About psychotherapy

 

Gestalt psychotherapy is a dialog between a client and a therapist that has certain characteristics:

• the therapist has holistic approach to the client, which means that he/she equally respects client’s psyche, body/emotions and soul.
• the relationship that is being gradually built through this dialog is happening in safe environment and has healing effect on the client.
• the aim of this dialog is for the client to become aware of things really happening in his/her life and to understand how the client has been stoping himself/herself in meeting his/her needs, to experience everything that hasn’t been lived through and to try some new patterns of behaviour that would help in finishing certain situations and integrating it into his/her being.
• the dialog usually starts with things happening here and now, but it can spread further into the past if it is necessary for the healing process. These can include some unfinished buisiness from the past, traumatic events, losses and many others.
• through this dialog, the client becomes aware of the ways he/she chooses and contributes to the things ‘happening in his/her life’, which results in the possibility of making different choices.

The aim of the whole therapeutic process is for “a person to discover, explore and experience his or her own shape, pattern and wholeness”. This wholeness (‘gestalt’) is always different and more than the sum of its parts. Hence, the aim is to support the client in acknowledging, healing and integrating all parts of one’s being/soul, that is to allow oneself to be what he/she really is.

Since there is an inner principle inside every being that leads that being toward continual development, we have to support the client in that process, within the therapeutic dialog, while discovering blocks, ambiguities, conflicts.