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Being an integratively steered therapist means that I am able to adopt techniques of therapy from different disciplines. One of these disciplines is Gestalt, where methods of focusing and the Empty Chair are used to tap into the client’s inner self and unravel the overshadowed parts of the client that have been buried deep in their psyche.
Focusing is a body-oriented process of self-awareness and emotional healing, in which we learn to become aware of the subtle level of knowing that speaks to us through the body.
Feeling "Too Much" or "Too Little"*
People typically come to learn Focusing from two ends of a feeling spectrum. On the one hand, we have people who are troubled by feeling "too much." Their stomachs tighten each time they assert themselves. They have a constricted throat for hours after a difficult phone call. Such people have no doubt that their emotional life has an impact on their bodies--in fact, they often wish it didn't! To them, Focusing offers a way to have a friendlier, more positive relationship with feeling experience. They learn to acknowledge their bodily felt senses without becoming overwhelmed by them. Further, they make the almost miraculous discovery that when these felt senses are listened to and "heard," they lighten, soften, relax, and often release completely.
The other type of person who comes to learn Focusing is someone who feels "too little." This person has thoroughly learned the lesson of our culture: that the body is devoid of meaning and should be ignored whenever possible. When he or she puts awareness in the body, it feels blank, like nothing is there. This is the person who simply cannot answer when asked, "How do you feel?" For this person, learning Focusing means learning how to feel (rather than ignore) the body's meaningful reactions.
Confirmatory Knowing*
The knowing that comes through Focusing is often surprising, and operates from its own logic rather than following in a linear fashion from something previously known. Its signal can be an intensification or a releasing. It can also be a sense of flow, fresh air, opening, expansion, or the like. Tears are a strong confirmation: tears that have nothing to do with sadness, but rather with the rightness of the knowing--"truth tears." In contrast, the body's way of saying "No" is a feeling of something being "off," an uneasiness, a wrongness, limitation, or contraction, or backing away.
The Wisdom of the Body*
Many people now understand that our bodies "know" what good health is, and can show us the way to optimum physical health if we so desire. But to see the scope of the body's wisdom as exclusively physical is to take too narrow a view.
Our bodies are wise in ways hardly ever acknowledged by our culture. Our bodies carry knowledge about how we are living our lives, about what we need to be more fully ourselves, about what we value and believe, about what has hurt us emotionally and how to heal it. Our bodies know which people around us bring out the best in us, and which do not. Our bodies know the right next step to bring us to more fulfilling and rewarding lives.
Learning Focusing means returning to a kind of nonanalytic knowing that connects us to our wholeness. We build a better relationship with our emotional life. Trust in our own process deepens. Focusing becomes an inner "compass" that points the way more and more reliably the more it is used.
Empty Chair *
Gestalt therapy has been successfully employed in the treatment of a wide range of "psychosomatic" disorders including migraine, ulcerative colitis and spastic neck and back.
Gestalt therapiy works well with couples, with individuals having difficulties coping with authority figures and with a wide range of intra psychic conflicts.
The therapy has been effectively employed with psychotics and severe character disorders.
It emphasis on personal responsibility, interpersonal contact and increased clarity of awareness of what is, could be of great value in meeting the problems of the present.
Empty chair work can help people re-own rejected, "alien" parts of them, it can also help resolve conflicts between aspects of one's personality.
When the client expresses a conflict with another person, through this technique, the client is directed to talk to that another person who is imagined to be sitting in an empty chair beside or across the client. This helps the client to experience and understand the feeling more fully. Thus, it stimulates your thinking, highlighting your emotions and attitudes.
Cognitive change – Through this process, client will come to an understanding about how the imaginary person will be thinking about the same issues. He also learns that whether he was projecting any thoughts on the other person.
Behavioral change – client will come out with new behaviors in the supportive environment of the therapy and then they expand their awareness. More than passively accepting the environment, he will start taking stand on a critical issue and making choices that will result in getting what he wants.
Affective change – the client feels capable of dealing with surprises he encounters in everyday life.
When you go see a Gestalt therapist, the office will usually have an extra chair--an empty chair. This chair serves an important function. The "Empty Chair" technique is one of the various ways in which Gestalt Therapy can be applied which is developed and popularized by Frederick "Fritz" Pearls.
*Ann Weiser Cornell/ *Inner Knowing, Helen Palmer (Ed.), Tarcher/Putnam, 1998, pp. 159-164. ISBN: 0874779367
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