Gestalt Therapy Integrated: Erving and Miriam Polster
Contents
Chapter 1 The Now Ethos
Aboutism:
Experience counts:
Chapter 2 The lively
figure
Prior Living
Unfinished Business
The flow of present
experience
Accessibility of Ground
Chapter 3 Resistance and
Beyond
Composition
Chapter 4 The Commerce of
Resistance
Introjection
Projection
Retroflection
Deflection
Confluence
Chapter 5 The Contact
Boundary
Contact
Body Boundaries
Value Boundaries
Familiarity Boundaries
Expressive boudnaries
Exposure boundaries
Chapter 6 Contact
Functions
Looking
Listening
Touching
Talking
Language
Moving
Smelling and Tasting
Chapter 7 Contact
Episodes
Syntax
Representativeness
Teaching of skills
Arousal
Chapter 8 Awareness
Awareness of sensations
and actions
Accentuation of
fulfilment
Facilitation of working
through processes
Recovery of old
experiences
Awareness of feelings
Awareness of wants
Awareness of values and
assessments
Chapter 9 Experiment
Enactment
Directed behaviour
Fantasy
Contact with a resisted
event, feeling or personal characteristic
Contact with an
unavailable person or unfinished situation
Exploring the unknown
Exploring new aspects of
the individual
Dreams
Homework
Chapter 1 The Now Ethos
There are many ways we pay for a bright future by leading a
deadened present, so saving for retirement, studying to pass the exam can
deaden the present, if we do it for the future rather than for any pleasure we
can get out of it now. Studying can be an end in itself as can saving.
Truth\knowledge\theory, are useful in so far as they enable
vitality and action in the world. They are ways of looking at the world, and
there are many. If they help us to vitally take action then they have merit.
4 aspects of therapy
1.
Power is in the present
2.
Experience counts most
3.
The therapist is his own tool
4.
Therapy is too good to be limited to the sick
Power in the present
Detracting from the present detracts from the quality of
life.
An act of remembering is a present function, even if the
content of remember is past. Authentically important issues extend beyond the
scope of immediate personal contact, eg ecology.
Whilst concern with the future and past can be important to
consider that you live in either is to the detriment of the present. As you
tell a story of the past, and treat it as purely something that happened, then
you only minimally present. If you attend to how you retell it, then you are
aware of what this story means to you know, if you notice what purpose this
story provides you in the telling of it, then you are aware of what it means for
you now.
In other words there is a dead past where you treat it as a
now no longer. But when you engage in the past, and you are aware of how and
why then you see how you take this past forward with you
Gestalt therapy espouses an anti should stance. Should
always denigrates the present for a future pay off, e.g. in heaven, or for your
parents.
Aboutism:
Talking about things that aren’t present, e.g. therapy
clients, or what we will do tomorrow, may function as distractions, are
attempts to make conversation, may be used to show off your knowledge, avoid a
fight, sex or confusion which may make life safe but uninteresting, as it is
depersonalised.
However being confined to spend time in an arbitrarily
stated set of experiences called now is a prison nonetheless. It seems rather
than the depersonalised talking about, or the prison of the now, is a talking
about things passionately, because they mean something to me now.
When you talk about other people, things, from their
perspective, not from what they mean to you, then you deaden what you say, it
means nothing to you, you are distanced from it, and depersonalised. In the
same way when you talk about one, or they or people, it means nothing to you,
you are distanced, and your vitality is reduced.
Experience counts:
As much as the present is the home of vitality so is your
experience. However some experiences are also the horizon for future
experiences, so symbolic, as I tell someone I love them, this now also means I
am ready for love, and ready to express it where I want. It can be premature
sometimes to stamp an experience with meaning as it ties it to a mould where it
is still in process.
Meaning and experience have a complex relationship and too
much of one can block the other. Trying
to find meaning can block experience, just experiencing something can ignore
its meaningful content. In
psychotherapy, the symbol is most powerful when its meaningfulness arises out
of experience which exists first for their own sake and then projected
themselves into a natural and evident meaningfulness which helps tie experience
together. So this section really is
about therapist interpreting another’s actions symbolically, but rather it’s up
to the person who does the action to attribute meaning to it.
Therapist is his own instrument
Not much to say here
Chapter 2 The lively figure
Motivation affects perception. Gestalt psychologists argue people perceive
by organising sensory streams into figure and ground, the figure being chosen
by the current desire. The figure compels attention to some degree. Perception
also aims at closure, so if you see an incomplete figure you use meaning to
complete it, so when you see a circle of separate dots, you see just that a
circle of separate dots, not just separate dots. In contact, in transaction
between a person and their environment, then there are many times you have
incomplete tasks which might be thwarted due to social facts of life. The
incompleted gestalts distract the perceiver from the business at hand, and
want\urge\call to be completed. The gestalt view, is that for incompleted
gestalts, then completing them several times over will be needed to release the
energy.
The figure we construct fascinates, the ground however has
no such magnetism and is unbounded and formless, it provides context to the
figure. The power of the ground is in its fertility being the source of new
figures. In studies we have seen how the perceiver structures, edits and
censors what he sees and hears to harmonize with his needs. One’s whole life is
background for the present moment.
There are three aspects of how one’s life provides
background to the present.
1.
Prior Living
2.
Unfinished business
3.
The flow of experience
Prior Living
Values, are really just perceptual bias and what aspects of
a scene will stand out. Although you may have a value of kindness and a belief
in the cruelly of the world, which results in sadness or anger, so you may well
keep on seeing cruelty overcoming kindness. So you may have thoughts and acts
of kindness but pull back due to a feeling of sadness or anger.
If you have a value of kindness, and act on it regularly,
you can be said to have it as a characteristic, which means you will be more
sensitive to acts of kindness to appear from the ground as figure. The job of
psychotherapy is to alter a client’s background so it is sympathetic with his
values\personality now.
To push a background of your life experience out of
awareness, means you no longer draw figures from this background. The clarity
and effervesce of one’s life are profoundly affected by how richly figural
material from the background may become. Excitement that cannot be tolerated is
transformed into and experienced as anxiety.
People whose figural flow is compulsive lose the quality of depth which
is sensed in those whose figural development springs naturally and gracefully
from a rich experiential background.
As you have a diversified background of personal experience
so you have greater ability to harmonise your desires with the environment.
Unfinished Business
All experience hangs around until a person is finished with
it. Whilst one can tolerate a great deal
of unfinished business they do seek completion and when they get powerful
enough the individual is preoccupied, has compulsive behaviour, wariness,
oppressive behaviour and self-defeating behaviour.
There are two barriers to completing unfinished business:
1.
Obsession or compulsion which leads to a
rigidity in figure\ground formation
2.
A labile mind, which leaves little time to
experience what is happening, so you can’t get closure
Rigidity prevents experiencing the richness of life, and
therefore its and your vitality. Labile people prevent the relationship between
one moment and the next, so never experience satisfaction or closure. You also don’t get an identity which comes
from completing small steps of your life.
It takes considerable artistry to know when something is finished.
The flow of present experience
How do you deal with the flow of experience? You talk to the
other, it triggers off many thought in your mind, what do you do with these
thoughts? Likewise how do you attend to one task when there are other interruptions,
do you attend to the interruptions, ignore them, park them? Virtually all of
our purposive communication requires a sense of timing until the right moment
arrives. The current system is wait your
turn and stick to the point although fertility springs from generosity of mind
not parsimonious.
Our current conversations either talk in, previously thought
statements, or in condensed chunks where the “financial crisis” might be referred
to. We also talk in position statements, strawberries are good, going to war is
bad. However to arrive at the policy statement a lot of thought has gone into
them, but just to issue them is sterile. .
To move from chaos to clarity is inherent in creativity,
although we are phobic to chaos. Chaos
is frightening as there is no assurance of completion, the incomplete remains
painful. Chaos is also disruptive of any
systems already in place.
When people are struggling to get out of old habits, chaos,
whilst scary can offer such an approach.
Through reintroducing chaos, a freer relationship between ground and
figure formation can ensure, than a tightly programmed person might find.
Another aspect of flow is the relationship between a couples
incompatible desires, how one wants to see a movie and the other have a meal.
What then is the flow that you use to manage putting your desires in abeyance
until they can be met, do you always please the other, hold yours in abeyance? So holding things in abeyance can be about
place and time. So speaking to the right person although they have current needs
which mean you can’t address your own needs, or wrong place, so you’re talking
with someone who can possible address your needs so you hold them in abeyance.
The flow of our experience has to know of all our desires,
are they strong enough to come into fruition. If they are, is the environment
such that it can satisfy it, or do I need to put it into abeyance and come back
to it. How do I deal with competing
desires from myself as I seek to do a long task, how do I stay focussed when
others are giving me new tasks.
Accessibility of Ground
The trouble with interpretation from an expert, is that you
begin to lose trust in your engagement with the foreground and seek an expert
instead. There is a figural flow, it takes psychological effort to maintain a
sense of sameness. To allow each
experience its due, it will become figure take attention and then be replace by
the next one. This gives a sense of vitality which if you look to keep sameness
you lose.
The gestalt view is that there is a flux of vital experience
if you attend to it that if you allow, means that change is the natural state
of affairs. You can notice when people hang onto experience when it’s gone,
with a sense of desperation, a hanging on. When disharmony persists and nothing is done
to change the circumstances then someone is hanging on.
Chapter 3 Resistance and Beyond
Resistance is standardly defined as a person has a goal and
any behaviour which interferes with that goal is defined as resistance. Then
they say resistance must be removed. Resistance is a saboteur. The aim to return to a time before resistance
is futile as a new person has been grown. Resistance is a natural part of a
person, a competing desire. I resist crying as it brought me spanks, I resist
shouting at a large person as it will get me hurt, I resist speaking out loud
as it will bring me embarrassment. To
resist is to block one thing, which then can enable the growth of another. To
resist crying can enable your pain to be expressed in other ways.
To work with resistance then we need to energise it rather
than let it become a depersonalised dead weight, we need to move it back into
the sense of active choice so we understand what is going on with it.
If John as a wall that stops him talking to mary, then get
John to experience the wall, get the wall to talk. The way this works is to take your resistance
as part of you, to understand how you actively resist, rather than the
resistance is an external part of you, a bad part of you. With a wall the
resistance is obvious however resistance is usually a lot more subtle than
that.
Composition
Man gets into trouble when he is divided within himself
rather than against himself. The man divided
doesn’t own both sides of the conflict, and can’t choose them to be different.
The man that is divided is in a dead stale mate. To acknowledge the vital conflict can enable
a new configuration be made to seek a higher synthesis?
There is a primal reflex towards synthesis when elemental
identities come into contact. Identity emerges from the composition of forces
within man. Identity that is imposed in the other direction merely seeks to
divide man from himself where the things that don’t fit with his identity are
disowned.
Mans being is composed of his polarities. As soon as you see
one attribute its polarity will be around. When both of these are made figural
and oppositional they can get frozen into a relation of mutual alienation, e.g.
topdog and underdog. Top dog bullies masters, issues should, underdog plays
stupid, controverts, acts lazy. Polarities have infinite dimensions. The task
to resolve polarities is to enable each part to live fully and to come into
contact with each other.
The contact of the contradictory is not always a pleasant
one, sometimes one will dominate, but allowing their connection as opposed to a
dead stalemate enables a new dynamic synthesis. The move to a new synthesis may
not be fruitful, there may be a drastic move on one side promiscuity to respond
to the morality on the other, and the difference of behaviour won’t be felt as
integrated, and the person will feel very unstable, and indeed the boundary
they may need to expand to, to enable the new synthesis may not be possible.
Chapter 4 The Commerce of Resistance
If someone thinks that his efforts at satisfying his desires
from the environment will be successful then he is potent, and he will approach
the environment with confidence and appetite. If his efforts don’t get what he
wants then he is left with unpleasant emotions frustration, impotence and
disappointment. He then is also left to divest his energy in way that will
reduce possibilities for contactful interaction with his environment.
The ways he divests this frustrated energy are by
1.
Introjection
2.
Projection
3.
Deflection
4.
Deflection
5.
Confluence
Introjection
Doesn’t state his requirements. Passively incorporates the
environment as he finds it which is fine if the environment is benign.
Projection
Disowns aspects of himself and ascribes them to the
environment or others.
Retroflector
Abandons any attempt to influence his environment and
becomes self-sufficient.
Deflector
Engages in the environment in a hit or miss basis.
Confluence
Individual goes along with trends, which involves very
little choice, he yields to the current field and lets it carry him along.
Introjection
This is the original form of interaction, the child accepts
whatever is not seen as immediately noxious. So the idea is take, swallow and
spit up if it doesn’t work. There is no restructuring to suit you.
The person who has swallowed whole the values of his
parents, his school and his society requires life to continue as before. He has given up his free choice in life, so
even if the world is how he wants, it is lifeless.
Introjection is a difficult one to change as it’s a major
part of learning. AT 2 and at the
teenage years he resists the outside influence and seeks his own choice system.
You get more of your desires met if you create what you want
rather than just say yes and no.
Chewing is the prototypical activity to making the world assailable
to your needs, when it hasn’t started out that way.
Treatment
Go through beliefs, and say I believe that… and see which
ones are his own belief, culled from experience and how many are stale take
overs from other people in their lives.
You need a certain element of aggression to destroy what
already exists, in the same way as chewing.
If you see life as a repetition of experiences you have
already had then you buffer yourself against the new but you also lose freshness.
There are two types of perceptual style, those that
accentuate the difference to previous experience and those who try to diminish
it.
The impediments to introjection are laziness, greed and
impatience. Impatience, you can’t wait for good food, laziness you can’t be
bothered and greed you’re just interested in satiating yourself as soon as
possible.
Projection
A projector, projects their feelings as they can’t or shouldn’t
accept them. They project them onto another person (or onto the environment?). This
shouldn’t or can’t is standardly the result of an introject. So how do you tell
the difference between a projection and the standard behaviour of an
individual.
Projection is the bedrock of empathy, I can understand why
the person feels how he does, because I can project my feelings and behaviour
into him. In projection we start to
understand how much of the universe is our creation, how much we are the still
at the turning of the universe TS Eliot
Retroflection
This is where you do to yourself what you would ideally like
to do to others, or you do to yourself what you would like someone else to do
to you. In retroflection there is a split of person of observer and observed.
Soothing yourself with food, is to consider, no one else
will do it, so I will have to do it myself.
Thinking is a retroflective process, a talking to oneself.
Thinking is useful when it is too difficult to come up with a spontaneous
solution, should I marry\move etc. The undoing of retroflection is to find the
suitable other.
To get to this point you need to investigate the internal
struggle. You can see this struggle
going on in the body, the posture.
There are two levels of retroflection
I need to be touched
1.
I curl up into a ball on the sofa and sit
cosily, so I touch myself
2.
Touching seems so wrong, that I cannot even
touch myself, I sit upright in a chair, avoid touching myself tenderly, avoid
nuzzling another.
A child originally has an impulse and then says no to
themselves, then they clench their jaw, then they take the tension for granted.
What is needed in retroflection is to becomes self-conscious again, of how you
grit your teeth…who would you like to chew?
Deflection
Deflection is turning aside from a direct connection with
someone. It takes the heat out of the contact.
This can be done by:
1.
Laughing
2.
Intellectualising
3.
Being abstract
4.
Talking about rather than to
5.
Anything that avoids the full effect of the
present moment.
Deflections make life watered down. The effect of this is
that you feel bored, confused, cynical, unimportant and out of place, because
you have never been involved.
Deflection can be useful as something’s are too hot to
handle, that’s why you get diplomacy between nations, which softens the blow.
Becoming addicted to deflection is where the trouble begins.
Confluence
Confluence is a when you want to reduce difference to
moderate the upsetting experience of novelty and otherness.
No two bodies can occupy the same space, no two minds can be
entirely in agreement. It can be useful to reduce your personal style so that
you can work in a team.
Confluence is a three legged race between people who agree
to disagree. It is an inarticulated contract with hidden clauses and perhaps
only one partner knows about.
Two clues to disturbed confluent relationships are feelings
of guilt or resentment. When one party has breached the contract then they feel
some guilt. If you feel guilty then you seek punishment, or to make reparation.
Feeling sorry for yourself is retroflected feelings of
indignation at the other, how they could have acted.
When you are
confluent with society, you do what it demands, and you do this in return for
payment, fame, success etc. However there is no society, it doesn’t know you
exist and therefore will not pay you these things. Given there are no intrinsic
rewards in doing these things, then when the recompense isn’t forthcoming he
becomes aggrieved. Alternatively he becomes aggrieved and tries harder.
The antidotes to confluence are contact, differentiation and
articulation. The individual must begin to experience choices, needs and
feelings which are his and do not have to coincide with other people. He must
learn he can face the terror of separation and still be alive.
What do you feel now
What do you want now
What are you doing now
These questions can help deal with confluence.
Confluence is done for reward, if you get the reward and
aren’t confluent one party will complain
Chapter 5 The Contact Boundary
We are individual and seek union with those other to
ourselves, maybe as a return to the womb? Out sense of union, paradoxically
depends on a heightened sense of separateness. The function which synthesises
the need for union and individuality is contact. We balance freedom and union
throughout our lives.
Contact
Contact is not togetherness or joining but is about two
separate beings always requiring independence and always risking capture in
their union. In this act then there is a creation you and me and we, they are
all separate and want a voice.
When I meet you full eyed, full bodied, and full minded you
become irresistible. Only through contacting you can the realisation of our identities
fully develop.
An organism lives in its environment by maintaining its
difference and more importantly by assimilating the environment into its
difference.
Organisms persist by assimilating the novel , by change and
growth. What is always the same, is indifferent is not an object for contact.
Contact is the lifeblood of change and of a vibrant life
I do not understand why contact is only made with the novel?
Does this mean when you contact the non novel it isn’t contact, so just the
definition of contact means contacting the novel.
You can have contact with animate, or inanimate, it’s not
seeing, it’s how you see. Contact can be made with memories and images if the
contact is sharp and full.
Contact occurs at the point where separation is maintained.
Wherever a boundary comes into existence it is both contact
and isolation. Contact is the organ of a particular relation of the organism to
its environment.
Gestalt therapy is a recovery of peoples contact functions.
Action can provoke change, but you don’t need to rationalise
to tidy it up. A therapist might have this need to tidy up but there is no need
from the client, who through action has internal knowledge. Knowing how to.
Contact is the meeting of ourselves with what is not
ourselves.
We can split ourselves, into the observer and the observed,
but this reflection can interrupt our more pertinent outward focus.
I-Boundaries
Contact is between two differentiated figures. A person’s
I-boundary is the range of what contact is permissible to the world and to
himself. Within the I-boundary contact
is easy, at the edge of it, it becomes risky, and exciting and less certain,
outside the I-boundary contact is impossible.
The I-Boundary, has the types of contact that are permissible
and has therefore some beliefs about self that determine how contact should be
made, so I am the upstart the virgin etc., and contact is made from this self-image.
If an individual’s I-Boundary is rigidly set then a fear of
change to it, is a fear that he will explode or there is too much sensation or
excitement to contain, he fears he is in danger of overload.
An I boundary can contract, and this is a fear of emptiness,
deflation or puniness. If the I-Boundary is significantly under threat then
this can mobilise great energy or the suppression of great energy which is
experienced as anxiety.
If his I-boundary is
seriously threatened, this produces much energy, if the response needed to
maintain the I-boundary is outside the I-boundary then you won’t be able to
contact to resolve this and you will feel the anxiety of energy mobilised that
needs to be suppressed
Anxiety results from trying to suppress excitement. To
extend the I-Boundary is to act in a way that might not be you, might not be
assimiatable, but then if it is, offers excitement and growth.
As each persons I-Boundary is expanding and contracting you
never know what kind of contact you will get.
I-Boundaries can be described in several aspects:
1.
Body-boundaries
2.
Value-boundaries
3.
Familiarity boundaries
4.
Expressive boundaries
5.
Exposure boundaries
Body Boundaries
Some parts of peoples bodily sensations are marked off
limits, some are favoured.
Value Boundaries
Some peoples values are so tight that anything outside that will
not be entertained, as socialist would never talk to anyone who isn’t left
wing, a therapist to someone who hasn’t studied psychology. Likewise if someone
will only do interesting things, then they won’t be able to do something which
bores them to enable a really interesting thing
Familiarity Boundaries
We cling to what we know rather than to venture out into
unfamiliar boundaries: I am what I am gets hardened into I am what I have been,
which is what I will always be. Whilst there are some practical limits on
experiencing newness, there are opportunities which we turn away from that are
limits that we put on ourselves.
Sometimes we think either there is the familiar or there is nothing.
Ones future welfare often travels in disguise and its
blessings are frequently recognised only after extensive turmoil.
The fertilise void is the place where the familiar has
dropped away, and you trust the moment of life to produce new opportunities.
Expressive boundaries
These are all the range of things that are not allowed, you
should not.. The self is not a structure it is a process, and whilst you do
lose your identity to expand the I-Boundary, this allows the self to develop
Exposure boundaries
What are the circumstance that you will and won’t be seen
and acknowledged by someone close by a group, in public. How much, what is your
style of being seen? What aspects do you allow to be seen, your sadness, your
happiness? Do you dread certain reactions, e.g. pity? When a person comes to
accept all his variety of beings then he can be exposed without problem
There are a variety of ways of expression
1.
Blocked
2.
Inhibited
3.
Exhibitionistic
4.
Spontaneous
Blocked the person doesn’t know what to express
Inhibited the person knows but doesn’t want to express
Exhibitionistic, the person expresses but it’s not
integrated
Spontaneous is the gold standard
Exhibiting oneself as sad is not the same as being sad
Some willingness to accept the awkward moments, the
inauthentic is essential for growth,
Chapter 6 Contact Functions
Touch is prototypical of contact: we get in touch with
someone, we are touched by something, contact has almost come to mean touch.
Touch is not the primary sense in contact, there is touch throughout other
senses, i.e. light waves, sound waves.
There are 5 basic contact movements
1.
Sight
2.
Sound
3.
Taste
4.
Touch
5.
Smell
Then 2 others
1.
Talking
2.
Movement
When contact is made through any of them, then there is a
charge of excitement made in the individual with that which is interesting at
the moment.
Not all contact will result in happiness, but to avoid
contact as you avoid unhappiness is to lead to ennui and ineffectualness.
When you play with machines, machines can make a machine out
of you. Inert, inorganic.
Looking
Sometimes looking allows you contact with an object, when
you read, you use it to get contact with ideas. There are two types of contact with looking as
there are with all senses, looking to get contact with something else
(evidential contact) and looking as contact for its own sake. If you can see
for its own sake you are likely to see better evidentially as well,
Ways to avoid full contact with looking is to look away, or staring
which makes the contact rigid. Staring is the same as saying the same word over
again until they become gibberish, staring at someone makes them feel pressed
to the wall.
Some people only focus on the relevant, but doing this
sacrifices the context which completes the scene and leads to your ability to
find novel sensations. Context gives dimension and resonance to experience.
Listening
You can listen to sound to people, like you listen to a
concert
People don’t like chaos so they listen then talk and avoid
interrupting. Often people are pretending to listen, rather they are just
waiting to speak. People don’t value listening, it’s nice that someone does it,
but it’s not held high up the value chain
It is difficult to beat out the rhythm of a conversation
where someone has a predetermined position, or knows what they are going to say
before talking. Hidden agendas always
interfere with full listening. If you
expect criticism you will hear it.
There are different kinds of listening:
1.
For criticism
2.
For support
3.
For information
4.
For condescension
5.
For complexities he will not understand
6.
For simple facts
7.
Some people only hear statements and not
questions
In couples sometimes a person wants the other person to have
bad listening skills, they want to remain unheard.
As you listen different people may be sensitive to different
aspects of the speech, of the expression, to the sexuality, to the hostility, etc.
etc.
When the listener hears he is in good contact, and when the
talker knows he is being heard his contact is enlivenment.
Touching
There are taboos against looking and listening, don’t
eavesdrop, don’t stare, the taboos against touching are even stronger. Don’t touch is shouted at children in shops,
don’t touch your genitals, and don’t touch others in case you touch them
somewhere you shouldn’t.
Touching is getting a bad name as most of it is performed
under staged conditions rather than coming from a ripe culmination. Sometimes
people feel constrained to touch someone who is not ready or does not want to
be touched.
With new behaviour comes awkwardness, self-consciousness.
Gestalt aims to use touching as contact rather than an
initiation rite of membership in a new order.
Once we enable touch, that also enables a range of
prohibited actions that may result in touch, e.g. standing close to people,
talking intimately. A gap between what you are and what you could be is a
neurotic problem.
Talking
Talking has two dimensions voice and language
Voice=the voice is the prototype of an expressive tone, as
is the precursor to song and to music. As you become aware of your greater
range of need, so you become aware of a greater range of expression.
The voice also has direction and momentum. The voice has a
target which the individual wants to reach through the medium of sound. For an individual to penetrate another person
with his voice is an aggressive act. If he enters harmoniously and with a
quality of incisiveness which is assailable and it he is welcomed there will be
good engagement.
Some peoples voice is suited to intimate surrounds some to
public speaking
Laughter does it well up or is it pumped out? Does it have
resonance or is it metallic
A basic gestalt principle is to enhance what exists rather
than change it. Nothing can change until it is first accepted. There is the
danger of humiliation here, to be abruptly brought into contact with your
behaviour. When someone is willing to
explore this is the time to use this.
Speaking can be seen as a modified breathing. Speaking
should be via the breath but if it’s all down to the vocal chords then speech
can be laboured.
Language
Language is possibly the most powerful agent for contact.
Some people use language stingily, using exact words,
measuring them out like dried beans. Some people with speak with a torrent of
words, a splash of colour to take away the tawdriness. Some people wander as
they talk, in a confused way. Some people need to be totally right, or to be
certain, in which case their language ends up like a legal contract. If all
energy is used up in terms of the speakers internal needs for conversation then
there is no excitement left to create unfinished business for the hearer.
Jargon helps people avoid contact, they are pre-packaged,
like TV dinners. in that they have no taste, as there’s nothing to engage with
nothing to chew on. Again jargon, is a
shortcut, and can never be a direct representation of a person’s experience
People over explain, where they both speak, and tell the
other person how to interpret
Being something showing itself from itself.
Repeating oneself is another way not to have contact, it
attempts to get the other person to only engage with the message you want,
rather than what they hear, it is like the nymphomaniac who thinks the next
screw will do it, or the fatso the next milkshake.
Yes but is a deflection of the power of the real message, if
someone uses sugar coating all the time it’s difficult what the real message
is.
Asking questions is another way of avoiding making contact
as it masks the statement in uncertainty. Many questions are hidden statements.
To distinguish between disguised statements and curiosity in
statements is the basis of getting contact in language.
Moving
A mime artist can portray large meaning through movement,
however we generally use movement as an adjunct to meaning, a sideshow and not
having large import. In movement you can either see the unimpeded fluid action
of a person who supports the activity which he is engaged with or you see the
clumsy actions of someone caught between impulse and inhibition. The movement absorbs conflicting desires.
Working with movement, then firstly notice it, then secondly
allow it to go where the direction, or movement suggests.
Gestalt the return from the unconscious happens after
recovering present function.
To work with movement
1. Client experience movement as it currently is
2. Client experience movement to its full extent
3. Look for sources of support from the individual’s body
Cerebral activity deprived of sensuous informatation from
the body leads to intellectualising.
When your neck is tight, then you are very aware of those
things that are obvious in front of you, but less aware of those things in the
periphery at the edge of your awareness
The aim is to free each part of the body that can provide a
supporting fashion and to get it to provide this support and no more.
When a person sits or lies down they need to receive
external support, not all people do and sometimes in seems like they are
levitating and not receiving the external support. There is a Charlotte Selver
exercise where you pick up the limbs and head of a person lying on the floor,
some people are resistant to this and do not let someone else do it for them.
They usually have the belief of I have to do everything myself.
In movement gestalt looks for flexibility of moving parts, e.g.
elbows, knees and other joints. There is a general taboo about using the pelvic
joint, men don’t use this, as it is seen as a woman’s movement, but
reconnecting to this enables fluid contact.
Most importance
1. Flexibility of pelvis
2. Eyes and neck
Fixed pelvis due to taboos, women to sex, men to being a
woman
Fixed eyes and neck, relating to only seeing that directly
in front, only aware of my purpose. Relevance though is linked to context, so
you need to be able to be aware of both figure and ground.
Flexibility in movement is essential, as anything that stay
in sharp focus for too long becomes dead, like a foot that goes numb when you
sit on it for too long
Smelling and Tasting
These are relegated to subordinate importance, in the
leisure of eating, or the trip to the pine forest. We have become so reliant on automated
signals we no longer need or rely on our senses. Tasting is an evaluative act to establish if
food is tasty, eating is a metaphor for engagement with the world. Some people have good taste, a fine sense in
evaluating the fitness or non-fitness of actions and objects.
Most people do not want smell other people or be smelled.
Companies spend a lot of money telling us to avoid our body odours.
Perfume is a mass market contact, where the contact is
between marketing and the other, and is not individual.
Chapter 7 Contact Episodes
Contact episodes have three aspects:
1. Syntax
2. Representativeness
3. Recurrence
Syntax
This is the ordering and structure between the episodes.
So the syntax of a contact episode with resistance is:
1. Emergence of need
2. The attempt to play out the need
3. The mobilisation of the internal struggle
4. Statement of them incorporating the need and the struggle
5. The arrival at the impasse
6. The climactic experience
7. The illumination
8. The acknowledgement
This cycle can last from seconds to lifetimes
When you force yourself into a corner, you don’t have to
choose.
Anxiety is constricted excitement (??)
In therapy you want to create a safe emergency, i.e.
something is very important and needs to be resolved, but it happens in a safe place.
Representativeness
There are three aspects that touch on the ability for
therapy experience to affect experience outside therapy
1. Teaching of skills
2. Contact function
3. Development of a new sense of self
Teaching of skills
Usually skills are taught with a distinct purpose, e.g.
riding a bicycle. The skills in therapy
might be subtle and certainly not goal orientated. As a person’s ground expands then new figures
can arise and new ways of behaviour can ensue.
Therapy deals with developing new thresholds for behaviour
not altering behaviours. It then allows the choice of whether or not the new
behaviour will happen.
In terms of teaching, you do not infantilise the student as
the student still has to put it into practice, so telling a client how to live,
still require that they practice to enable it.
It certainly saves the time of the student if they are told how, then they
need to do it and integrate.
Arousal
Making good contact, leaves you aroused, arousal spawns more
arousal in yourself and others. To
change, to make good contact you have to risk turmoil.
As much as love can be arousing, so can frustration. Perl’s
described his work as creative frustration.
He would frustrate clients in a move that depended on his
co-operation. In some ways dissonance,
dialectics are both frustrating and arousing, there is only so much frustration
that you can tolerate before you must act.
Humour can also be an arousing act. Playfulness, teasing,
laughing at incongruities, this can join with another. It can also be escapist.
Touching is arousing. New physical movements are arousing.
Good breathing is arousing, there are many sources of arousal, of activation of
energy, of movement towards contact.
New sense of self
People have clouded views of themselves, they see movies of
themselves and are incredulous. People construct their view of themselves in
terms of what other people tell them, this can include a lot of stereotyped
attitude, and misinformation. However in therapy there is the opportunity to
make your own discoveries, with curiosity there is the opportunity to make your
own discoveries.
The teaching of new skills, the power to arouse and the
change in ones sense of self all merge to arouse, to make contact, and to breed
these attitudes.
Recurrence
Integrating new behaviour takes a number of iterations to
become integrated.
A neurotic problem is a problem with something I care about
but don’t value.
You can have ever increasing solutions to the same problem
that can enable contact, e.g. a therapist who has unfulfilled business of
wanting to love his mother, treats his clients better and better
Other influences in the contact episode
There are 3 additional factors which can help\hinder contact
1.
Love
2.
Hate
3.
Madness
They are a hindrance as they make us afraid to reach beyond
our standard level of tolerance.
They are a help as they are powerful inner forces.
Loving
Encompasses the spectrum from friendliness, through sexual
play to devotion and the addictive state of being in love.
There is love in therapy but you may wish to distinguish
between love and obsession, love and dependence, love and sexuality. Within
therapy you can discover how to love without guile, stereotype or strategy.
Emotions are merely the guide to their own disappearance. To
hang onto feelings, is to make an idol out of one experiences, but immortality
is to be found in the process of the continual replacement of feelings.
To fully love without stereotype, you need to define what
love is for you within your relationship.
Transference is to protect the feelings that the therapist
has for the client, and the client has for the therapist. It is a way to
deflect that feeling, and to make it not about me.
You can love without marrying, or fucking.
Hating
Just as love encompasses many different ways of being so
does hating, e.g. rejection, exclusion, alienation, anger. Hating is a residual
crud formed out of the accumulation of a number of unexpressed things which are
spawned by personal threat. Hatred is
central to contact as it is a force born out of non-contact.
In hatred there is a reservoir of excitement that threatens
to engulf the self in its poisonous fumes. Whilst the expression of this anger
can be cathartic, timing is key. If it is forced out by a therapist or a group,
then it is not expressed.
Sometimes hostility can be deflected, the boring talker, the
person who won’t give an inch, the person continually later. Some people
retroflect their hostility.
Madness
There is a dread toward madness and it is defended against
strongly, it is the living death. The
people who describe other people as mad hold onto their own passions squash
them, hold their body rigid so they avoid this label.
The fear of madness is a powerful force to prevent contact.
If an individual comes to close to the edge of their I
boundary then they fear disappearing, disintegrating, or becoming alien to yourself.
To go mad is to experience the extreme loss of your choice system. You can become a prisoner of your own fear of
madness. When one is stretched to ones boundaries, you risk your sanity. But
when the struggle is avoided then you may be comfortable but stagnant.
Chapter 8 Awareness
Sometimes people are self-conscious to scan to ensure that
nothing dangerous has been done, it’s a protective mechanism. Sometimes this self-consciousness
is a distraction from what might actually want to be done. So you guard against
types of act y, but actually you currently desire x, but you miss this as you
are self-consciously guarding against y.
As you move to greater awareness, you may pass through self-consciousness
which may disrupt the spontaneous and fluid grace of action, but this is in so
far that this may be recovered. So you may start being self-conscious of what
you are not accustomed to experiencing, then that can bet integrated into fluid
movement.
Forcing awareness, can disrupt temporarily the formation of
bright figures. The ideal with Gestalt would be to fully form figures, then to
come back into awareness should you wish, and to have a supple movement between
these two places.
Experience is the combination of cumulative and ingredient
form. As you write, this is the result of many years of education and in this
moment the senses are the ingredients used to form this writing, I am aware of
the words coming on this screen, I move my fingers to ensure the next letter.
In awareness you may move between analysis and synthesis,
between the whole and its parts.
Awareness is a continuous means of keeping up to date with
one self, it is an ongoing process, readily available at all times. Awareness
heightens experience and contact.
Four aspects of Awareness:
Awareness of sensations and actions
Awareness of feelings
Awareness of wants
Awareness of values and assessments
Awareness of sensations and actions
We eat for many more reasons than just being hungry, so the
sensation of hunger and the relation to eating are only joined distantly. We
alienate ourselves by not being direct with our desires and how we satisfy
them, or rather we satisfy them indirectly without acknowledging them to start off
with, so angry sex, bored and we eat.
Sensations exist in tandem with action, sensations helps us
become aware of action.
The synapse is a useful metaphor here, the Greek means both
union and action.
The synapse through its action enables awareness of the
sensation. So there is the union between sense and motoric components. AT times
of union of perception of both sensation and its expression then there are
profound feelings around. The awareness of sensation and its expression is
magical.
It is thought that babies give themselves totally over to
the sensation, not treating it as caused by, but living it in its entirety
outside of the bounds of its objectenss
Concentration is a major technique in recovering the power
of sensation.
In therapy awareness of sensations have 3 therapeutic
purposes
1.
Accentuation of fulfilment
2.
Facilitation of working through processes
3.
Recovery of old experiences
Accentuation of fulfilment
There are action orientated people and awareness orientated
people. Either is fine so long as it doesn’t block awareness of the opposite,
so through action you become aware of your sensation, through awareness of
sensation, you become aware of your desire to act.
Facilitation of working through processes
So as you become aware of a fixed gestalt you will notice
sensation in the body that accompanies, that provides the significance to the cognitive
aspect. Through focussing on this sensation you can engage with the
significance for you, and enable you to work through the experience.
Recovery of old experiences
Unfinished situations move naturally to completion when
resistances are redeployed and when inner stimulation compels you to
completion. We often talk about old experiences but we never ground their
significance in sensation.
Silence when joined with focussed concentration has the
effect of building up the intensity of the feeling.
Awareness of feelings
There are sensations, e.g. physical sensations, that may or
may not relate to feelings, i.e. emotions. Emotions really are the gestalt that
make meaning out of the whole, the situations, the cognitions, the sensations
Feeling is part of a cycle of awareness, and the aim is to
enable it to come to completion.
Asking a client how they feel, can distract from their
absorption in the present moment, the story they are telling, or it can allow
them to grasp the present moment in a richer way. Directed awareness is useful
in how it fills the gaps in awareness, in experience. Thus the how are you feeling should go with
an unarticulated moment, or where there is a facial expression of emotion that
is unremarked.
Questions
1.
How are you feeling
2.
Stay with that feeling and see where you want to
go
3.
What action does that feeling make you want to do?
4.
Try to feel your sadness fully as if you were
you sadness.
a.
Accentuation of feelings get people to express
themselves. This requires a scene where expression can lead to completion
People can get trapped into expressing feelings without
taking them through to completion. Maybe these feelings are directed towards
the wrong thing, or are expressed poorly.
So the aim of therapy here, is to find the right scene to express these
emotions so that they can find completion.
Awareness of wants
A want is an orienting function, a want is a blip into the
future, a depressed person has no wants and has no future. Wants are linking
functions, linking the present with the future where gratification exists. Many wants are satisfied without them ever
being articulated, I enjoy you smiling, but I wasn’t aware of this as a need.
Many people rely on this unexpected satisfaction of wants,
but it is unreliable, you can’t predict it and you have to be facing the right
way, like a sunflower to achieve satisfaction from it.
In Gestalt we ask what do you want, and get practice in
understanding our wants. Unfamiliarity
with this can see as with a lot of activity but very low satisfaction.
When a want can be recognised and expressed the client gets
the sense of being on target and moving towards completion
One common way to remain out of touch with wants is to blow them
up, inflate them to global wants, which are forever undefinable and out of
reach. I want respect, I want love, I
want to be a success.
Specific requirements can be completed universal global
ones, can never be.
Awareness of values and assessments
Awareness of values derives from awareness of sensations,
feelings, and wants.
Values often have to be rebuilt as they often have
anachronistic material in them.
To revaluate an anachronistic aspect of a value, you have to
reconstruct it so that it can become figural, and then revaluated. If an anachronistic aspect of a value serves
a current need it will persist, otherwise making the historical aspect of it
figural can enable it to come to completion.
Chapter 9 Experiment
Some people talk about acting, in the hope that after a
while they will be drawn\compelled to action.
Action based purely on past deliberation without any influence of the
presence is likely to be lifeless and mechanical
Decisions about
actions are best taken by taking some action and seeing what direction is
indicated. So choosing between lemon and strawberry, have a little strawberry,
go to a strawberry farm, experience some strawberry and see if it demands more
of you.
As you experiment with different ways of acting, then this
is neither a rehearsal or a post mortem rather it is experiencing something
different in the present. Doing the
experiment helps to find different ways of acing.
There are 5 different types of experiment
1.
Enactment
2.
Directed behaviour
3.
Fantasy
4.
Dreams
5.
Homework
Enactment
For its best effect learning requires action. This is the
dramatization of some aspect of the client’s experience. So for example he may
make a small gesture, we get him to extend to a fuller gesture, we ask how that
feels, he says it makes him want to growl, so we get him to do that
3 types of Enactment
1.
Enactment of unfinished business from the
distant past
2.
Enactment of
contemporary unfinished business
3.
Enactment of a characteristic
Words are often a shorthand to what people want to say, and
require amplification. So a label can be sterile shorthand, but if you act it
out you can become aware of more aspects of it, and as you act you put more
dimensions of yourself into it, you explore the truth from more angles than
just the cognitive.
On the richest forms of information about a person is the
metaphors he uses about himself or others use about him
Enactment of polarities can also be rewarding. When there are two opposed characteristics,
then a person may avoid acting due to confusion or ambivalence or merely to
seek resolution as they can’t stand uncertainty. Again victory to one side, can
have the other side going underground and sabotaging.
When working with polarities you need to restore the
connection between the polarities.
4 types of action
1.
Blocked
a.
Not consciously restricted
2.
Inhibited
a.
Consciously restricted
3.
Exhibtionistist
a.
Not Well integrated into the person
4.
Spontaneous
a.
Well integrated into the person
You need to be able to tolerate the exhibitionistic phase in
order to reach the spontaneous
Directed behaviour
Sometimes behaviour is directed to bring something into
consciousness, so if a person speaks with a whiney voice, we may ask him to
exaggerate to bring it into awareness. Alternatively the exact opposite may be
tried, so speak quietly, speak loudly.
Fantasy
Fantasy reaches beyond us, sometimes puerile, sometimes
obsessive, sometimes they gain more power than real life. However when someone
fantasises or ruminates typically they strip the flesh from the bone, there is
no emotion, no detail, no energy. So
take a fantasy and give it its flesh, it can become motivating.
Fantasy has four major purposes
1.
Contact with a resisted event, feeling or
personal characteristic
2.
Contact with an unavailable person or unfinished
situation
3.
Exploring the unknown
4.
Exploring new aspects of the individual
Contact with a resisted event, feeling or personal characteristic
Sometimes you can develop release in fantasy only, maybe if
the resisted event is now historic. The emotions that come from fantasy are
real and if integrated, can aid emotional acceptance, reduce emotional
avoidance. So imaginal exposure, rescripting a memory really
Contact with an unavailable person or unfinished situation
So finish your business within fantasy, when you can’t in
real life.
Exploring the unknown
Imaginal rehearsal, role play
Exploring new aspects of the individual
Imagine yourself acting with new attributes
Dreams
Dream work=Always tell dream in first person. Tell the dream
from each perspective in the dream. Some parts will be resisted, I don’t want
to: this is the alienated part, to tell it from this perspective, enables this
part to be reintegrated into the whole.
Whilst perls saw dreams as projections about disowned parts of the
personality, there are also contained straight representations, so it’s another
part of life the dream, where your values get played out. So you can use a
dream contactfully.
Tell the dream as if it is part of your existence, then talk
to it, to the parts of it, get contact with your dream. Use the characters of
your dream as real to get contact, as if this happened with them and engage
with them. That’s contact. When you start playing the other people and things
within the dream, there lies projection. If someone is hitting themselves, to
move from the retroflection.
Notice when someone holds their breath then they are often supressing
their emotion.
Dreams can also be used as the starting point for
discoveries about present relationships, or existential problems. So if the
dream is told in front of the group,whats that like for the dreamers relation
with the group.
You can also use the dream to stage a play, the embodiment
and enactment can surface difference aspects of the dream for the dreamer, and
also provide a new vehicle for interpretation by the rest of the group.
When people play out the dream, the dreamer gives them basic
acting instruction and then they improvise as they go along.
Three touchstones of gestalt:
1.
Contact
2.
Awareness
3.
Experiment
If a person can be silent by themselves, then they should be
able to do this as a couple, with a small group and within a big group.
Homework
Techniques
1.
Contact
a.
Through looking
i.
Open your eyes wide, then blink alternate eyes
15 times
ii.
Looking from side to side without moving one’s
head
b.
Listening
i.
To restore the attention we have in listening,
get the person to listen to what’s happening apart from the words, do they hear
an aggressive tone, or is it placid, is it breathy etc.
ii.
Get the person to repeat what he just heard
before he responds to it. The other person can only respond when this has
happened
c.
