2) What is Gestalt therapy?

• Gestalt therapy is a client-centered approach to psychotherapy that helps clients focus on the
present and understand what is really happening in their lives right now, rather than what they
may perceive to be happening based on past experience.

Focusing: The focus is on what is happening in the here-and-now, rather than the there-and-then.

How it works:

Perls believed that we are not in this world to live up to others' expectations, nor should we expect
others to live up to ours. By building self-awareness, gestalt therapy helps clients better understand
themselves and how the choices they make affect their health and their relationships. With this self-
knowledge, clients begin to understand how their emotional and physical selves are connected and
develop more self-confidence to start living a fuller life and more effectively deal with problems.

The goal of Gestalt therapy is to raise clients' awareness regarding how they function in their
environment (with family, at work, school, friends). ... In therapy, clients become aware of what
they are doing, how they are doing it, and how they change themselves, and at the same time,
learn to accept and value themselves.

How Does Gestalt Therapy Suggest the

Mind Works?
According to Gestalt theory, individuals adopt social roles in order to fulfill their
biological needs. In healthy existence, this is a fluid process in which the most pressing
need emerges into consciousness in order to be fulfilled. Healthy individuals interact
with their environment to select the best means of addressing each need as it arises.
They live each moment anew recognizing that there are always fresh ways of achieving
the same goals.

In unhealthy existence, individuals become stuck in rigid patterns of behavior which they
repeat automatically across a wide array of situations. Instead of trying to be all they
can be, they become obsessed with living up to an ideal or with other people’s
expectations of them. They may even suppress aspects of themselves that they fear
could lead to rejection or disapproval.

In normal development, individuals also establish a boundary between themselves and

others. An effective boundary allows the individual to engage in beneficial interactions
with others while maintaining a separate sense of self. If the boundary is too
impermeable, the individual becomes disconnected from others; if it is too permeable,
the individual ends up losing the distinction between self and others.

How Does Gestalt Therapy Cause Change?

In Gestalt therapy, awareness is viewed as the primary mechanism of change. When
clients are helped to become fully conscious of their own experiences, it is believed that
change will occur spontaneously without the need for any coercion or persuasion on the
part of the therapist.

As clients learn to live more fully in the present they will find that suppressed needs and
emotions gradually surface. In the safety of the therapeutic environment, they are able
to acknowledge and work through such material. They learn to reconnect with the parts
of themselves the