Gestalt: Therapy and Treatment

Gestalt Therapy

Gestalt therapy teaches therapists and patients the phenomenological method of awareness, in which perceiving, feeling, and acting are distinguished from interpreting and reshuffling preexisting attitudes.

Explanations and interpretations are considered less reliable than what is directly perceived and felt.

Gestalt psychotherapy can be conceived of as the process of ameliorating the healthy contact between a person and his or her environment, with a view to satisying of needs.

In Gestalt therapy there are no "shoulds." Instead of emphasizing what should be, Gestalt therapy stresses awareness of what is. 'What is, is'. This contrasts with any therapist who "knows" what the patient "should" do.

An observation could be made about a person's breathing or their physical posture.

A suggestion could be made to express what one is experiencing after hearing another speak direct contact between therapist and client, Emphasis on "the here and now,"

The client's own responsibility for his or her growth,

Trust in the client's self-regulation,

The ecological interdependence of person and environment, and the desire for awareness.

The goal is for clients to become aware of what they are doing, how they are doing it, and how they can change themselves, and at the same time, to learn to accept and value themselves.

The therapeutic goal is the resumption of growth by means of bringing the individual into closer contact with and greater awareness of the present.

Gestalt Treatment

Gestalt therapy begins with the first contact. Ordinarily, assessment and screening are done as a part of the ongoing relationship rather than in a separate period of diagnostic testing and social history taking. The data for the assessment are obtained by beginning the work, for example, by therapeutic encounter. This assessment includes the patient's willingness and support for work within the Gestalt therapy framework, the match of patient and therapist, the usual professional diagnostic and character logical discriminations, decisions on frequency of sessions, the need for adjunctive treatment and the need for medical consultation.

An average frequency for sessions is once per week. Using the Gestalt methodology, an intensity equivalent to psychoanalysis can often be achieved at this frequency. Often individual therapy is combined with group therapy, workshops, conjoint or family therapy, movement therapy, meditation, or biofeedback training. Sometimes patients can utilize more frequent sessions, but often they need the interval to digest material and more frequent sessions may result in over reliance on the therapist. Frequency of sessions depends on how long the patient can go between sessions without loss of continuity, decomposition, or lesser forms of relapse. Frequency of sessions varies from five times per week to every other week. Meeting less frequently than every week obviously diminishes intensity unless the patient attends a weekly group with the same therapist. More than twice a week is ordinarily not indicated, except with psychotics, and is definitely contraindicated with borderline personality disorders.

All through the therapy patients are encouraged and aided in doing the decision making for themselves. When to start and stop, whether to do an exercise, what adjunctive therapies to use, and the like are all discussed with the therapist, but the competence and ultimate necessity for the patient to make these choices is supported. Analysis

In Social Work practice given that psychotherapy is a kind of treatment restricted mostly to verbal exchanges, practitioners do not have to be medically qualified. In most countries, however, psychotherapists must be trained, certified and licensed with a range of different licensing schemes and qualification requirements in place around the world. Psychotherapists may be psychologists, social workers, trained nurses, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, or professionals of other mental health disciplines. Social workers have special training in mental health assessment and treatment as well as linking patients to community and institutional resources.

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