Introduction To Gestalt Therapy (Part II)

Gestalt Therapy as Process of Growth

Everything that occurs in Gestalt therapy, or in short, Gestalt, is a process. There isn't one definite and predefined goal for this process. There is likewise not one way of learning Gestalt; there is no standard path. I consider this to be a positive thing.

I believe that learning objectives are pedagogical nonsense. Learning has no one specific goal. In hiking, for example, the destination is also just a contrived justification for the many pleasurable and arduous steps you take. Learning to develop awareness of my bodily sensations, and what they are telling me about my feelings, and about my needs, developing consciousness of what is, what I experience here and now, is in and of itself a goal.

Awareness of Polarities

In the Gestalt process, we learn to become aware of polarities. The polarities that tend to dictate our inner chatter, our internal narrative, and that therefore influence our choices, our actions and run our lives. Polarities that we are used to viewing as unreconcilable dichotomies. We are so used to thinking in these exclusive terms. Good vs. bad, black vs. white, selfish vs. altruistic. But reality is usually far more complex than that. These false dichotomies are actually often two sides of the same coin, or polarities that are interdependent and interrelated; one could not exist without the other, or we could not conceive of one without having an inclination of the other. While it may give us a sense of relief to feel that we understand the world around us when we compartmentalise it in this way of either/or, we miss out on the richness of life. But what if we learn what happens when love and hate are allowed to touch and even hug each other?

One common polarity is the notion of healthy vs. sick. You are either sick or you're healthy. But when we look closer, the divide does not appear to be so clear. I don't find that there is one satisfactory definition of sick and healthy. Are the bored and expressionless faces we see on their commute day in and day out healthy or sick? Is someone who can no longer tolerate an intolerable situation sick or healthy? What about those who always say yes to everyone but never take care of themselves? Or those who can no longer function in an oppressive environment?

Gestalt does not distinguish between Health and other types of illness. It is about you and about me and about our experience in the here and now. I think that Growth is a much more befitting word to the process of Gestalt than therapy. However, the change and the growth that may be achieved in this process do not result from targeted efforts, but are a desired secondary effect of what happens when we develop awareness to what is. This is known as the paradoxical theory of change. “What is, may be, and once it may be, it may change.”

Security and Exploration

Here is another polarity for you: security and exploration. We all have a need for both. The need for security is the need to be able to trust the predictability of the reality around me, and to trust my ability to respond to it, even if it's as simple as trusting that the ground will be there under me when I place my next step. If you have ever experienced an earthquake, you know how that basic trust may be shaken. How that thing that we take for granted the most, the earth under our feet, can be robbed from under us with not so much as a moment's notice. If we had no sense of predictability, no trust in the reality that surrounds us, and no trust in our ability to make sense of our perceptions of that reality, we would find ourselves in a state of utter chaos; we would not be able to take one step, no action would be possible because the result would be completely unforeseeable to us. We simply could not survive in such uncertainty. So on that very fundamental level, a sense of security is a basic human need, a prerequisite for all human action.

At the same time, we all have a need for exploration. If we always stayed in that secure realm of what we know, our experience would become ever more limiting; what once was a house that shielded us from the elements becomes a straitjacket that we can no longer move or breathe in. We are creatures of motivation; we are not trees that passively feed off the sun and the rain. We feel hunger or thirst, and we actively go out into the world and seek things that will quell our thirst and satisfy our hunger; the same is true with mental foods. With no novelty, we experience no contact, no contact, we cease to experience ourselves in relation to our environment, and since no gestalt is discernible without a background, an environment, how can we conceive of ourselves with an absence of a surrounding, in a state of vacuum?

Awareness Through Differentiation

Imagine what happens when you put your hand in a bowl of water that is at body temperature, within thirty seconds, you will not know where your fingers begin and where the water ends. The reason for that is because there is no boundary, there is no difference between the temperature of the water and the temperature of your fingers. As soon as you change the temperature of the water enough, just by a noticeable difference, by either heating or cooling it, you begin to create a boundary at the point where the finger, or the skin, interfaces with the water. At this point, it's the difference that creates and allows the awareness.

Awareness or the experience of a gestalt formation, if you will, comes about through difference, and difference is felt on the surface, on the level of the contact boundary of our organism with the environment. As long as we keep ourselves cooped up in what we already know, in that comfort zone where everything is knowable and predictable, no difference is discernible, no awareness can be experienced, no exploration and no growth.

The Balance of Security and Exploration

So we have a basic need for both security and exploration. We can picture a circle, inside that circle, there is order and security and outside of that circle, there is novelty and exploration. If we always stay inside the circle, we never experience anything, and we stagnate; on the other hand, if we thrust ourselves outside the circle, we are surrounded by chaos, uncertainty, and we experience trauma. And so awareness and growth happen on the surface, at the contact boundary of the circle with its environment, when we step outside of our comfort zone just enough so that we still feel safe, with one leg on terra firma, but also just enough that we can experience novelty. That's the sweet spot where we can begin to assimilate new ideas, play with them, discarding what is indigestible to us, and digesting and integrating what is useful to us. This is where learning, experiencing, and growth take place.