THE METHODS AND TECHNIQUES OF GESTALT THERAPY.

The experiments, games, works, and representations that happen during Gestalt practice are not a series of empty techniques. Using a cushion is not to practice Gestalt. The techniques respond to a deep spirit that in turn feeds an approach to life. The techniques only make sense taken as a whole, and they depend on each therapist's singularity too.

The Gestalt techniques work from here and now and emphasise the sensations, with the goal that the patient may become aware of how he is preventing himself from fulfilling his needs and closing his Gestalts. They also consider the relationship I-you (patient-therapist) without impeding each one's independence and responsibility

Awareness

It can be defined a deliberate consciousness about what is happening (physical sensations, feelings, imagination) "to me" and what is happening in the environment I am integrated in. Awareness comes from the answer to four key questions:

1- What are you doing?
2- What do you feel right now?
3- What are you trying to avoid at this moment?...
4- What do I want, what do I expect from you?

Awareness allows the patient to situate the therapeutic meeting; it is a warming up that also lets previous unfinished situations come out. In turn the therapist is attentive to his own flux of sensations and emotions. This is known as continuum of consciousness.

The "empty chair"

One of Perls's favourite techniques and one of Gestalt's "trademarks".
In the "empty chair" (usually replaced with a cushion) the patient places any character of his life with whom he has an unfinished situation:

Used at the right time, the "empty chair" activates feelings and allows patient to meet with unfinished characters or situations to see them here and now. Its exaggerated and discretionary use, however, can interfere in the direct contact between patient and therapist.

The "empty chair" also permits bringing into play a classic concept in Gestalt approach: the Top-dog and the Underdog. The first represents the person's desires, needs and potentials. The Underdog identifies the, excuses, pretexts and obstacles the person puts in his own way. The Underdog may personify interjected characters.

The monodrama

This technique resides in asking the patient to play the different characters of an unfinished situation in his life, so as to have a clear experience of each one of them and their emotions...

Not; only is it possible to represent other people, but it's also possible to represent the emotions, organs or emotions themselves.

Working on the representation of characters, emotions, abstractions or parts of oneself, the patient can clearly explore his polarities, get to know and accept them instead of reducing them to just one term. He can also register the differences and similarities with other people in his life. He is able to perceive that life manifests as a dynamic and changing balance.

EACH GESTALT THAT CLOSES GIVES RISE TO THE OPENING OF A NEW ONE. THIS IS HOW THE ORGANISM REGULATES ITSELF IN RELATION TO THE MEDIUM, THIS IS THE PRINCIPLE OF HOMEOSTASIS.

Amplification or exaggeration

The therapist asks the patient to continue with some gesture or movement, to gradually intensify it and to exaggerate more every time. This increases the perception of certain mechanisms the patient uses in his contact with the environment to block his sensations and feelings.

On amplifying his movement and his gesture and saying out loud what is the matter with him, the person hears himself breaks the confused interior soliloquy. It becomes a revealing and modifying experience

Talking to the other (Direct Interpellation)

This essential in Gestalt work. The therapist discourages those phrases that, for not being directed to a specific addressee, prevent emotional contact.

Not to do "mind reading" is also part of the same question: this is to say, not projecting on the other your own feelings, wishes, fears, fantasies, etc.

Direct interpellation points to creating more direct contacts, without justifications, explanations, arguments, excuses or intents to convince. Contacts in which "what is" imposes itself on "as if" (what "should be") This kind of dialogue requires honesty-the ability to say what you feel, think, want, and accept what you hear without judging it.

Talking in first person

This point is closely related to the other.

Gestalt maintains that the person is responsible for his acts, his thoughts his feelings or emotions. They belong to him. When he talks in first person he becomes aware of all that he is, he exercises his responsibility. The contrary favours dissociation.

Dreams in Gestalt.

Even though Freud appears as the first in this century-to scientifically go deep into them, dreams have been, in humanity's history, a territory wherein answers, symbols, orientations are sought. The ways have been multiple, versatile, from esoteric to rational. Perls gave great importance to them in Gestalt Therapy. The big novelty that this therapy introduces is that dreams are not objects of interpretation or Free association. In Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, one of his fundamental works, Perls says:

"The dream is the most spontaneous expression in a human being's existence. In Gestalt Therapy we do not break up nor interpret dreams: we try to antedate them to life. We revive it as if it were happening now. We act it out in the present, so that it becomes part of one. Whenever it is possible to remember it, the dream will be alive and available and will contain an unfinished situation. In the dream we find the existential difficulty, the part that the personality lacks. Everything is there. The dream is an excellent opportunity to discover the personality's gaps. Understanding a dream means to have awareness of how much the obvious is being avoided".

In Gestalt a dream is worked starting from a description of each one of its elements.

Perls even suggested writing dreams down and enumerating the elements in writing.

The therapist may invite the patient to play out the dream's different elements talking as if he were each one of these elements. It is very important that this representation be not only verbal, but that the patient bring into play emotional and corporal resources as well so that he may feel and get the experience of each element. It is also possible dramatise the dream.

"Each element of a dream is a part of ourselves. When I dream I write a script on my life, I say things about myself. Dreams can be seen as a camouflaged message. The message is existential, it is a message about how I exist, about the very nature of my existence". Jim Simkin

Suggestions for working one's own dreams.

1) Tell the dream in first person and present tense, as if you were dreaming it now.

2) What part of the dream is less like you? Which part is it hardest to identify yourself with?

3) Go back to the dream and talk like that part, in first person and present.

4) Is the dream giving you any message? Is there anything about the dream that you recognise in you?

5) Once the dream has communicated its message to you, put it in the "empty chair" and express your gratefulness to it. If there is any other thing you want to say to it, do so.

In Gestalt, voluntary and unconscious corporal manifestations, such as gestures, movements, micro gestures, tone of voice, postures, skin complexion, breathing are taken as important data of what is going on inside the patient. Body language is rooted in the here and now. The way to "awareness" that goes from the body to the word is followed progressively.

Gestalt Therapy goes farther than simple verbal acknowledgement of what is corporal (which does not bring into play what is emotional), and the mere emotional catharsis (which does not take what is corporal to a reflexive process). Gestalt enters into the interior processes of the body and in this way maintains consistency with its approach of the permanent relation background-form.

It is important to remember that mere movement or corporal agitation does not mean the Gestalt approach is being used. Appealing to the body has an objective, and results differ according to each specific group or individual situation, which may look for different "awareness" concerning experiences of abandon, tenderness, the enclosing feeling, trust, notion of limit, aggressiveness, etc. This search is determined here and now, so the therapist is not able to rigidly program the "games" and "exercises" ahead of time. Corporal work-in Gestalt-not push the flux of the therapeutic experience, but modulates with it. The results of this work are important to the body and the memory, too, for in the work it is possible to detect living materials from the pre-verbal infantile period. which cannot be accessed through purely verbal therapies.

Gestalt and the "awareness"

Gestalt techniques mainly aim at the patient's acquisition of conscience or awareness. This occurs when the person's organismic (that is to say, integral) attention is focused on a contact zone between the organism, and the environment, where a complex interchange is produced that shows where a patient is blocked. In Gestalt it is said that something is going wrong when you are not conscious of that interaction's difficulty.

The Gestalt therapist does not intervene directly to make the patient conscious, but instead collaborates in restoring the conditions so that the patient, through the use of his capabilities, may have awareness and the events' natural flow can be restored.

For the acquisition of awareness, Gestalt therapy always puts the stress on questions and never on the answer...

The mechanisms by which people block becoming conscious of their conduct are called resistance.

"These resistances prevent the individual from an adequate contact and balance between himself and the environment. They confuse the limit between the self and the other. This is how neurosis arises."

Resistance blocks the process of Self-acknowledgement and growth, that is to say, it obstructs self-support and maturity.

Resistances -a fundamental concept in Gestalt-are several, though Perls considers four main ones

1. Interjection

This is the mechanism through which a person incorporates, without digesting, all the information and mandates coming to him from the medium and acts according to them. These unassimilated "alien bodies" are called interjects and impede the development and expression of the own self. By swallowing them without digesting them a person may find himself with two opposed or incompatible mandates working within him, and an attempt to reconcile them may contribute to personality disintegration. that is to say, it obstructs self-support and maturity.

In the interjection the limit between the individual and the rest of world shifts so much toward the individual that he almost disappears

2. Projection Interjection's the opposite side of the coin. In the projection the person ascribes to others the attributes he rejects about himself and shows himself absolutely critical, intolerant and hypersensitive towards these characteristics. He makes the environment responsible for what arises within him. He feels that everybody harasses him. He who is an introvert accuses others of being cold, etc. Pathology (of which paranoia is an extreme case) should not be confused with assumptions based on the observation of reality, which are normal and sane. So is the artist's projection when creating characters and stories. In projection the limit between the individual and the rest of the world is so shifted in the individual's favour that this one almost cannot detach himself from his attributes or have perspective.

3. Confluence In this resistance the function of the ego is lost since the individual registers no limit between himself and the medium that surrounds him. The border between him and the medium is abolished. It is the state of a newborn child, natural in him, but not in an adult. The confluent lives confused, knows it what he wants, knows not what he feels, does not see the difference between himself and the rest of the world. He loses the sense of self. In the confluence, the habitual cycle of contact-retreat by which the individual maintains a healthy relationship with the medium does not happen. The confluent does not stand for either the differences or the confrontation.

In the confluence all notion or register of limit disappears. No difference is tolerated. Everything has to be the same. It is the resistance of dictators, fundamentalists, sectarian group or parents who consider their children as a simple extension of themselves.

Perls wrote a famous GESALT ORATION, adopted by many and criticised by others, who see in it an excessive individualist or egotist. Beyond its various possible readings, some authors, like Ginger, See in ORATION a claim of the confluence:

"I do what I do, you do what you do. I did not come to this world to fulfill your expectations. You did not come to fulfill mine. I am I. You are you. If by chance we meet ourselves it will be wonderful. If not, there is no remedy".

4. Retroflection

This mechanism is the one employed by people who do to themselves what they would like to do to other people or objects. The energies stop being directed toward the contact with the world to concentrate on the person's interior. In this ambiance he substitutes inside him the world in the place of his self. The retroflector invades his own interior world. A certain degree of retroflection is healthy, as long as it manifests as a reasonable self-control (Perls says this should not be confused with the Freudian superego). When it becomes a person's usual behaviour, retroflection becomes a masochist inhibition of impulses or exacerbation of narcissist manifestations. An example: the "altruist or the "sacrificed" person who leaves everything behind for another.

The retroflector draws a very clear line that marks the limit between himself and the environment. But he draws it through the middle of his self. He sees himself and "his self" as two different things. He says "I'm ashamed of myself", "I owe it to myself", etc. He seems to be talking two different people.

When retroflection becomes chronic it gives rise to diverse somatizations. The emotions and feelings dominated and turned toward themselves (what Laborit calls inhibition of the action) finally manifest as migraine, headaches, stomach aches, ulcers, etc. Carl and Stephanie Simonton, known for their prestigious studies on cancer, observed that statistically the number of victims of this disease are people too in control, who manifest neither their negative emotions (grudge, rage, sadness) nor the positive (joy, enthusiasm, happiness). Retroflectors attack their own inmunological system.

The theme of confluence finally allows us to see another difference between Gestalt therapy and Psychoanalysis.