One of the core concepts in gestalt psychotherapy is contact. Specifically, gestalt therapists are interested in what happens at the contact boundary; itself an emergent phenomenon that arises wherever self meets other.
In gestalt's founding text, Perls Hefferline & Goodman's Gestalt Therapy (PHG), the self is defined as "the system of contacts at a given time".…
the bristol therapist facebook page digest - january 2018
Quite a while back, I got excited and over-committed myself to an in-depth process of chewing over everything I read online that would culminate in a weekly digest. The two main outcomes of that experiment were an inability to get beyond week two, and a consequent reduction…
An enduring metaphor in gestalt therapy is to imagine experiences as food. Whilst this was a concern of the founders back in the 1950s, social media has given emphasis to its appropriateness. We regularly refer to what's appearing in our feeds, mostly without pursuing the hint that the information delivered by our feeds is a…
One of the arch-villains of gestalt therapy is the word “should”.
If you’re in therapy with a gestalt therapist, and you start talking about things you should be doing, chances are your therapist’s self-talk has started going, “holy shit! Introjection at twelve o’clock! Kill it! KILL IT WITH FIRE!”. This is because “should” is treated as…