalt practitioners believe firmly in the core conditions of the Rogerian Person-Centred approach.
Contact
A Gestalt therapist would spend a lot of his/her training just developing the ability to make good contact with a client, to really get through to that person, through all the layers of defences, and to stay in very close contact.
Awareness
The ultimate aim of therapy is awareness; making the unconscious conscious, where it can be dealt with; although Gestaltists tend to speak of ‘out of awareness’ and ‘in awareness’.
Exercises are often used to develop awareness.
Once we are aware of some aspect of ourselves, that we were previously unaware of, then we are in a position to do things differently, and so we begin to change.
Much of Gestalt therapy focuses on the seven boundary disturbances
