What is Gestalt therapy?

What is Gestalt Therapy?

I am not a Gestalt purist. But as the modality in which I've trained, it shapes how I work and how I think about what happens in the room.

People often come to me saying they have good self-awareness. They want to understand more, the reasons, the whys. I don't judge that. But I often notice something is out of awareness. The trouble with understanding alone is that it can send us up into our heads. We end up analysing our experiences, stacking more interpretation on top of interpretation, and there's a limit to what we gain from that.

We can remix things a thousand ways and still come up with the same answer. Or at best, more interpretations, and lose other shades of our experience along the way.

What's often missing is contact with ourselves.

In Gestalt therapy, the work is to connect with your full self, not to split off into meaning-making alone. If only I knew more about why I do what I do. Yes, that can be helpful. But it can also miss the mark of all the other parts of you.

Gestalt is a dynamic way of working, moving between all parts of your experience: thoughts, feelings, beliefs, sensory experience. Thoughts matter. But if we're always in them, we risk disconnecting from our felt experience. Feelings likewise can shed light into our inner world, but if we only stay there, we can collapse into them.

Sensory experience is what I find people struggle with most, and I'm not exempt from that. Our senses connect us to the now of our experience, the present moment. By design, when we are present, we minimise the sway between anxious ruminations about an uncertain future and being swallowed by the grip of the past. Sounds great - but hard work!

When we are present, we are most likely to be in contact with the nuances, shades, and textures of what is happening for us.

In those moments we can see more clearly what is supporting us and what isn't. We can make more informed choices, to live more fully, more creatively, outside the push and pull of past and future. There is more spaciousness.

When we are present, we are more able to let in compassion, care, gentleness, discernment. We can accept where we are and have greater contact with ourselves, and in turn with others and our environment. Not chasing after where we're not, or haven't been, or can't yet be. That's a busy mind that clouds the reality of current experience.

In Gestalt we focus on process: the what is, not the what ifs.

We work with what's happening now, staying curious to this present moment. When we resist the is-ness of things, there's less room for movement. Things can feel forced and tight. Staying within our process honours how we are, in the moment, with ourselves, with our experience.

Accepting things as they are right now doesn't mean we don't have capacity to change. We change through increased awareness, a full awareness of experience, not just cognitive. When we stay close to our experience, we can honour how our patterns have helped and supported us, whilst also giving space to explore whether those patterns still serve us now.

In Gestalt theory, we try to move away from pathologising patterns and ways of being as wrong, bad, or in need of fixing. Instead we see them on a more nuanced scale of supportiveness. You may be here because a particular way of being has run its course and no longer serves your current needs. Curiosity about our patterns opens new choices. Negating them tends to close them down.

Contact is everything.

So often I hear people trying to solve things alone, shutting themselves off from others. Contact is only possible when we have adequate support. In the room, I stay close to and curious about your experience.

But we don't operate in a vacuum. A big part of Gestalt therapy is field theory, holding your unique position and experience, but also the wider context and world you are in. I work through an intersectional lens, with the fullness of your identity, acknowledging how that informs how you bring yourself to the room.

At its core, Gestalt is deeply relational. I won't be sitting there analysing or interpreting you. That's not my job, and if I'm doing that, something's wrong. In an age of hyperconnectivity, productivity, and capitalist drives to do more and demonstrate our worth, relational work is quietly radical. Feels somewhat cringe to say it, but cringe is golden sometimes, we are human beings, not doings.

And for some individuals, communities, and identities, simply being can be complicated by oppression, harm, inequality, and injustice. Gestalt holds that too.

Gestalt has been called an art, an art of being together. That can be scary. But on the other side of that is something genuinely exciting.