Gestalt Therapy and Behavior

 

Gestalt Therapy

 

Founders: Fritz and Laura Perls

 

Key figures: Miriam and Erving Polster

Key Concepts:

·        This is an experimental therapy stressing awareness and integration; it grew as a reaction against analytic therapy.  Gestalt Therapy integrates the functioning of body and mind.

·        Relational Gestalt Therapy – Stresses dialog and relationship between client and therapist.  The focus is more on process than on content.

·        Emotional-focused Therapy – related to Gestalt Therapy in that it blends the relational aspects of the person-centered approach with the active phenomenological awareness experiments of Gestalt Therapy.

Some Principles of Gestalt Therapy:

·        Holism – attending to the obvious, while paying attending to how the parts fit together, how the client makes contact with the environment and integration.

·        Field Theory – asserts that the organism must be seen in its environment, or in its contest, as part of the changing field.  Gestalt therapists pay attention to and explore what is occurring at the boundary between the person and the environment.

·        The Figure –Formation Process – describes how the individual organizes experience from movement to movement.  Gestalt therapy differentiates between a foreground (figure) and background (ground).

·        Organismic self-regulation – a process by which equilibrium is disturbed by the emergence of a need, sensation or an interest.

The Now:

·        Phenomenological inquiry- paying attention to what is occurring now.  Therapists ask questions about what and how but rarely why.

·        Unfinished Business – When figures emerge from the background but are not completed or resolved and can manifest in unexpected feelings such as resentment, rage, hatred, pain, anxiety, grief, guilt and abandonment.

Contact and Resistance to Contact:

·        Contact – necessary if change and growth is to occur.  Effective contact means interacting with nature and with other people without losing one’s sense of individuality.

·        Introjections – the tendency to uncritically accept others’ beliefs and standards without assimilating them to make them congruent with who we are.

·        Projections – we discover certain aspects of ourselves by assigning them to the environment.

·        Retroflection – consists of turning back onto ourselves what we would like to do to someone else or doing to ourselves what we would like someone else to do or for us.

·        Deflection – process of veering off or distraction, so that it is difficult to maintain a sustained sense of contact.

·        Confluence – involves blurring the differentiation between the self and the environment.

Therapeutic Process:

·        The 6 methodological components considered vital to Gestalt Therapy

o   Continuum of experience

o   The here and now

o   The paradoxical theory of change

o   The experiment

o   The authentic encounter

o   Process-oriented diagnosis

·        Clients are expected to do the following:

o   Move toward increased awareness of themselves

o   Gradually assume ownership of their experiences

o   Develop skills and acquired values that will allow them to satisfy their needs without violating the rights of others

o   Become more aware of all of their senses

o   Learn to accept responsibility for what they do, including accepting the consequences of their actions

o   Be able to ask for help and get help from others and be able to give to others

Therapeutic Techniques:

·        Exercises are ready-made techniques that are sometimes used to make something happen in a therapy session or to achieve a goal.

·        Experiments grow out of the interaction between client and therapist, and they emerge as the therapist gets to know the client in the here and now.

Interventions:

·        The internal dialogue exercise

·        Making the rounds

·        The rehearsal exercise

·        the exaggeration exercise

·        staying with the feeling

·        dream interpretation

 

Behavior Therapy

Key Figures: B.F. Skinner, Arnold Lazarus, and Albert Bandura

Key Concepts:

• Focus is on overt behavior, precision in specifying goals of treatment, development of specific treatment plans, and objective evaluation of therapy outcomes.
• Present behavior is given attentino.
• Therapy is based on the principles of learning theory.
• Normal behavior is learned through reinforcement and imitation.
• Abnormal behavior is the result of faulty learning.

Basic Philosophy:

• Behavior is the product of learning.
• We are the both the product and the producer of our environment..
• Traditional behavior therapy is based on classical and operant principles.
• Contemporary behavior is therapy has branched out in many directions.

Therapeutic Process:

• Goals occupy a place of central importance in behavior therapy.
• The general goals of behavior therapy are to increase personal choice and to create new conditions for learning.
• The client, with the help of the therapist, defines specific treatmet goals at the outset.
• Continual assessment throughout therapy determines the degree to which identified goals are being met.
• It is important to devise a way to measure progress toward goals based on empirical validation.
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Theraputic Techniques:

• Positive reinforcement
• Negative reinforcement
• Extinction
• Punishment
• Positive Punishment
• Negative punishment
• Progressive muscle relaxation
• Systematic Desensitization
• Exposure Therapies
• Eye movement desentization and reprocessing
• Social skills training
• Self-management programs and Self-directed behvior
• Mindfulness and Acceptance-based Therapy