Summary of Gestalt Therapy

View of Human Nature

     Perls believed that people  developed in relation to their environmen, and he divided this development into social, psychophysical, and spiritual stages. His existential and humanistic perspective viewed people as self-directed: he believe they had to take responsibility for their own lives.Gestalist believed that a healthy personality is the result of a person's experiences forming a meaningful whole. This occurs when there is a smooth transition between those sets of experiences that are immediately in the focus of awareness and those that lie in the background.

Development of Maladaptive Behavior 

     According to Gestalt theory, people develop psychological problems in several ways. They can either lose contact with the environment and the resources in it, or become so overinloved with the environment that they lose touch with themselves. Some people fail to put aside unfulfilled needs or unexpressed feelings, whereas others may become fragmented or scattered in many directions.

     He dividesthe kinds of problems individual experience into six areas. This are lack of awareness, lack of responsibility, lose contact with the environment, inability to complete unfinished business, denial of needs and dichotomizing dimensions of the self. 

     In short, from the point of view of the gestalt therapist, people become maladjusted when they fail to utilize their own capacity for self-regulation, depending upon others,or manipulating the environment in countless other ways. 

Functions of the Therapist

     One of the major fuctions of the gestalt therapist is to frustrate the clients demands for support and help, so that they are forced to rely on their own resources. Some of the ways in which gestalt theraphy helps the patient to evaluate interrupted or faulty contact is by the evaluation of the sum of a client's communication abilities. Evaluating the whole presentation, not simply what a client says, but how they act, how they speak, words they choose and body language can help the client discover barriers to complete contact. Therapist in gestalt method are generally trying o change a client's entire life by focusing on every aspect of his mental state. Gestalt therapy differs from many other kinds of therapy in its tendency to focus on what people are feeling in the present. 

Goals of Therapy

    Tries to help individuals to assume responsibility for themselves, rather than relying on others to make decisions for them. It helps to raise the client's awareness regaring how they function in their environment. It focus on the here and now not there and then. The past is no more and the future not yet only the now exists. Anxiety, for Gestalist, is the gap between now and then, between the present and the past or the present and the future.

Major Methods and Techniques

     Some of the major methods and techniques are converting questions to statement, use of personal pronouns, assuming responsibility, playing the projection, empty chair, making the rounds, exaggeration and confrontation.

Application

     Principles and techniques derived from GT are being applied in a variety of educational setting internationally. Initials investigations of the results of these applications have noted significant increases in teachers self-knowledge, sense of personal control, flexibility and attention to the here and now additionally students have shown significant increases in a number of areas including self-esteem and self-awareness. For the children to have a self-confidence, high self-esteem, to take responsibility, control their behavior and accept themselves as what they are.

Facilitators:

Arellano, Maricel 
Epino, Jocel
Plamio, Jhastine
Sedentario, Leslie