Chapter 7-Gestalt Therapy – Flashcards

1. resistance to awareness:not attending to the here and now (resisting therapy);focusing on the past and unable to move forward 2. want you here, not interested in small events from the past

1. initially trained in psychoanalysis 2. first theoretical attempts replaced freud's sexual drive with the hunger drive Ego, Hunger, and Agression (book)

Assimilation: healthy contact with the environment that helps you develop a sense of personal identity (digestion) believed in assimilation of experience and the regions of introjection (swallowing experience whole) accommodation: clients recognizing that they have a choice

Focuses on person centered, Gestalt, and existentional approaches based on assumption that human emotions are adaptive signals that tell us what is important and prepare us for action dysfunction results from problems in symbolizing experience and the accompanying distorted emotional processing of experience goal: client learn new ways of processing emotion that lead to different meaning and more adaptive coping strategies

1. self regulation involves the processes of determining what is good and bad for the organism, which should learn toward acceptance of the good and rejection of the bad. The tendency to self-regulate is innate and humans adapt easily to the changing environment

o Contact o Needs: an incomplete gestalt that emerges into the organisms awareness; it becomes figure and the rest of the experience becomes ground • Once need is figural, person will innate behavior to fulfill the need--.> need fulfilled and the gestalt is completed and destroyed (need becomes background) • ground (rest of experience) vs. the figure (what sticks out) • awareness of the need is critical to the cycle o polarities: if something exists the opposite must as well (top do vs. underdog) o contact disturbance: when the cycle of awareness is disrupted, we see problems at the contact boundary • most primitive is introjection

• When continuous process of gestalt formation and destruction has failed in some way, the result is unfinished business because the needs that is not met hangs around to bother the person • Makes the person unable to see and deal with current needs • Stuff you haven't dealt with that is affecting you in the present • When your needs are not met (psychological, interpersonal and biological needs) • This acts negatively on the human being causing dysfunction; it will influence your perception

contact disturbances, boundary problems or defenses: resistance to awareness • Retroflection: unacceptable influence are turned inward; you have feelings that are unacceptable and instead of expressing them, you turn the feelings back onto your self to be expressed (unacceptable impulse turned inward) o Ex: being angry at someone in lecture (not okay to express) so professor clutches his fist o Ex: so angry with a break up so you try and kill yourself

• Creative indifference: a gestalt therapist that is an authentic counselor but is not really invested in helping the client change • Transference: not seen as purely the clients distorted way of perceiving the world, although it is seen as a clue to how the client habitual structures experience • Proactive countertransference: counselors unfinished business is activated while in a relationship with the client o Ex: client tells you something about his father and you have unfinished business with your father, so this stirs a reaction inside of yourself • Reactive countertransference: the counselor responds to the clients transference behavior... these responses are taken as data for the analysis of the interaction of client and counselor in the here and now o feelings about what is going on with my client in session o Ex: if the client says something to me and I react to that and I am reacting to the client • Authentic Communication: an authentic, nonjudgmental, dialogic relationship between client and Gestalt therapist is the crucible of change

• Patterning: o Therapist first first of all a perceiver and constructor of patterns; artistic creation o Events: things that have happened to the patient o Systems: include all these interlocking events that interact on a specific level of existence o De- emphasize the cognitive and emphasize awareness of the therapist to the client o Focused on the process of interaction → want to prepare the client to interact more effectively • No formal assessment • Assessment and treatment as an integrated process that attends to all aspects of the individuals experience • Counselor looks at.. o Individuals patterns of contact with the environment, her level of awareness and the amount of the environmental and personal support she has

• Because the gestalt counselor strives to understand the person in the environment and explore her awareness, the approach is well suited to working with clients from all walks of life o Individual cannot be understood without environment • Emphasis on awareness helps working with clients from diverse backgrounds provided that the therapists is aware of his own process; also pointed to the filed theory construct of GT as promoting the understanding of the client and counselor as indivisible from their contexts but she cautioned that the heavy reliance on nonverbal observation and intervention calls for attention to differences across individuals to understand the meaning and impact of these expressions • Others do not believe this and say that cultural biases are present; also say that emphasis on verbal emotional and behavioral expressive is counter to the values of many cultural groups

• Therapist is the tool • The therapist self-discloses personal information in therapy to a degree • Playing the projection • Exaggeration • Reversals: act the reverse (if you are shy, pretend you are outgoing) • Dream work: taking a part of the dream and "be that part of the dream" • Taking responsibility: own your behavior 2 chair technique: patient responds as if they were the person, then moves back to the other chair to respond as themselves (keep persons awareness focused on who they are) • Dialogue techniques and the empty chair • Any technique that facilitates awareness is considered acceptable; broadly put as experiments in awareness that happen to take many forms o Therapist self disclosure: disclose his awareness to client then they discuss (bored, amazed etc.) o Dialogues (with the self, with the therapists, with some other individuals in the clients life, past or present, or b/t splits or polarities in the clients personalities) • Top dog (critical, demanding) vs. under dog (whiny, excuse using) o Playing the projection: • Ex: if client sees someone as angry and hateful toward her, the therapist might ask her to act out an angry and hatful person. Then therapist could then ask the client if she could find these qualities in herself o Exaggeration • When someone is unaware of some (typically nonverbal) aspect of her experience • Ex: wiggling leg, and therapist asks her to exaggerate the wiggle, to increase awareness of this expression and create meaning • Also used with statements o Reversals: recognizing that observable behavior are sometimes the opposite of underlying impulses, the gestalt counselor directs the client to act in the review • Ex: shy client asked to be the extrovert o Dream work: client takes on the role of the parts of the dream, giving each its own speech and experiences. (these are most likely parts of the client that they have disowned or that represent important people in the clients life) o Working with polarities: what part is the client disowning or not expressing o Awareness training or body work: more aware of their physical sensations because these are often clues to aspects of experiences blocked out by awareness o Taking responsibility: the client is asked to follow her statements with this phrase: "I take responsibility for it"

• Impasse: experienced when a persons customary supports are not avaible and new supports have not yet been mobilized. Experience is existentially one of terror; cannot go back. If you cant make it through then go back to maladaptive behavior

• Central feature of life; effective contact is essential to life because it is necessary for the satisfaction of needs; can be in an aware state • Ex: breathing • Defined as meeting the environment, which can be either external to the person or aspects of the self o Individual makes contact with the environment at the contact boundary→ differentiation b/t self and other • Healthy contact results in assimilation of novel elements (things that are not already part of the organism) which leads to growth • After contact, the organism withdraws for a period of rest to "digest" the results of contact

• Lots and not moderate responses • In the classic form overemphasized the individual • Perl's acted unethically and was sometimes abusive • Took on the rebellious, antiauthoritarian stance of the mid to late 1960→ seen as wild and dangerous • No supporting theory • Contemporary are less susceptible to these critiques • Outcome research: exists but not to the extent that it does for other approaches o Effect size similar to humanistic therapies o Some others had support for the approach o Theories on this are varied and sophistication and quality • Some say that the people with therapy are living more in the now because they have resolved unfinished business o Schizophrenia patients: found that it did help them but the only test was the Rorschach. The Rorschach was the only measure of reality testing used and so these results can be called into questions • Theory testing research o Support for the empty chair dialogue o Increased experience or awareness is necessary for resolution of dysfunction (support) o Not successful in exploring projection, introjection, retrojection confluence and deflection (exploring the contact boundary and disturbances) • Not sure if people can rate their own contact related styles which is assumed in these experiments

• Much broader approach to dream work • Includes the traditional play the part method, but clients also benefit from interventions such as... o Telling the dream in present tense o Creating different ending for their dreams o Nonverbally telling the story of the dream o devising dialogues between dream elements o And others not listed in book

losing yourself to the environment, not able to separate the environment from the sense of self of from other people; complete loss of self

unwanted part of self is expelled into the environment, unaware of own cognitions and feelings (ex: If I am feeling hateful towards my class I might go home and tell my friend that "my class hates me")

swallowing whole of experience, no breaking down of problems, no awareness

impulse is blunted/dampened (ex:you know someone is mad at you but they smile)

you have a feeling but you dont own it in an authentic way

the counselor responds to the clients transference behavior -these responses are taken as data for the analysis of the interaction of client and counselor in the here and now

an authentic, nonjudgmental, dialogic relationship btw client and counselor

it is a central construct so very important, it results from healthy contact with the environment

helps you develop sense of personality

it helps us become more harmonious with our environment and with ourselves. It is innate

1. relationship 2. awareness 3. experiment

The here and now

1. No, it contributes to dysfunction 2. yes it does 3. needs are not met

dealing with the here and now

unfinished business but it could also be said that I disowned my feelings because I havent been dealing with them

creative indifference

1. empty chair 2. two chair scenario 3. dream work 4. exggeration