There is no better way of explaining gestalt therapy than through demonstration. And the best way of demonstrating gestalt therapy is for you to meet me for an initial session. Of course, that doesn’t help you know ahead of time whether you will benefit from even an initial session with me!
To support you in deciding whether to give my approach a try, I describe below some of the core ideas in gestalt therapy. This will hopefully give you a flavour of my understanding of the gestalt approach. If you find that some of these ideas resonate with you, then it could well be that my approach will be a good fit for your therapeutic needs.
Here and now
Gestalt therapy focuses on the here and now. That’s not because the past and future are unimportant; they just don’t exist. When you and I meet in a therapy room, the experience takes place in the here and now. Every experience takes place …
Your experience
Gestalt draws heavily on an area of philosophy called phenomenology. Essentially, this means the study of experience. My concern as a gestalt therapist is the exploration of how you experience your reality. This is in contrast with psychoanalytical …
Field theory
Gestalt therapy has a world view that is field theoretical. Field theories are world views that see reality as being essentially holistic and inter-related. It’s not that everything affects everything else, it’s more that everything exists …
Contact and creative adjustment
Contact A critical concept in gestalt therapy is contact. This actually refers to a constant process rather than a specific state of being. At every moment of our lives, we are involved in the process of making contact with reality in some …
Creative experimentation
Gestalt therapy is both creative and experimental. The creativity of gestalt is all about identifying support in the current situation. Blue Peter taught a generation of people how much support they could get from toilet roll tubes and double …
Organismic self-regulation
Gestalt therapy focuses on organismic need. The founders of gestalt therapy spoke about people as organisms in order to get across the holistic nature of a person. Mental activity and physical activity aren’t separate, they are just two different …
Paradoxical theory of change
Gestalt therapy takes place from a position of creative indifference to any particular outcome. This means that, as your therapist, I’m not attached to you changing in any particular way; I don’t need you to change in order to feel good …
