Gestalt therapy is one of the modern directions of existential psychotherapy. Its main goal is to increase a person’s level of awareness in order to achieve the integrity of the personality, fullness and consciousness of life, improving contact with the surrounding people and the outside world.
In childhood, we “swallowed” insults because we were afraid to fight back. Then we were ashamed of tears so as not to upset our loved ones. Today, we suppress joy in ourselves due to various considerations, conclusions and projections such as “if we laugh hard, then we will have to cry bitterly” etc. etc., and then by chance we discover that she too has gone somewhere from our lives, and most of the time her face has an alert and sorrowful expression.
All this repressed, unspoken, unexpressed and unfinished lives inside, absorbs our strength and poisons our life. As a result, we help those whom we do not want at all, and, on the contrary, we cannot express love to our loved ones.
Translated from German, gestalt means image, figure, form. In psychology, gestalt is understood as a specific organization of elements that makes up a certain whole. In the process of life and circumstances, this whole in us seems to have broken into many parts and pieces, which in a certain sense helped us to survive, but on the other hand could not preserve the energy of joy and unity with the world, which is available to the whole. And most of the suffering that arises is that “part of me seems to want one thing, and the other part wants something else, and they cannot reconcile in any way.” And since every figure, form, phenomenon in the world, i.e. gestalt, strives for completion, that is our inner, often unconscious desire to connect, to become a whole filled and as a result a happy person.
When a person has a need that requires satisfaction at a given moment of time, contact with the outside world occurs stronger than others. And there is often a breakdown of the boundary of contact, when satisfaction cannot occur.
The gestalt approach that works in the “here and now” time helps to find or notice in which phase the break in contact occurs, to realize in what way a person did it, and it is possible to find a new creative adaptation, as a new way to complete an unfinished situation and continue to contact the outside world comfortably and in a productive way.
At the same time, a lot of attention is paid to sensations, feelings, emotions and experiences at a specific moment in time.
