Gestalt Therapy View of Human Nature: people ar

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Gestalt Therapy
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View of Human Nature people are

• self-reliant
• spontaneous
• capable of self-regulation
• able to reintegrate the disown parts of
  themselves
• striving toward actualization and growth

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The present (here and now)

• Directly Experience rather than talking about
  situations
• Becoming the hurt child rather than talking about
  childhood trauma experiences.
• Ask what and how instead of why
• The power is in the present.
• However, many people focus on past mistakes and
  future plans.

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Unfinished Business (UB)

• Definition Feelings about the past are
  unexpressed
• May be of anger, hatred, guilt, fear
• May be memories and fantasies
• Interfere with effective contact
• Tend to result in physical symptoms
• By working through unfinished business, the
  preoccupation with the past is complete.

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Contact Resistance to contact

• Contact interaction with nature and other
  people without losing ones individuality
• Contact is necessary for change to occur
• Resistance to contact the defenses that prevent
  us from experiencing the present fully

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Contact Boundary Disturbances

• Clients are encourage to be aware of their
  dominant style of blocking contact
• Introjection uncritically accept others view
  without reviewing them
• Children often take parents opinions as fact
• Projection disown certain aspect of ourselves by
  assigning them to others
• Feeling anger may lead a person to project anger
  onto others
• Retroflection doing to ourselves what we want to
  do to others,
• Biting ones nails can be a substitute for
  aggression toward others

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Energy and blocks to energy

• Attend to where energy is located, how it is
  used, and how it can be blocked
• Blocked energy is a form of resistance
• Recognize how their resistance is being expressed
  in their body
• feeling numb
• Exaggerate their tension and tightness in order
  to increase awareness

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Therapeutic Goals helping clients

• to enhance awareness
• to depend on themselves
• to bring the past or future into the present
• to achieve integration of the whole person
• Verbal behavior, nonverbal behavior, feelings,
  thoughts, perceptions.

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Therapists function and Role

• Increase clients awareness
• Attend to the present moment
• Attend to verbal, nonverbal, and inconsistent
  message
• Help clients to experience their being stuck
• Make I statement
• It is difficult to make friends?I have trouble
  making friends

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The Therapeutic Relationship

• Therapeutic relationship is important for the
  therapy to be effective
• Be empathetic, genuine, and understanding
• Share therapists experiences to clients in
  here-and-now
• Apply the notion of use of self in therapy

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Therapeutic Change

• Not making progress is due to fear of change
  (Perls, 1969)
• Exploring the reluctance
• The Change Process three-stage (Polster, 1987)
• Discovery (get a new perspective)
• Accommodation (learn that they have a choice)
• Assimilation (change their environment)

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Therapeutic techniques and procedures

• The experiential work
• Use experiential work in therapy to work through
  the stuck points and gain new insights
• Preparing client for experiential work
• Obtain permission from clients
• Be sensitive to cultural differences
• Respect resistance

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Therapeutic techniques and procedures

• The internal dialogue exercise
• Top dog (critical parent) and underdog (victim)
• Empty-chair (two sides of themselves)
• Making the rounds
• Go around to each person and say What makes it
  hard for me trust you is
• Reversal exercise
• Reverse the typical style (e.g., behave as
  negative as possible)

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Therapeutic techniques and procedures

• Rehearsal exercise
• Share the rehearsals out loud with a therapist
• Exaggeration exercise
• Exaggerate gesture or movement, which usually
  intensifies the feelings attached to the behavior
  
• Staying with the feeling
• Go deeper into the feelings they wish to avoid

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Therapeutic techniques and procedures

• The Gestalt approach to dream work
• Do not interpret or analyze dreams
• Bring dream back to the present life as though
  they are happening now
• Every person or object in the dream represents a
  projected aspect of the dreamer
• Dreams serve as an excellent way to discover
  personality
• Not remembering?refuse to face what it is at that
  time

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Research on Gestalt Therapy

• Compare with a waiting list control or no
  treatment, Gestalt therapy is effective
• In general, results are similar among Gestalt
  therapy, P-C therapy, or CBT.
• Leslie Greenberg and colleagues conducted a
  series of research on empty chair technique
• Across studies, the empty chair technique is
  helpful by reducing self-criticism and increasing
  self-understanding.

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From a multicultural perspective

• Contributions
• Work with clients from their cultural
  perspectives
• Limitations
• Focus on affect may not be appropriate
• Asians value emotion self-control
• Direct expression of the negative feelings to
  their parents is not appropriate.

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Summary and Evaluation--contribution

• Enhance awareness
• Attend to verbal and nonverbal cues
• Directly experience rather than talking about it
• Focus on growth and enhancement
• See each aspect of a dream as a projection of
  themselves

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Summary and Evaluation-limitation

• Ineffective therapists may manipulate the clients
  with powerful experiential work
• Some people may need psycho-education