My Approach
I employ an Integrative approach in therapy, weaving together various techniques and methods customized to meet the unique needs of each session. At its core, I utilize the Gestalt approach to connect and collaborate with you.
As a practitioner, I draw from the essential Gestalt therapy model, emphasizing the aesthetic criterion of contacting. In evaluating a person's creative-adjusting within therapy, I trust what emerges from the situation rather than imposing standards based on diagnostic categories. My approach delves into the relational and ethical aspects of Gestalt therapy, integrating them into self-functioning, emphasizing the relational and existential dimensions of human experiencing
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Gestalt Therapy
Embracing the Present for Lasting Change
Gestalt therapy, born in the early 1950s through the minds of Fritz and Laura Perls and American intellectual Paul Goodman, stands as an original humanistic approach to psychotherapy. Evolving over the decades, it has left an indelible mark on various clinical approaches. Initially responding to authoritarian therapeutic norms, Gestalt therapy broke free, fostering individual identity and creativity. Guided by a person's experience rather than external judgments, it values the "aesthetic" qualities of contacting – the how or shape of experiencing the present. Contemporary gestalt therapy extends its reach with an explicitly phenomenological, existential, and hermeneutic approach from a relational perspective. Emphasizing people as emergent beings within various contexts, it stresses the importance of relatedness and underscores the value of the therapy relationship. This model integrates concepts into clinical practice, engaging in a worldwide dialogue with various psychotherapy modalities
Addressing Fixed Gestalts
Repeating patterns or fixed gestalts (fixation) often result in diminished awareness and a weakened sense of self. Unresolved feelings from the past can hinder current relationships, trapping individuals in unsatisfying patterns. However, when these feelings become part of conscious experience, fixed gestalts release, enabling a new perspective and the ability to choose different actions.
The Essence: Gestalts and Contacting
Derived from the German word for "shape" or "form," Gestalt therapy focuses on the forms of experience, the gestalts. This approach explores the ongoing process of experience - how it's sensed, felt, and thought-through in the present. Gestalt therapy emphasizes "contacting," the process where gestalts form and change over time. Diminished awareness can obstruct creatively seeing possibilities, leading to a life filled with perceived problems.
A Holistic View of Present Experience
Gestalt therapy recognizes present experience as a whole embodied experience, integrating mind and body. While focusing on the present, it does not neglect the importance of a person's wider social context – family, friend, co-workers. Past and future contribute to each moment in meaningful ways, shaping a person's unique journey.