Gestalt therapy - basic methods and techniques

Concept of Gestalt therapy
We explain with simple examples
How can a Gestalt therapy specialist help?
What methods does a Gestalt therapist use in his work?
Who is suitable for Gestalt therapy?

Gestalt therapy is an effective direction that psychologists use in therapeutic work to work through relationships, improve the emotional background, and raise self-esteem. But due to ignorance of the specifics of this method, clients often choose more popular directions - psychoanalysis or cognitive behavioral therapy - to solve their problems. Today we will tell you in an accessible, simple language about Gestalt therapy, who it will help and in what situations it is more advisable to choose it.

Concept of Gestalt therapy

In various difficult life situations, we can lose contact with ourselves, stop tracking our emotions and desires to please others. Often this happens due to unfinished stories or unlived feelings. A course of Gestalt therapy helps to rediscover oneself, identify true feelings and thoughts, teaches one to cope with problems independently and achieve what one wants.

Fritz Perls, the luminary of German psychiatry, is considered the founder of therapy. In the 1940s, he became seriously interested in Gestalt psychology, studying the human psyche’s desire for complete completion of any relationship, image or situation. Translated from German, Gestalt means “image”.

The nature of psychological disorders

Naturally, the nature of the functioning of the individual in a system of needs that arise again and again presupposes constant psychological tension—frustration. And according to Perls, frustration is an important catalyst for personality development, since it is its presence that is the source of all human activity. This is how the child learns to interact with the world and becomes an individual precisely in order to effectively get rid of frustrations (psychological stresses).

All frustrations are caused by an unsatisfied need, and its satisfaction is associated with the assimilation of part of the surrounding world; an example of such assimilation is the satisfaction of hunger - we bite food, chew it and digest it, this is how we receive energy from the outside world and assimilate it through digestion. This process has both physical and mental manifestations, when information or objects can appear instead of a material object (food). However, according to Perls's concept, the instinct of hunger lies at the source of both processes.

Thus, it was with a violation of the satisfaction of needs that Perls associated the emergence of psychological problems.

We explain with simple examples

If the unfinished action is some simple everyday story, you can easily deal with it yourself - find, buy, fix and move on with your life in peace. But when it comes to relationships, things are worse. Such an incomplete gestalt will be accompanied by a range of negative feelings - resentment, anger, fear, anxiety, sadness and even grief - which, at best, will lead to chronic discomfort, and at worst, to illness and suffering.

Let's look at a simple example.

Ivan is already an adult, he can’t establish relationships with his elderly parents, all attempts to have a heart-to-heart talk end in mutual claims and resentments, tea parties end in quarrels, evenings end in slamming doors. Ivan is angry, but he cannot stop communicating with his parents. Together with a psychologist, they are trying to understand this situation. The specialist is interested in what specific emotions these clashes evoke in Ivan, what feelings arise in him when he calls or visits his mother and father. At first, Ivan admits that this is anger, but in the course of subsequent psychological conversations it turns out that there are other conflicting feelings, that since childhood he has been expecting support and approval from his parents, but at the same time he still feels like a schoolboy whom his mother and father ask questions about. : “4 for the test? Why not 5? I tried hard..." “Schoolboy Ivan” gets offended, the thought comes that he is bad, a loser, incompetent, if his parents do not praise him. The task of the psychologist in this case will be, with the help of Gestalt therapy, to return our hero to his significance, to help him again feel pride in his successes, regardless of the parental reaction.

More examples of common open gestalts:

Due to lack of attention and dislike from parents in childhood, an adult will intensely seek and demand from his partner manifestations of love and attention that he lacked in childhood. Will such relationships be harmonious where there is constant pressure?
A love union that breaks up, for example, on the initiative of a man, can cause a woman to constantly relive the breakup, trying to determine the cause and the guilty party, simultaneously proving to her former lover that everything is fine with her, and life has only gotten better without him. With such a psychological state, a happy relationship is unlikely for this woman.

All these examples indicate that the situation has not been lived through to the end and has not been mentally released. That is, the gestalt is not completed and will continue to cause suffering to the person. The well-known saying “Time heals” will not work here; qualified help from a specialist is needed.

How can a Gestalt therapy specialist help?

The duration of therapy in each case is different - for some, in 2-3 sessions they will be able to cope with a harmful situation and improve their psycho-emotional state, while for others, even a few months will not be enough.

During therapy, the psychologist:

will help you understand what exactly causes you anxiety and negativity;
will reveal your feelings and sensations associated with the root cause;
with the help of special psychotherapeutic techniques, it will help complete the gestalt and teach you how to act in similar cases in the future.

Research by Wolfgang Keller

Wolfgang Keller - German and American psychologist, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, dealt with the problems of general, comparative, experimental psychology. Introduced the principle of isomorphism (equality of forms in the physical, physiological and phenomenal fields).

V. Keller studied problem solving by apes. Experiments with chimpanzees allowed him to understand that the task assigned to an animal is solved either by trial and error (blindly searching for the right solution) or through sudden awareness.

Köhler's experiments proved that the thought process follows the second path, i.e. there is an instant grasp of the situation and the correct solution to the task.

Köhler came to the conclusion that objects and objects that are in the field of perception and are in no way connected with each other, in the process of solving a problem, begin to unite into a single structure, the vision of which helps to solve the problem. This process happens instantly. V. Koehler called this phenomenon insight.

Insight is inner illumination, sudden understanding and finding a solution.

Explaining the phenomenon of insight, he believed that the moment phenomena enter another situation, they acquire a new function. The combination of objects in new combinations associated with their new functions leads to the formation of a new gestalt, the awareness of which is the essence of thinking.

Köhler conducted a series of experiments with children to study thinking in order to prove that humans solve certain problems in a similar way. He offered the children a problem situation similar to the one put before the monkeys (for example, getting a typewriter that was located on a cabinet). To get the typewriter, the children included various objects in the gestalt with the closet (a ladder or other objects: drawers, a table with a chair).

What methods does a Gestalt therapist use in his work?

During psychotherapeutic sessions, the client is encouraged to share sincere emotions with the psychologist, answer questions and receive feedback.

Psychologists in the Gestalt approach use the following methods:

working with feelings;
exercises and tests to express your state through body movements;
analysis of dreams and memories;
creating and playing out situations and sensations with the participation of fictional characters.

According to the principle of Gestalt therapy, the main conditions for a happy life are the completion of unfinished business and the client’s awareness of his desires and actions, therefore, in the first stages of work, the therapist tries to lead the patient precisely to the moment of understanding his problem and the reasons that caused it, and at the end of therapy, to teach him take full responsibility for your decisions and actions in order to be able to independently correct difficult moments in your future life and live through events to the end.

Our course will help you master the technique of the Gestalt approach - in just 4 months, experienced teachers will tell you about all existing methods of Gestalt therapy, and after passing the final certification, you will receive a diploma of the established form and will be able to work as a consulting psychologist yourself.

Principles of Gestalt psychology

The research allowed Gestalt psychologists to discover the laws of perception, and subsequently the laws of Gestalt.

1. The principle of proximity - elements that are close to each other in space and time and that seem to us to be united in groups, we perceive together.

2. Continuity principle - there is a tendency to follow a direction that allows observed elements to be linked into a continuous sequence or a specific orientation.

3. The principle of similarity - similar elements are perceived by us together, forming closed groups.

4. Closure principle - there is a tendency to complete unfinished items and fill empty spaces.

5. The principle of simplicity (the law of pregnancy) - the perception and interpretation of composite or complex objects as the simplest form or a combination of the simplest forms.

6. The “figure-ground” principle is the organization of perception in such a way as to see an object (figure) and the background against which it appears.

7. The principle of isomorphism is an expression of the structural unity of the world (physical, physiological and mental).

8. Common Zone Principle - Gestalt principles shape our everyday perceptions, as well as learning and past experiences. Anticipatory thoughts and expectations also actively guide our interpretation of sensations.

9. The principle of contiguity - the proximity of stimuli in time and space; Contiguity can determine perception when one event causes another.

Who is suitable for Gestalt therapy?

Therapy solves the problems of healthy people or people with a neurotic organization, and has a good effect in cases of difficulties caused by interaction with other people, misunderstandings, negative feelings, and grievances. That is, therapy will not bring relief to patients with severe mental disorders.

Such unpleasant and dangerous emotions as fear, anxiety, aggression, loss of meaning in life, loneliness, excessive anxiety, insomnia, apathy and frequent bad mood are also reasons to visit a Gestalt therapist.

The method is suitable for working with teenagers, adults, and married couples. Women open up more easily during consultations than men, who are accustomed to being guided by reason and easily ignore their desires in order to achieve a goal or success, and a thorough analysis of feelings often seems to them an unnecessary exaggeration.