figure/ground

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…

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'…