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Martin came with the issue that during the group meditation period, he had felt some tension in his stomach. I enquired whether this queasy feeling was familiar - it was not usual. He wondered if it was related to being a young child, and having a medical emergency, which his mother told him about later. I asked him to go into the feeling in his body - it was a shaky feeling. As he went into it, his face softened, tears were in his eyes, and he said he could hear his grandfather and father's voices reassuring him. I asked then about his family context -his field. He said he was loved and supported by his parents, and older siblings. He had a healthy and loving childhood experience. So fear was unusual for him in his current life. This was somewhat unusual in therapy, and meant that his fearful feelings in his stomach had a different meaning than what it may normally mean for someone with trauma and unfinished business. He said he was not a big risk taker, leading a comfortable and settled and happy life, both at work and home. This sounded great…except that the feeling in his stomach indicated that perhaps he wanted something a bit more. I explained that fear is the precursor to the experience of excitement, which is what happens when fear is integrated into one's being. So back to the fear, which I suspected indicated a yearning for more risk, and thus more adventure in his life. He agreed. So I asked him to give me a vision in three areas - personal, work, and relationship. His personal vision was being on top of a tall mountain he had climbed. His relationship vision was a long road trip in a motorhome with his family. His work vision was creating his own company, based on a progressive vision. As he pictured these things, he again had tears in his eyes, and reported feeling deeply grateful to life. I explained about how support helped convert risk, anxiety and fear, into excitement, and we explored what kind of support he might need to enable these things to happen. This case shows how important it is to approach people's experience from a phenomenological stance - not pre-interpreting what any particular symptom means. We do this by bracketing presuppostions, theories etc, and being present with the meaning it has for the client. The result is the client feels heard, seen and understood, and we can know more precisely just where to work with them. It would have been a waste of time going into his family background to try to search for a source of the fear. It was evident he had a healthy upbringing, and there was nothing that he displayed to suggest that he was avoiding something. This allows us to work more with the present, moving into the future. Gestalt work is just as much about the future of the field, as the past of the field, both of which are worked with in the present.
Abby spoke sharply. She was annoyed by another man in the group, and the way he expressed his feelings. She was critical, and somewhat condescending. I was interested in her energy, more than the words. There was a sharpness, and liveliness about her manner that I wanted to engage with. I asked her to personalise the feelings. She admitted to feeling sadistic towards me. And she showed me a particular action with her hands. I was feeling quite engaged with her - her explicit willingness to show her aggression, and authentically express it. I did not feel defensive at all. Instead I was interested in her energy, and wanted to meet her in that place. I invited her to show me again the aggressive action towards me, using movement with her hands. I invited her to stand up, so we could both mobilise and move some more. I asked her to show me with her face and hands what she felt. She did so, but also used sharp angry words. I ignored the words, and matched the energy - she showed me a hostile face, so I made a hostile face back. I was careful to match her as exactly as I could, neither less, nor more. Every nuance, every move I reflected back. Both in terms of expression, and the anger behind it. I did not feel angry towards her, but I summoned my angry feelings and used them to meet her. When she showed spite, I showed spite back. I encouraged her to put less emphasis on the words, but she sill wanted to use them. She amped up - with stronger, more hateful words, and energy, and I kept pace with her - not using any words back, only energetic meetings. This escalated. She wanted to hit, so I got a pillow and encouraged her to hit it. But this wasn't enough, she really was furious, and hateful, and voiced hate at the human race. I asked her to personalise that, to whom exactly what she so hating and despising. She said - 'father, mother'. But she kept speaking about the human race - two eyes, two legs. I kept drawing her into the present - 'I have two eyes and two legs'. Then she went inwards, talking about hating herself as a human, wanting to stab herself. She clutched her hands at her chest. I pointed there and asked what she was feeling. It took several times repeating my question until she spoke about how much she just wanted to kill herself - a retroflection of her energy and hatred. I kept pointing to where she was clutching her chest, and asked her about the feeling. Tears appeared in her eyes, and her hatred and anger towards me was now mixed with other feelings. She softened, there was an opening of vulnerability. At this point, I moved forward and held her. I could see that the hatred was never ending, and that no amount of matching it was going to satisfy her. I could see both the window of vulnerability, and could also see she was out of control. So I held her, and allowed her to both cry and rage. She was clutching onto me with one hand. The other hand, I encouraged her to hit my back. She did this, as well as squeezing me aggressively with that hand. It did not hurt me. I was fully grounded in the moment, in my body, with all my resources available. Then she started to soften and sob. She cried 'father', and was wracked with intense emotion. I supported this for some time, and then asked her to look at me. She could hardly do so. I wanted to bring her into contact, with what was available in the present. She went back into her sobbing, and after holding her, I again asked her to look at me. We did this several time. Finally, I could feel her letting go into me, and held her, with the same firmness she had been grabbing onto me. After some time, I sat down with her, as she was now quieter, and allowed her to curl up and be held by me. She became completely quiet and calm, and I asked her to really take in the nourishment available to her in this place. This process entailed the Gestalt element of relationship. Dialogue was less about words, and more about energy, emotion, and meeting. By staying with her, and meeting her in each place she went to, she was able to move forward. I originally moved from her words, to the experiment, which involved meeting her anger. To stay with the content of her words would have been distracting from the relational interaction going on underneath. Gestalt is always oriented towards process, towards embodied energy, and towards bringing things as far as possible into the present therapeutic relationship. As I went down this track, she was able to move into a place of openess, and then taking in the nourishment she had been wanting but pushing away previously. By representing this taking in/pushing away, with her two hands, she was able to move past that impasse place.
Lenny wanted to feel. He was not in touch with his feelings, at all. I asked at what point he had lost contact with his feelings. This is a field oriented question, paying attention to context. He said before the age of 30 he felt them more. I asked what happened when he was 30: he got married; for 3 years. We were now 13 years later, and he had not remarried. Clearly, something happened at this point. I asked him what - it seemed that the trauma of whatever had happened in the marriage had somehow been associated with him cutting off from his feelings. I said - 'so its a woman that hurt you'; he agreed. So I asked a woman to come up from the group. I found the right distance for her to sit. We experimented with different distances, and at each distance, I asked him how he felt. He was able to differentiate. If she was too distant, he couldn't sense her at all. Too close, and he felt some pressure. I then invited him to notice how he felt sitting there with her. He reported a sense of wanting support. This was significant for him, as he had explained that normally he was a person who supported everyone else - one of the reasons he suspected that he had distanced himself from feeling. So I asked him to express this to her directly - that he wanted support from her. I asked how she felt when she heard this. She actually didn't feel much. I could see this was because she was not really taking the process of the experiment - or him and his feelings - very seriously. He did not have any big dramatics, no strong feelings, so it was hard for her to respond. When men have buried their feelings, sometimes its hard for women to perceive anything there. So I explained to her that this was actually a very vulnerable process for him, to sit in front of a woman, that he had wounds that meant he distanced from feelings, that he found it hard to express himself, and that it was hard for him to ask for support. I did this as an intervention to support him, and to support her to move into her own feelings. Somehow, she seemed to be also distancing from her feelings - perhaps affected by the field effect as we call it in Gestalt. She reported wanting to support him and feeling kind towards him. So, back and forth - I asked him what he felt on the other end of her intentions and feelings... then to express that to her... then what she felt hearing that... and to express that to him. In other words, I supported a dialogue between them. In this process a variety of things happened. He moved towards receiving support from her, then automatically found himself wanting to give support. She moved away from offering support as he became less receptive, then back towards him as he again expressed his vulnerability and need. This was the dance of relationship, unfolding before our eyes. At each juncture, I asked him how he felt. This was very hard for him to identify and express, but he was able to notice small changes - like feeling tense, or feeling strong, or his heart beating, or feeling 'swollen' though he couldn't necessarily identify the specific feelings. I then asked him to hold out one hand as the giving one, the other hand as the receiving one. Then I asked her to hold both his hands, and for him to give with one, and receive with the other. This was another version of the Gestalt experiment, that expressed what was happening in the process, and embodied it, to help focus the figure of awareness. He could do this for a little while, but then reported feeling dizzy, and 'swollen'. So I asked her to sit back down, and did a little more exploration with him. However, he was not able to identify the feelings any further. The dizzy showed he was actually feeling too much to handle it. And the swollen indicated that he was very full of feelings. But as he was unable to identify them, it was time to stop. As homework I asked him to continue to monitor his feelings, and see what he could identify over time.
I told Rosemary that I wanted to get to know her. She came with a very open and positive attitude towards me. She said she wanted to know something beautiful about me. This I found a difficult question - somehow easier to answer a question that requires me to be self critical. Nevertheless, this was her request, and so I looked into myself - and told her that I am an open person that people felt very comfortable around - which is true. She told me that something similar was true of her. I said - 'well, then its going to be easy for us to get along'. This affirmed our similarity, and created a sense of joining. She visibly relaxed. In fact she sort of curled into herself, as if about to lie down…she told me she felt dizzy. Given there was clearly a connection between us, and that her movement suggested that some kind of support was missing, I invited her to lean against me, rather than simply collapse into herself. This takes a movement that is 'retroflected' -that is directed back to self rather than to the other. So in Gestalt we encourage this to be directed into relationship. So I sat next to her, and she leaned her head against me - in the same way and with the same movement that her falling over had been. I reported my feeling of warmth in the connection and asked hers. She was relaxing, but also afraid of rejection. So she was not fully letting the warmth in - only as far as her skin. She spoke of feeling 'chilled' inside. This indicated that she was active in the process of rejection - something that she had put onto me as a fear. It also showed a polarity - warmth and cold. So I invited her to talk about her own rejecting process - she said that her fear was about the future, about the loss of connection. Clearly, this was her method of not being fully present. Rather than look for the field context, I drew her into the present, and into our relationship. I asked her to become fully present, and notice where her fear was, between us. This is often the direction we take in Gestalt - into the here and now of the therapeutic relationship. She said her feeling was 'can't fully take this in'. I invited her to put this in a relational statement to me - 'I will only let you in so far before pushing you away'. This was the authentic statement we aim for in Gestalt - it increases the quality of contact. I asked her to feel the combination of warmth in the contact, and her coldness inside. She talked about it as 'coming and going'. I remarked - 'so we are going to have a complicated relationship'. This was a way of giving a larger frame to the process - the push and pull which was clearly a part of Rosemary's way of being in relationship. In Gestalt we are interested in being with 'what is' rather than jumping in to change it. In this case, with her internal contradictions, I indicated I was willing to be in relationship with that complexity rather than be put off by it, and reject her.
Sally admitted to being a bitch. She would easily berate her husband. There were many things about him that infuriated her. His lack of responsibility with money and his lack of career drive was one of those things. Sally would quickly reach her limit in conversations, blowing up at him. She hated the repetitive nature of the situations. He would offer what she considered to be his paltry excuses, and she felt like she was pushing him, rather than him having any drive himself. He seemed to be quite incompetent to her, and would not respect spending limits or other agreements they made. He was clearly passive aggressive, and essentially disrespectful of boundaries. However, she was the client, and it was her that I needed to work with. Often when dealing with one person in a marriage, a large laundry list of grievances will be brought by them. These are valid, as are their feelings about the issues. However, what matters, and what I focus the client on, is where their responsibility is. I bring it back to them, to what they need to do differently. Often they are so focused on the other person's faults that they see their own as secondary. All their efforts go into changing their partner. In Sally's case, bringing it back to her revealed a number of things. Firstly, her explosions were quite emotionally violent, and contributed to an atmosphere of alienation. Secondly, when not exploding, she was in avoidance mode. When she felt strongly about something she would either sob too much to be able to talk, or she would stop herself saying anything before the tears came out. In this way, she prevented herself talking through important issues, and would freeze herself emotionally. This resulted in her freezing him out, not responding to his affection for instance. These were important themes to work with, and were her part of the negative dynamic. Its important to not get caught up with the stories people tell about their marriages and partners. The important information is what they do to contribute to the dynamic. This is the Gestalt emphasis on responsibility; it takes an especially strong focus on this from the therapist to bring it back to the client. In her case, we started with her response to him when he did approach her in a warm and friendly way. She would pull back. In this was her resentment, and also her feeling of ungroundedness - she couldn't manage the feelings that came up, both positive and negative, and hold onto herself. In couples, it is very important to work with what is called differentiation - the capacity to be fully yourself, and at the same time, be close to the other. Gestalt pays attention to boundaries, and this helps to do this. In this case, she was not able to be close, and yet stay in touch with herself, and her feelings. So I suggested an experiment. I would play her husband, and she would simply work to stay grounded in her feelings. I asked for a particular phrase that he used, when being friendly. I repeated this to her, and supported her to stay present, breathe, and then talk about her feelings. This was very basic work, yet this is often the kind of support people need in their relationships. The embodied experiment is important, rather than just talking about it. The Gestalt 'safe emergency' allows us to bring up the difficult and provocative situation, but bring lots of support into it, so something different can happen. The result of this, over a number of sessions, was that Sally learned to hold onto herself. She took the support from the sessions, and could start to support herself in these situations, to just remain with herself. Before even learning to communicate what was happening for her, she first needed to get to first base. In Gestalt work we are satisfied to work very slowly, as it is in the slow work, with plenty of support, that integration occurs. Simply confronting someone with their responsibility is too harsh on its own. What is necessary is providing the kind of support they don't have, in order that they can indeed take the steps towards responsibility and differentiation.
Numi had had what seemed to be very strong emotional reactions to others in the group - not negative, but very sensitive. She had also, in her feedback, tended to tell a large and very big story about herself. So when it came to working with her, I remarked on this. I remarked on her big stories, and the big emotions that she showed. She started talking about her history, which I was interested in. She had been on medication, so I asked her about what had happened so she had to go on medication. She started going into the story in very great details. The story was important and there were many big events that helped me understand what had led to her taking medication. However, the stories led, one to the other, and I we could have sat there all day while she told me stories all day about her distress, her life, what had happened, her difficulties. In Gestalt, stories have value, but what we are more interested in is coming into the here and now, working with the experiment and attending to the relationship. So I interrupted her and said, 'I am having an experience right now of getting lost in your stories, and I often have that experience with you'. She started going into another story and I said, 'I am getting lost right now, and need to find a different way to connect with you'. So instead of criticising her, telling her to do something different, I was telling her about me, about my difficulties. This is the dialogical approach. Her habit was to tell stories, rather than communicate directly and interpersonally. So I guided her to firstly contact her feelings. She told me she felt shaky. I then connected this to our relationship, in the present. I asked her what it was about the experience with me that felt shaky. She replied that she felt comfortable with me, though she was concerned about judgements I might have about her stories. I gave her one of my judgements - I thought that she had suffered a lot, and at the same time, I thought that she had managed to survive some very difficult circumstances. Although many people think therapy is non-judgemental, this is a very limited view. Judgements are part of most human interactions; what is important in Gestalt is being able to make clear choices about when and where to bring in judgements - in service of the client. And to identify my own thoughts of judgements clearly and precisely, and articulate them in ways that contain information about myself. She relaxed some more, and I invited her to come fully into the present of our experience. She tended to be so lost in her own stories, subsequently losing the listener, that it was a new experience for her to come into the actual experience of relationship, especially one that was non-threatening. This in itself was a healing experience.
Tilda had problems with jealousy. She did not appear to have a tragic childhood. Her parents were supportive, as were her grandparents. She was finding her way in life, she was creative and energetic. But when it came to relationship, her jealousy had become quite an issue. She described the jealousy as cold, and the anger that accompanied it as hot. Well, that made some sense. Tilda described the hot and cold as coming in bursts. She said it felt like 'ice trays' in her gut. In Gestalt we call this retroflection - directing energy inwards, that wants to go out. So I invited her to send out a cold wave, and direct it to her partner - this is what she was implicitly doing, so this represented ownership of her action. She said she felt no control, it had to get out, because she felt so horrible, but she also didnt want to freeze her partner out. So I asked her to imagine him standing in the desert, a very very hot place, and send her ice cold energy out there. She could feel the ice melting. This brought together her polarities - hot and cold waves. She started feeling pain in her chest. This was a good sign, as this is what lay underneath the jealousy and anger. I asked her to stay with that feeling. She talked about her confusion -caring for him, yet wanting to hurt him. I asked her to imagine him in front of her, and say both things: 'I care for you, and I want to hurt you', and to stay in touch with her pain as she did so. She started sobbing. This was the authentic feeling underneath the scorching anger and freezing jealousy. After some time, she felt more settled, and was able to ammend her sentence to him: 'when I dont have your full attention, thats really painful for me'. This opened up a deeper topic, related to the topic of differentiation - the ability to be fully oneself, in closeness with others. When people experience fusion, or 'confluence' in Gestalt terms, they find it hard to have a sense of themselves separate from the other. They need confirmation for their own sense of self. Of course, we all need some of that in relationship. But when that need becomes a 'have to', then we lose our independent existence, and essentially impose a 'should' on the other person. Classically, Gestalt would simply confront the client with their responsibility to be fully themselves. In contemporary relational Gestalt we are more willing to respond in, at times, a parental type of way, giving the kind of confirmation that the person may have been lacking, and still long for. This is done, not in the sense of regression, but in the here and now, so it becomes an experience which can be integrated into the person, in the present.
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