awareness

The Golden Arrow: how to live a more or less fulfilling life

Bristol Therapist BlogFebruary 22, 20180Comments

The Golden Arrow is a heuristic tool I've been thinking about for a while now to help frame my understanding of what is happening in therapy at a given time. Really, it's an app running off the gestalt cycle api; the theoretical cycle of gestalt formation and destruction chunters away in the background, and gets…

the gestalt cycle of figure formation and destruction

Rising and falling: the cycle of gestalt formation and destruction

Bristol Therapist BlogFebruary 21, 20180Comments

My first encounter with what pre-gestalt Fritz Perls would have recognised as concentration therapy, came in the form of two exercises from a book called Concentration & Meditation. These were exercises designed to lead into wider Buddhist practice, but I was using them to still and focus my otherwise drastically scattered mind. One of these exercises…

Timing is everything. I repeat, timing is everything!

Bristol Therapist BlogFebruary 18, 20180Comments

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…

Resistance is fertile

Bristol Therapist BlogJune 23, 20173Comments

At the heart of every course of therapy sits a struggle between change and resistance. Traditionally, the therapist is seen as an agent of change. In this view, it is the therapist's job to help bring about change, be that the explicitly desired change of the client, or an unwanted albeit necessary change. In gestalt therapy, this…

Chewing digital food in my pocket

Bristol Therapist BlogMay 2, 20170Comments

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…

Resentments and regrets: working with unfinished business.

Bristol Therapist BlogApril 12, 20170Comments

Any incomplete gestalt is unfinished business demanding resolution. Usually this takes the form of unresolved and incompletely expressed feelings. Patients are encouraged to experiment with finishing business which heretofore was unfinished... Gestalt therapists have found that resentments are the most frequent and meaningful unexpressed feeling, and often deal with this with a game in which…

The psychopathology of boredom

Bristol Therapist BlogApril 3, 20172Comments

Psychopathology is a great word. It has three parts: 'psyche' (the soul), 'pathos' (suffering), and the suffix 'ology' (the study of). If you're ever writing about something in the context of its impact on human suffering, you can't go far wrong by dropping in psychopathology (incidentally, given those meanings, that makes the meaning of 'psychopath'…

EU Referendum: 3 gestalt therapy exercises for undecided voters

Bristol Therapist BlogJune 22, 20160Comments

Tomorrow (Thursday 23rd June 2016), millions of us will go to a polling station, and decide the fate of our nation by putting a cross in one of two boxes in the much anticipated EU Referendum. Polling puts the result on a knife-edge, which means that the votes of undecided voters will decide the result. I've…

Simple questions, complex therapy

Bristol Therapist BlogFebruary 10, 20160Comments

The most elaborate of complexities can arise from the most elegant of simplicities. In gestalt, simplicity is achieved and maintained through a rigorous attention to the present moment, the legendary here and now. Gestalt therapy can be stripped back to three basic questions: 1. What are you aware of now? 2. What do you need now? 3. What does…

introjection visualised by jennydrewsomething

Shoulds: the internalised wants of other people

Bristol Therapist BlogJanuary 21, 20130Comments

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…