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 way. That can be other people, our environment, some aspect of ourselves. We don’t live in a vacuum; we live in a constantly changing situation in which we need to make and break contact with various things according to our needs at that point in time.
A second concept becomes critical at this point, so I will spend a paragraph describing that, then put the two together.
Creative adjustment
Creative adjustment is one of the primary activities of living. Because our situation is constantly changing, and because we are forever making and breaking contact with various aspects of our situation, it is necessary for survival that we creatively adjust to our present situation. Gestalt therapy uses the term creative adjustment to emphasise the active and spontaneous nature of this activity. Every second of every day, we are creatively adjusting to changes in our situation.
Creatively adjusting contact
These two ideas belong together because when we creatively adjust to our situation, what we are adjusting is our contact with that situation.
For example, suppose I’m in a meeting and I start to feel hungry. I now have two competing needs; one is to concentrate on my meeting, the other is to eat some food. My situation has changed, and I need to creatively adjust. I can choose to modify my contact with my hunger by ignoring or suppressing it until my meeting is over. I can choose to modify my contact with the meeting by eating something or break contact altogether by leaving to find food. I can also choose to make contact with both, splitting my available concentration between feeling hungry and the meeting.
Creative adjustment is all about maintaining a tolerable level of contact with the situation we are in at any given time. This process can cause us problems and suffering when the creative adjustments we make to one situation become fixed, stopping us from adapting to new situations.
For example, suppose I sprain my ankle. I will need to creatively adjust to my situation by changing how I walk. In order to minimise pain, I will take more weight on my good ankle. If this persists for a number of weeks or months, my entire balance will shift, the muscles taking the extra weight will develop, and the muscles I’ve taken the strain off will soften. My ankle heals, but when I try to walk, I have a limp simply because my body has adapted. Depending on how physically ingrained my adapted way of walking is, I might need physiotherapy to re-distribute how I carry my weight.
Our thoughts, emotions, sensations, and spirit are equally prone to being sprained, broken, and otherwise adapted to circumstances in ways that cause us problems when those circumstances change. And the point to using the term creative adjustment is to emphasise that those adaptations were and are really valuable. Because that was the most creative way you had of adapting given the situation you were in and the resources you had available.
But gestalt therapy isn’t about identifying creative adjustments and changing them. It’s about becoming aware of them and making choices. After all, if you’ve creatively adjusted to a loving upbringing and your open heart causes you pain when you find yourself in a more callous situation, is it you or the situation that needs to be changed?
This is an expression of gestalt therapy’s revolutionary spirit. Creative adjustment includes the possibility of reaching out to change the situation we are in. When you combine this with field theory, the question becomes: how much of this problem is mine, and how much of it belongs to society?
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 …
About gestalt
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 …
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 …