There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, „It is yet more difficult than you thought.“ This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Wendell Berry
I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
and you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.
Fritz Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, 1969Adult children are committed to halting the generational nature of family dysfunction for the greater good of the world.
Welcome to ACA pg. xiii, Big Red BookYou are not stuck. You’re just committed to a certain pattern of behaviour because it helped you in the past. Now it’s time to upgrade.
Emily MaroutianThe objective of Gestalt therapy is to enable the client to become more fully and creatively alive, to become free from obstacles, constraints, and unfinished business that often diminish satisfaction, fulfilment, and growth, and then to experiment with new ways of being in the „here and now“.
I am currently halfway through a 4-year training programme in Gestalt therapy. This month’s session touched my heart and provided both inspiration and food for thought. The topic chosen by Dr Allen Berger, who designs and leads the curriculum, was „self-alienation“.
In his brief introduction, Allen described how many of us learn, especially in early life, to supress a part (or parts) of our selves because it is unbearable or because our gut feeling tells us that our chances of getting the basics that every child need to survive and indeed thrive, would be improved if these parts were not there.
By way of example, let’s take my case, as the fifth of ten children. My experience, as a child, was that on voicing a need, a desire, or a wish, I commonly received the terse response: „Don’t be so selfish!“
In hindsight, it is clear that this was a likely reaction from parents who were, themselves, overwhelmed by the family situation they had created, especially when we consider that each of them had grown up in even larger families, also under the care of parents who — in light of the available evidence — were, in their own ways, overwhelmed.
In today’s language of the Twelve Step programme dedicated to helping us recover from growing up in chaos and dysfunction (ACA), they would be identified as „untreated Adult Children“.
Hindsight, however revealing, is of no benefit to the young child in the given situation. My reaction to these early experiences was to desist from articulating my needs, supressing them, deciding instead that I didn’t need anyone or anything from anyone. I was going to do just fine out on my own, thank you.
This was the advent of the alienation of my own awareness of my basic needs for support, nurturing, and community, the alienation of my vulnerability.
A general observation here is that a high proportion of people who have experienced trauma in their early years are characterised in later life by the stance of hyper-autonomy or hyper-independence.
They tend to be self-directed, driven, and often quite successful in achieving worldly goals. The price we pay, however, can be seen in our restlessness, irritability, and sense of discontentedness, and in the turmoil of our relationships.
A person living in the „I’ll do it all myself“ stance will have great difficulty in navigating the „give and take“ of everyday relationships, in the family, at work, and beyond. This turmoil also exists in our relationship with ourselves. The ultimate fruits of this stance include a sense of emptiness, futility, and extreme loneliness.
Allen Berger suggests a means of identifying the suppressed aspect which is causing the client difficulties. By keeping a look out for „what’s missing“ in the interaction of the session, we will be guided to the alienated part(s).
The alienated parts can be seen as holes in our functioning capability. They are generally located in our so-called blind spot. It is highly unlikely that we will ever discover them alone, without the compassionate, loving assistance of a friend, a partner, a coach, or a therapist. Until we do, we can never fully function, never reach the full potential of our being.
When engaged in a compassionate yet truthful manner by a therapist or coach, however, the client will often become angry, either openly so or in the more subtle passive-aggressive mode. The anger may be directed at the therapist, others in life, or, indeed, the client herself.
Anger, especially for men, tends to be a holding ground for all manner of unidentified, and therefore, alienated feelings. If we have not learned emotional literacy in our family of origin (I certainly didn’t), it is certain that we will remain illiterate into adulthood.
We will not be able to discern or articulate what we are feeling until we first return to and befriend our bodies — we’ve been living in our heads — and then do the inner work of recovering our alienated parts, those we jettisoned in the chaos and dysfunction of childhood.
Anger is not a good seedbed for empathy. It is the product of an ingrained reflex that is driven by our preference to switch from seeing „what is“ to delving into a concoction of familiar memories and long-held beliefs, beliefs of which we may not even be aware.
Though bathing in this concoction may itself be deeply unsettling, it is less challenging than seeing and feeling what is really going on right now. We prefer the devil we know to the devil we have not yet encountered and befriended…
The therapist or coach can be most helpful in this respect by operating in „Explore Mode“ (see the description of the PQ model elsewhere on this website) and paying attention to what is missing in the interactions.
This is what the American psychotherapist Walter Kempler — a long-time mentor of Allen Berger who contributed greatly to the development of Gestalt therapy — called the „working point“ of the engagement between therapist and client.
Walter Eugene Kempler was born on 9 September 1923, in New York City. He trained in psychotherapy and spent his entire working life as a clinical psychiatrist, writer, and educator — mostly in California. He died on 12 April 2007, at the age of 83.
Kempler worked with families to achieve a healthy balance of union and separateness, to arrive at a place of full engagement for all members. During the process, some members of the family may feel like they have no choice but to give something up. The process of grieving disappointments and losses is a key component of experiential (Gestalt) family therapy.
By working toward compromise, family members come to mutual agreements with which each can live. Agreement does not mean everyone gets to a place of complete satisfaction and fulfilment, but rather a place where family members are able to experience, accept, and cherish one another, even — or rather, especially — in their imperfection.
Experience is at the heart of experiential therapy, and Kempler believed that real change required the full engagement of all involved in the action of that experience. The therapist is not the source of change, only a tool engaged in the service of change.
Acting as a catalyst, not an engine, the therapist is there to guide and direct but should not push or force people into anything. The goal is to help each family member remain present and engaged, allowing every member of the family to understand his or her relationship to the union of the family (or relationship). The overarching principle is: „We give our clients as much support as they need and as little as possible.“
Instead of the usual live client/therapist engagement we had witnessed in previous training modules, the central element of this weekend’s training comprised a recording of a session between Walter Kempler and a married couple he had been supporting for some time. For many of us trainees, it was the first time we had seen Walter in action.
Allen Berger set the scene by stating that the relationship between the therapist and the clients was already well established, that Walter was perhaps more confrontational in this session than he would have been with new clients.
He certainly was very direct. The central problem, as expressed by the wife, was that she often felt powerless in the family dynamic. She placed the responsibility for this dilemma — in her view fairly and squarely — at the feet of her husband. Due to the way he behaved, it was his fault that she felt so powerless….
Walter was having none of it. He kept bringing his client back to the central issue, namely her pattern, for which she was not taking responsibility. As an observer, it was clear to me that until she did, nothing would change. The female client kept trying to dodge the issue, and her husband was inclined to quickly get enmeshed in her dynamic, saved, on several occasions, only by the intervention of the therapist.
Both husband and wife were caught up in a dance far older than their union. Until they both recognised this, they would continue to play the game of red herrings, which led to even further mutual alienation which they were piling on top of the self-alienation which had not yet been addressed.
At one point the wife , in a burst of exasperation whined: „It’s the way it’s done!“ Walter Kempler’s retort was swift and frank: „That’s the last hideout of a scoundrel!“ He was referring to her seeking sanctuary in the underdog/top dog dynamic.
Gestalt therapy focuses on process (what is actually happening) over content (what is being talked about). The emphasis is on what is being done, thought, and felt right now, rather than on what was, might be, could be, or should have been.
This distinction between direct experience versus indirect or secondary interpretation is cultivated in the process of therapy. The clients learn to become aware of the behaviour on their part which activates the willingness to risk a shift or change.
For this very reason, and the speed with which a shift can be accomplished, I deploy many of the elements of Gestalt Therapy in the Men’s Emotional Sobriety Retreats I currently facilitate at various locations throughout Europe.
In this recorded session we were provided insights into how the methodology of Gestalt can be exercised in a creative, dynamic fashion while respecting both the progress of the clients achieved to date and the remaining untapped potential for further growth.
The challenges and experiences of all involved resonated strongly with me, as did the unveiled collective challenges we face as a species today. This session gave me grounds for optimism.
I firmly believe that, working together with practical modalities such as Gestalt therapy, we can meet and transcend these challenges.
