Gestalt Therapy Techniques

Gestalt therapy is a therapeutic approach that emphasises your personal responsibility and works with the present moment, rather than dwelling on past experiences. It encourages you to become aware of your thoughts, feelings, and actions in the "here and now" as a way of working with difficulties.

Gestalt therapy may suit you if you want to work on your self-awareness and on how you relate to other people. The work involves noticing what you are doing as you do it, and attending to unfinished business from the past that still shapes how you live now.

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Core Tools of Gestalt Therapy

Gestalt therapy uses a range of tools designed to increase your awareness of what you are doing, feeling, and avoiding.

Awareness Exercises

These exercises form the base of gestalt therapy, and involve activities that draw your attention to your current surroundings, emotions, and actions. Methods such as mindful breathing and body scanning are used to help you notice physical sensations and emotional states as they occur.

Contact and Resistance Exercises

These exercises look at how you make and break contact with people, objects, and situations around you. The aim is to help you identify patterns of resistance, where you may be holding back from fully engaging with parts of your life. Recognising those patterns puts you in a position to change how you meet the world around you.

Empty Chair Technique

In this exercise you hold a spoken conversation with a part of yourself, or with a person who is not in the room. It is often used to work with long-standing conflicts, because it gives voice to different sides of a situation and lets them speak to each other.

Techniques for Enhancing Personal Growth

Gestalt therapy also uses techniques that invite you to try out new behaviours and perspectives, and to look at other ways of thinking about and responding to the situations you find yourself in.

Experimentation

Experimentation in gestalt therapy means trying out a new behaviour, or revisiting an old situation with a different attitude, inside the safety of the session. You might, for example, role-play a difficult conversation with a manager or a partner in order to test a more direct way of speaking. Working through it in the room first gives you a chance to see how it feels before you attempt it elsewhere. The emphasis on what you want to do differently, rather than on tracing where the problem began, is one gestalt shares with solution-focused therapy techniques, although the two approaches work in different ways.

Playing the Projection

People often attribute their own feelings or characteristics to others without noticing that they are doing it. In gestalt therapy you learn to identify these projections and explore them through role-play or other exercises. The aim is to recognise the disowned part and take it back as your own, which can ease the internal conflict that the projection carries.

Use of Metaphor and Creative Expression

Gestalt therapy also uses drawing, movement, and other forms of creative expression to work with experiences that are hard to put into words. Drawing a conflict, or making a physical shape of something that feels like an obstacle, can open a different view of what is happening. If words are difficult for you, these exercises offer a non-verbal route into the material.

Advanced Integrative Techniques

As therapy proceeds, you and your therapist may work with methods that draw together several strands of your experience at once.

Dialogue Process

The dialogue process involves open and direct conversation, either between different parts of yourself or between you and your therapist. For example, a dialogue between your present self and yourself as a child is one way of attending to painful early experiences that still affect you now.

Field Theory Application

This approach applies gestalt field theory, which holds that a person cannot be fully understood in isolation from their environment. In practice this means looking at how your family, your social circumstances, and your wider cultural context shape your feelings and behaviour. Seeing those influences more clearly allows you to weigh choices against your own values rather than only reacting to outside pressure.

Phenomenological Focus

A phenomenological focus means paying close attention to your present experience without judging or interpreting it. You notice thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations as they arise. In work with anxiety, the aim is to observe what is happening as it builds rather than being carried along by it.

Adapting Techniques to Individual Needs

Gestalt therapy is adapted to the person in front of the therapist rather than run to a fixed protocol.

Tailoring Techniques

Your therapist will work with you to select techniques that fit your difficulties, your goals, and your circumstances. Some methods suit some people and not others, and that is a matter for discussion between you rather than something decided in advance.

Strategies for Daily Integration

Your therapist may suggest ways of carrying gestalt practices into ordinary days. This might include mindfulness practice, journalling about daily experiences, or setting aside time for reflection. These practices keep the work going between sessions.

Community and Social Interaction

One way of carrying the work outward is to share what you are noticing about yourself with people you trust, and to try the new way of relating with them rather than only in the session. What they say back to you becomes further material to bring to your therapist, including where the new behaviour did not land as you expected. Others prefer to keep the work private, and that is also a reasonable choice; it is worth deciding with your therapist which people, if any, are the right ones to involve.

On evidence: gestalt therapy belongs to the humanistic psychotherapies. The editors of the American Psychological Association's handbook of research in that family report that research support for the major humanistic approaches has continued to accumulate (see Further reading). Gestalt therapy has been examined in fewer controlled trials than some other approaches, so it is worth asking a prospective therapist what is known about treating the particular difficulty you are bringing.

If gestalt therapy techniques do not appeal to you, look at the different therapy techniques and tools available and find an approach that suits you better. You can also search for a therapist on the TherapyRoute directory.

Key Takeaways

• Awareness is the method: gestalt therapy works by noticing your thoughts, feelings, and actions as they happen in the session.
• Integration: the techniques aim to bring disowned or separated parts of your experience back into contact with each other.
• Adaptability: the approach is fitted to your circumstances rather than delivered to a fixed protocol.
• Practical application: you are encouraged to apply what you notice in sessions to daily life.
• Your social world: involving people close to you is an option, not a requirement.

FAQ

What is the primary focus of gestalt therapy?

The primary focus is your awareness of the here and now, and the bringing together of your thoughts, feelings, and actions. It emphasises personal responsibility and treats you as an active participant in the work rather than a recipient of it.

How is gestalt therapy used with anxiety?

It uses awareness techniques that keep attention on present experience. The work involves looking at what precedes and accompanies your anxiety, and practising a way of observing it as it rises. How much this helps varies from person to person and by what is driving the anxiety.

Is gestalt therapy suitable for children?

It can be adapted for children. It uses creative and experiential methods, which give children ways of showing their experience that suit their stage of development.

How do I apply gestalt techniques in everyday situations?

You can practise mindfulness, use self-dialogue, and use awareness exercises to stay in contact with what you are experiencing. Your therapist is the person to agree with on which of these to use and how.

Can gestalt therapy address relationship difficulties?

It is used with couples and families. The focus falls on how people make and break contact with each other, including in the session itself, which can make communication patterns visible and each person's perspective easier to hear.

How long does gestalt therapy take?

That depends on your circumstances and on what you are working with. Some difficulties shift in a short course of sessions; others need sustained work over months or longer. Your therapist should be willing to discuss what to expect at the outset and to review progress with you as you go.

How do I find a qualified gestalt therapist?

Look for practitioners registered with the psychotherapy or psychology regulator and professional bodies in your own country, and check the registration yourself where a public register exists. An initial consultation is a reasonable way to see whether the therapist's approach and manner suit you.

Further reading

• Cain, D. J., Keenan, K., & Rubin, S. (Eds.). (2016). Humanistic Psychotherapies: Handbook of Research and Practice (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association. A research handbook covering the humanistic approaches, including a chapter on contemporary gestalt therapy and its evidence base. Introduction (PDF, apa.org)