Theory in Detail
Gestalt Therapy
(Adapted from Michael C. Clemmens, 2022; Gary Yontef, Lynne Jacobs & Charles Bowman, 2019)
Gestalten: a German word referring to a pattern, configuration, a meaningful whole- habits of interpretation, patterns of behavior, of feeling and movement- through which we construct and understand our world.
Gestalt is an awareness and therapeutic practice based on attending to what is happening in the present moment:
What we feel in our body.
What we notice in our breathing and gestures.
What we are aware of in other people and our environment.
Holism: humans naturally self-regulate and move towards growth; people and their symptoms can only be understood in relation to their environment.
Field Theory: describes the ways life context informs experience. We are always embedded in a field of relationships (to the physical world, the natural environment, social structures). Culture, identity and history are all part of the field we exist and make meaning in.
Somatic: what we learn through our body
Embodiment: the sensate experience of my body-self-in-relation to others and the world around me. Situated as I am, here and now, joining the bodily experience with thinking and feeling.
Disembodiment: at times it is helpful to not feel everything, especially during overwhelming experiences. When this becomes a habitual pattern of responding to the world around me it can be problematic.
Contact and Support: internal and relational supports can enhance or interrupt contact with embodied self, others, and the environment. This can be as simple as accessing breath to increase capacity to be present in the room with another person. We can feel when someone is present with us- we also feel when they are not.
The ways we interrupt contact are rooted in a unique Gestalt- patterning or imprints that may have contextual history in what we learned earlier in life, from traumas, from family and culture- patterns of accommodation, disowning emotion, expecting danger or rejection, etc. For example, when a child has a chronically disembodied parent they may develop a sense of emptiness, isolation, aloneness.
Awareness: supports embodiment to trust being as opposed to doing or explaining.
Choice: is crucial in any experiment of contact- choice to turn towards, to turn away from, to notice what’s difficult about what I’m feeling, to bring curiosity to how that was learned, and to explore whether it is still appropriate in the current context.
Experiment: the ways we bring what you’re talking about into the room right now, how is that in the room now? This includes emerging self-expression and focusing on the immediate experience.
Phenomenology: experiential meaning-making.
EMDR
I am trained in EMDR for treating acute, relational and developmental trauma.
EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) is a trauma-informed psychotherapy developed by Francine Shapiro which draws on our innate drive toward physical and emotional health.
EMDR involves understanding client history and life context, developing supports (grounding and affect management skills), building a treatment plan, processing of traumatic experiences to lower the intensity of activating images, emotions, sensations, and beliefs, and strengthening adaptive information processing for new past, present, and future stressors.
Eye movements or other forms of bilateral/dual attention stimulation activate your problem-solving process, which occurs during REM sleep when your eyes dart back and forth. By focusing on a specific stressor and its protective and supportive emotions, sensations, and beliefs, then adding bilateral/dual attention stimulation, your brain can begin problem-solving. As you are focused on the specific challenge, your brain can work through it more effectively than what may randomly come up during REM sleep.