D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
March 2006
D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
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Gestalt Therapy: A Journey Toward Wholeness By Vicki Allen The trip home last night from Cleveland where my husband and I were doing more training in Gestalt was later than usual. Somehow I give greater significance to "after midnight" when I'm tired—and then there's the time zone difference to our detriment. I went to bed stirred with this article that I'd promised to Desert Exposure. On my mind was the ever-challenging task of communicating clearly and enough of the essence of Gestalt Therapy to at least inspire others to seek greater investigation on the subject. My sleep was deep and my dreams vivid. In my dream I was given an infant to care for, a newborn, with an unclear time limit to my job. I found myself reacting to my charge not unlike what I would imagine I'd feel in real life: great responsibility, impatience and restriction, mixed with smaller amounts of love and joy. As my job progressed in the dream, the child's presence taught me that my resistance to these "chores" of attention, care and effort were dissolved by surmounting joy and utter delight in being with the child. As I emerged from my dream state, I could see that Gestalt feels like that child, and my attempt to communicate about its role in my life is that growing joy. I found Gestalt in my early twenties along with my closer friends in a very isolated mountain community in Southern British Columbia in the late 1970s. Our idealistic and highly creative social experiment as a counterculture living there was about trying on new ways of being. This had been going on there increasingly since the late 1960s, probably beginning in part with the first migration of US draft dodgers of the Vietnam War to the area. As in other such pockets in North America, this was a time when values and traditions were being challenged, but in the remote privacy of the Slocan Valley it seemed like everything was up for grabs or at least consideration of reform. This ranged from the practical—such as changing what foods we had been raised with to eat very differently, how we grew and cooked that food—all the way to experimenting with the structures of marriage, family and friendships, which included how some of the children were being raised in a very collective and ever-changing experience of family and community. Of course, this community was not the first to delve into such realms and no doubt won't be the last, but as with other major social experiments not all aspects were successful—to say the least. Even with the best of intentions there had become a large trail of pain and confusion in the wake of all that experimentation. Enter Gestalt. Bethal Phaigh, a gray-haired 60-something-year-old woman who lived in this valley, began to offer her work as a Gestalt Therapist. She had been trained years earlier at Cowichan Lake on Vancouver Island by her teacher, Fritz Perls. She mostly did her work in the setting of a group of us, typically working with one individual or a couple at a time. It was in a large teepee on what later became known as "the Gestalt Land" that I watched so many people of all ages and backgrounds grow, change, heal and move out of their habitual ways of reacting to problems that were no longer helpful. The process of their work (and mine) with Bethal typically led to an empowered place I consider to be in the realm of self-actualization. Specifically, I noticed greater self-awareness, increased range of choice and self-expression skills that led to inner peace and emotional clarity. I had never witnessed or experienced anything like this in my life and I felt a reverence for this work that led to relative closure on so many open wounds from my past or what I learned to call "unfinished business." I had grown up with the assumption that old pain was unfortunate, unavoidable and untreatable. Bethal's work in Gestalt had transformational effects on my troubled community, especially over the next and last 10 years of her life. My own life was never the same again, either. Gestalt works with phenomenology, what is experienced, thought, felt, seen, heard, tasted, smelled. Phenomenology resides in the senses as reportable information. Fritz Perls was quoted as saying, "Lose your mind and come to your senses." Our minds are so overdeveloped in our culture that most of us are stretched to become aware of the other sensations that are going on in the rest of our body besides our comfortable and familiar world of ideas and thoughts. Gestalt is interested in discovering meaningful wholeness. One of the many ways Gestalt works to develop meaningful wholeness is through developing what is undeveloped. It works with what is (phenomenology) and what else is possible (the experiment). The experiment comes into the work when the person or couple, through their work with the therapist, have identified where they limit themselves. This could be limitations being expressed in the present moment of the session and/or could be something from their past or something feared in their future. The experiment is about trying on some new possible behavior, style or response in the moment. Since learning can't take place without adequate support, the experiment is always graded to a level that helps the client to take an appropriate amount of risk in order for them to make contact with something new in themselves—but not so radical that they feel overwhelmed with the task that they risk feeling violated. Erving and Miriam Polster, two of the best-known Gestalt Therapists, called this appropriately graded experiment "a safe emergency." We all have made and continue to make creative adjustments to move through
the world that we live in. Gestalt offers tools to expand our repertoire
that affect not only how we experience ourselves but also how we experience
the world.
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