The expression to close the gestalt - in simple words it means to start living in a new way. Leaving the situation open means repeating the mistakes of the past. At the same time, it is not always easy to close the gestalt on your own, since it is often formed outside the zone of people’s control. Therefore, it is important to know techniques on how to close the gestalt.
People remember unfinished tasks best; the brain seems to fixate on them, which in some way provokes the emergence of mental stress. Subjects develop a persistent desire to return to an unfinished situation in order to experience it, turning it on again. So, for example, having started a new relationship, people involuntarily introduce into them unresolved contradictions from previous ones or run away from people who resemble an abusive father. In order to avoid this, it is necessary to close the gestalt in relationships with a man, woman or parent.
Who will benefit from the program?
For everyone interested in psychology and self-development
Do you want to improve the quality of your life, understand yourself better and build harmonious relationships with others.
I specialize in working with food addiction and binge eating disorder. Food is essential for survival and is an important aspect of our well-being. But, for people suffering from food addiction, food becomes a source of satisfying not only physiological needs, but also psychological ones: reward, pleasure, self-care, as a means of relaxation, calm and many others. In such cases, food anesthetizes “negative” emotions, or adds missing “positive” ones. Often, people suffering from food addiction have “special” favorite foods (often rich in fat, sugar and salt) that they cannot give up, despite being overweight and unhealthy. Also, the cause of eating disorders can be a tendency to strict restrictions and diets. The flip side of such restrictions is subsequent periods of “breakdown”, when all the lost weight is gained back. The person again “pulls himself together” and the circle closes. Ultimately, such restrictive behavior can lead to more serious mental disorders (night eating syndrome, bulimia nervosa, anorexia nervosa). In addition, overeating can be a consequence of severe emotional turmoil that occurs after an accident, the loss of a loved one, or as a result of distress.
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Psychologists, doctors, teachers, social workers, consultants
Do you want to expand your practice and deepen your knowledge, improve your personal and professional skills in working with people.
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Those wishing to master a new profession
Do you want to turn your passion for psychology into a professional activity, start combining it with your current profession, or try yourself as a therapist, supervisor, or leader of psychotherapeutic groups.
Interpersonal conflict is a clash of different interests or aspirations; some disagreement of an emotional, personal or professional nature between two or more people. Most of the serious conflicts in our lives, as a rule, are associated with those people with whom we closely communicate. These could be friends, loved ones, family members, relatives, partners or colleagues. It is not always possible to resolve the conflict, and then there is a possibility that it will progress, and the relationship may be jeopardized or completely destroyed. If you successfully cope with conflict, then your mutual understanding improves and your relationship with the other person becomes stronger and more stable. Intrapersonal conflict is a meeting within a person of equal strength, but opposite in direction, mutually exclusive tendencies (interests, needs, drives). As a result, a person experiences difficulty in choosing and making decisions. In fact, intrapersonal conflicts can not only be destructive, in some cases, the experience of overcoming them can give the personality new development, changing the outdated hierarchy of values or throwing off the shackles of alien attitudes.
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How to choose the right therapy
I came to Vladlen (that was the name of the healer of souls) with one request: “erase him from the memory.” There was no talk of childhood grievances, fears, or total self-dislike back then. Plunging into a chair, she immediately declared: “I don’t plan to stay with you. Quickly cure me of my heartache and let’s say goodbye, completing the gestalt or whatever it is.” To this, the psychotherapist smiled condescendingly and replied: “I’m warning you right away: it will be difficult and unpleasant. At the stage of resistance to therapy, you will begin to skip sessions, coming up with endless reasons “against”. The most common: no money, no time, I’m sick, I’m taking the cat to the vet. Does not work! I’ll find you anyway, keep that in mind.”
Ok, Cap, I'm ready to dive!
And now a small lyrical digression: why did I choose Gestalt therapy? Everything is simple here - I am close to the philosophy of this direction in psychotherapy proposed by Perls. Its basis is the principle: looking at the world as a process, and at a person as a wanderer searching for himself. And one more thought: if nothing bothers a person, he will definitely be happy. And his own fears, grievances, unfinished situations in the past, internal dialogues and other “demons” that they fight during sessions can interfere with him. The goal of such therapy is to find the place of interrupted contacts and complete what was started, restoring the balance of events.
The first thing Vladlen suggested that I do was to take off the helmet of my own rightness and begin to doubt, giving up the role of a person who knows “how it should be done.” This task turned out to be difficult. Nature has rewarded me with a stubborn character: I have my opinion and I have a wrong one. And even mentally accepting the fact that I might be wrong seemed like an almost impossible mission.
During the session, playing out various situations, I transferred to the psychotherapist all my stereotypes, labels and models of behavior scenarios written in my head. Vladlen had to play different roles: ex-husband, mother and that aunt from the store who jumped in line. We talked as if this was really happening. Sometimes he made me cry, sometimes I wanted to hit him, sometimes I wanted to laugh.
About the fourth session, what Vladlen had warned me about happened to me: I suddenly had a “stomach ache” and “ran out” of money for therapy. After 10 calls and the statement “discount for the poor,” I had to give up and get back on track. And it actually turned out to be true.
Gestalt therapy has four points of support: awareness, which means experiencing oneself in contact, the principle of reality, “here and now,” and dialogue. I would like to talk about the latter separately.
During the sessions, I had the opportunity to speak through the therapist to the whole world, showing him my true face.
There are no morals, notations or politics in Gestalt therapy. There are no value judgments in it, and when you sit down on a cactus, you can safely say “fuck” and not “oh, what a shame.” Its main function is to return a person to himself and get rid of the principles imposed by parents and society, having become acquainted with his needs, his dreams, his goals.
I was able to take a different look at the concepts of “good” and “bad”, at people and their actions, at stereotypes and rules that for some reason everyone should know. This opened up a whole world for me - one in which I and my desires exist, and not the need to be good for everyone. I went to individual therapy for a year, and then another year to group therapy, but that’s a completely different story.
Presenters:
- Presenters
Lipchenko Agata
Clinical Psychologist
Certified Gestalt TherapistSupervisor
Leader of training programs for Gestalt therapists
- Presenters
Herman Rosa
Psychologist
Logotherapist
Certified Gestalt Therapist
Supervisor
Leader of training programs for Gestalt therapists
The “Here and Now” principle in Gestalt psychology
Gestalt is what needs to be closed in order to be happy . And the principle of “here and now” is an approach to thinking that takes its origins from the philosophy of Buddhism. By the way, Fritz Perls carefully studied Eastern culture.
The psychotherapist always asks how the patient is feeling at the moment, what emotions and feelings he has. If a person talks about the past, the psychologist tries to bring him back to the present with questions:
- What is your relationship like now?
- How do you feel when you say this?
- How can this situation be corrected today?
- How does this situation affect you now?
This creates confidence that the client has control over the problem here and now. Even if it happened several years ago.
Understanding that a person should live at a given moment and hour is very difficult for us. We often get stuck either in the past or in dreams of the future.
Therefore, there are exercises on how to learn this. One of them can be done during breakfast, lunch and dinner. We need to focus on the cutlery that we bring to our mouth; during the process of chewing food; on the hand that reaches for salt. Here and now.
How the training works:
STRUCTURE OF TRAINING AT MHI
First stage
from 1 year to 1.5 years (180 hours) - “Basics of Gestalt Therapy” - introduction to the method, training in the basic concepts and principles of the Gestalt approach, personal therapeutic experience in a group, work with an individual therapist.
Second stage
— from 2 years to 2.5 years (420 hours) — “Theory and practice of Gestalt therapy” — professional training of Gestalt therapists, culminating in certification.
After completing the 1st stage, an intermediate certificate is issued indicating the topics and hours.
Procedures, techniques and methods of work in Gestalt therapy
Film "Fritz Perls: Session with Gloria"
Psychotherapy by Fritz Perls.
Film "Fritz Perls: Session with Gloria"
Perls accuses Gloria of insincerity. Gloria is outraged!
Perls first used his method in the form of individual psychotherapy, but later completely switched to the group form, finding it more effective and economical. Cm.
In both individual and group work, the main role of the Gestalt therapist is to focus the client’s attention on awareness of what is happening “here and now,” limiting attempts to interpret events, paying attention to feelings that are indicators of needs, and the client’s own responsibility for both implementation and and for prohibitions on the fulfillment of needs.
The main working methods and techniques of Gestalt therapy are awareness, focusing energy, taking responsibility, working with polarities, monodrama, the “hot chair” or “empty chair” technique.
Technical procedures in Gestalt therapy are called games. These are a variety of activities performed by patients at the suggestion of a psychotherapist that promote more direct confrontation with significant experiences. Games provide an opportunity to experiment with yourself and other group members. During the games, patients “try on” different roles, enter into different images, and identify with significant feelings and experiences, alienated parts of the personality. The purpose of experimental games is to achieve emotional and intellectual enlightenment, leading to personality integration.
Much attention in Gestalt therapy is paid to working with patients’ dreams. But, unlike psychoanalysis, dreams in Gestalt therapy are not interpreted. They are used for personality integration. Perls believed that different periods of sleep act as fragments of personality. In order to achieve integration, it is necessary to combine them, to again recognize as our own these projected, alienated parts of our personality and to recognize as our own the hidden tendencies that manifest themselves in sleep. By playing back dream objects and individual fragments, the hidden content of a dream can be discovered through its experience, and not through its analysis.
About some common techniques and methods of working as a Gestalt therapist (in questions and answers) - based on materials from an article by Irina Rebrushkina.
Why does a Gestalt therapist need an empty chair?
An empty chair is used in experiments aimed at clarifying and strengthening feelings - in the case when the client has difficulty determining how he feels about a particular person or in connection with some situation. An empty chair helps organize the experimental space, helps to revive ideas, facilitates and catalyzes the work of the imagination.
Why does a Gestalt therapist often ask these questions: “What do you feel?”, “What is happening in the body?”, “What would you like now?” – and similar ones?
The therapist asks these questions when he observes signs of a breakdown in contact (when the client does not feel anything; does not know what he is feeling or does not notice his feelings; does not understand what he wants; does not know how to achieve what he wants, etc.).
As mentioned above, a person is happy when his needs are met. However, the truth is that it is not always easy to determine what my need is, what I want and how I can get it. It helps to understand this by turning not to individual spheres of your personality, but to all of them in their interconnection (to use your entire personality, like a gestalt) - for example, not only to thoughts, ideas, assessments, but also to the body, feelings, your ways of contact with the environment .
Bodily sensations are the key to feelings and emotions (all emotions live in the body and have bodily expression). Feelings and emotions are the key to needs.
Why does the therapist share his feelings?
The therapist acts as an environment for the client, and the client has the opportunity in a safe environment to explore both his reactions to the environment and how the environment reacts to him.
Why does a Gestalt therapist often shift the focus from the content of the problem and describing its details to what is happening between the therapist and the client, and asks the question: “How is this in our relationship?”
Clients (and I as a client are no exception) usually strive to tell the therapist their story or describe the problem in every detail: it seems that it is then that the mosaic will come together, the therapist will see the full picture, understand and tell him what to do. But telling everything, everything, is useless and even harmful: time is wasted, there is not enough for anything other than telling and listening; sometimes the client's only need is to be listened to without judgment; however, usually the client wants some kind of response, reaction, opinion, to which he also reacts somehow, but there will be no time left to consider these important things if the entire session is devoted only to a detailed story about the problem.
How the client deals with his needs, how he contacts the environment to satisfy them - all this can be observed in the example of how he contacts the therapist. A relationship with a therapist is a small model of how a client builds relationships with other people, and he usually reproduces his patterns not only in life, but also in therapy.
For example, a client comes to work on the problem of responsibility: he cannot determine the boundaries of his responsibility in close or business relationships, he takes more or less responsibility than he needs. The same problem will be reproduced in his relationship with the therapist: the client will try to shift all responsibility for his progress in therapy onto the therapist or, on the contrary, will not notice, will not recognize the responsibility of the therapist, etc. And if we trace and solve this problem using an example client-therapeutic relationship, then the client will learn to solve the problem of responsibility in his other relationships.
It turns out that the mosaic of a problem usually consists of patterns - repeating elements of an ornament. And the fragment of the pattern that is repeated is usually clearly visible in the smallest segment of communication.
Features of group work in the Gestalt approach
As in many psychotherapeutic groups, group dynamics occur (and are encouraged) in the group, open expression of hidden, negative feelings and discussion of subsequent emotional reactions to this. As a rule, the group operates under initially accepted strict rules, in a fairly closed mode, and usually reacts negatively to the emergence of new members as a potential danger to the intra-group atmosphere. Cm.
Examples of practical work
- Where does nausea live?
- Fritz Perls advises
- It turns out it was a gestalt
First stage training includes:
Lectures
1. Basics of Gestalt therapy. Theoretical introduction, historical roots, founders of Gestalt therapy, schools of Gestalt therapy, authors, modern Gestalt approach, literature. 2. Basic concepts and principles of Gestalt therapy (field - organism-environment, phenomenological approach in Gestalt therapy, dialogue, awareness, figure and ground, contact, contact boundary, cycle of experience, creative adaptation). 3. Mechanisms for interrupting contact. 4. Working with the client’s internal phenomenology. 5. Creative methods in Gestalt therapy. Art therapy, work with drawings, metaphors, dreams.
Experiments and Exercises
Experiment is one of the main pillars on which Gestalt therapy is based. This is an organized event that takes place here and now, allowing you to touch a new experience. In a sense, this is action psychotherapy. We provide exercises and experiments to heighten your awareness of the ways in which you organize your life. As part of such work, it becomes possible to discover attitudes that prevent you from achieving what you want, work through them and begin to act in a new way, returning freedom and creative adaptation to life.
Group psychotherapy
Participation in a group helps you better understand yourself and analyze your relationships with others using the example of real interaction. In this safe space, participants are able to face strong experiences without getting stuck in them, share experiences with other people, and receive feedback and support from them.
The group provides the experience of living in honest, open and sincere relationships, in which the difficulties that arise do not become the cause of a traumatic break in contact, but the subject of research, through which the relationship itself moves to a new stage of development.
Individual sessions
An important experience for participants in the training program are individual sessions conducted by experienced therapists. This format, on the one hand, allows you to work through the current experiences that arise among the participants, and on the other hand, provides a unique opportunity to see how the work of a psychotherapist with a client is structured.
Gestalt therapy
This is one of the types of psychotherapy, founded by F. Perls in the 50s of the last century. The subject of Gestalt therapy is the contact and boundaries within which a person and everything that surrounds him is located. Contact is the solvation of the needs of the individual with the capabilities of the environment. It turns out that a specific need can only be satisfied by making contact with the outside world. (You can quench your thirst if you take water.)
The main technique of such therapy is a game based on dialogue within oneself. The conversation is conducted with one or more parts of one's own personality. In principle, all therapy is aimed at completing some previously abandoned task - gestalt.
The circle of correct gestalt looks like this:
- A need arises.
- Ways are being sought to satisfy it.
- Satisfaction occurs.
- Contact with the outside world ends.
There are always a number of factors that interfere with the ideal process. If the cycle is not completed, then the person feels exhausted throughout his life and cannot open up to new desires. An incomplete gestalt can cause a serious disruption in the protective properties of the human psyche.
Gestalt psychology and therapy is an opportunity to help “oneself” and find the root causes of internal inconsistencies, to put it briefly. There are a number of exercises aimed at accepting oneself and what lies beyond the real at the same time. They should help you start thinking about yourself and opening up to the world. Find more engaging interactive content developed by leading psychologists on BrainApps. Tests and courses on self-development, over 90 exciting games will allow you to understand your inner experiences even faster and put everything in its place.
