Gestalt Psychotherapy & Counselling, East Grinstead

In Gestalt psychotherapy & counselling the focus is on immediate experience, as a way of enhancing awareness. By developing our awareness of bodily experience, language, thought and behaviour, we discover more about our personal shape, pattern and potential for wholeness.

The intention of a Gestalt psychotherapist or counsellor is to support us to find ways to complete any ‘unfinished business’ currently interfering with our ability to live a full and inspired life. The goal is to integrate disparate parts of our experience, embrace the paradoxes of living a human life, increase our life force and develop our capacity for authentic and meaningful contact with ourselves and with others.

Rather than talking about and analysing experiences, the therapist invites the client into having direct experiences in the therapy room, through a variety of techniques. These can include drawing, writing, visualisations, role-play and dream work, or any other ‘experiment’ client or therapist might like to suggest. Clients are encouraged to describe their experiences of these ‘experiments’ and to draw out their own meaning through this process. (This is very different from the therapist interpreting the client’s experience, which is the approach in traditional psychoanalysis.)

Central to the Gestalt approach is the relationship between the client and therapist. Both are encouraged to engage in the moment-by-moment process of forming a working alliance with each other, bringing thoughts, feelings and experiences into the room for consideration, with a view to developing a genuine and authentic relationship.

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