Eyewitness to Therapy
I am a Gestalt psychologist and therapist. In this podcast, I conduct real-life therapy sessions with individuals who volunteer to experience a taste of Gestalt therapy. The purpose of Gestalt therapy is to transform your experience of living, helping you to clear up the situations and emotions you are currently dealing with.
Eyewitness to Therapy
"The Heart of Psychotherapy: Purpose, Process, and Outcomes"
Send me a text message to let me know how you feel about this episode.
Unlock the secrets to living a more joyful and fulfilling life through the transformative power of Gestalt therapy. Imagine being able to fully experience and accept your feelings without resistance, leading to profound self-awareness and personal growth. In this episode of Eyewitness to Therapy, we promise you'll gain invaluable insights into how starting with the simple phrase "I am aware" can uncover pressing issues in your consciousness and foster a safe space for self-expression and exploration.
Join us as we guide you through the therapeutic process that allows life to unfold naturally and vibrantly. Hear real-life examples from our guests' journeys, illustrating how therapy can help overcome personal barriers and lead to true transformation. We emphasize the importance of experiencing feelings in their entirety, rather than resisting them, to alleviate pain and enhance life's richness. If you're curious about sharing your own experiences or participating in an interview, reach out to us at cortcurtis@yahoo.com. Embark on this insightful journey of self-discovery and transformation with us on Eyewitness to Therapy.
Hello and welcome to the Eyewitness to Therapy, the one-of-a-kind podcast that focuses on a real-life therapy situation. I'm your host, court Curtis, psychologist and therapist, passionate about bringing you into an immersive experience of self-awareness through therapy. In each episode, we dive deep into the struggles our guests face and guide them on a journey of self-discovery and resolution. As your dedicated therapist, my purpose is to create a safe space where you can openly share and address your issues. We'll explore the power of the present moment in resolving your concerns, knowing that the past is completely over and the future is never yet. The past is completely over and the future is never yet. The key to healing lies in awareness, in being witness to your consciousness, and that's precisely what we'll uncover together in every episode of Eyewitness to Therapy. So join us as we navigate the transformative power of therapy and self-awareness. Welcome to Eyewitness to Therapy. The purpose of today's podcast is to explore the purpose, process and intended outcomes of psychotherapy. So what is the essence of the therapeutic experience? Therapy is nothing more than a conversation, a distinct kind of conversation between two individuals the therapist and the client. Unlike casual conversations between friends or family, therapy creates a unique space into which the client can enter and express whatever is most pressing in their consciousness. The therapist doesn't set the agenda for therapy. The client does, and the place where we start is where the client is or what the client brings forth in the therapeutic conversation. That is why we start with awareness. I ask the client to begin a series of sentences that begin with the words I am aware and then fill in the blank a number of times with whatever they are aware of as they reflect on their life, their situation, their thoughts and feelings. Sometimes we start with just one word or series of one words or short phrases that simply name something in relationship to these areas. Often, whatever they acknowledge in awareness becomes the subject of our conversation. But I also ask if they have an intention for our meeting or something they would like to focus on or address in our conversation. We go in whatever direction they desire our conversation to go, and thus our conversation begins with awareness. Whatever the client brings forth is worthy of exploration, and usually the exploration is of their feelings.
Speaker 1:Gestalt therapy is experiential. As a therapist, I am always interested in what the client is experiencing in the here and now. How do you feel about that or what is that like for you Are common questions that serve to get underneath the content of the conversation. In Gestalt therapy, we focus much more on the process of communication than we do on the content. That is not to say that we don't address background issues or past events, but experience is always the predominant focus and is always here and now. One of the underlying assumptions of gestalt is that the way out of unpleasant feelings is through them, to experience one's experience in its totality.
Speaker 1:Clients often pathologize their feelings and thus end up avoiding their feelings. It's not okay to feel sad or bad or afraid or anxious. There's something wrong with these feelings that we must avoid at all costs, and thus we end up pathologizing the feelings and then wanting to change or fix the feelings, and all of that represents our resistance to feelings. And by resisting the feelings we get stuck with the feelings. If therapy could be boiled down to the essence, it would be this Therapy is about unconcealing, revealing and experiencing your feelings, and what it means to experience your feelings is full acceptance of the feelings in the here and now.
Speaker 1:The therapeutic relationship is fundamentally described as a helping relationship aiming to support the client in experiencing a better life, a happy life, a joyful life, a loving life. Obviously, the client experiences a certain inner pain. That is why they seek the services of a therapist. They want help with their pain, they want relief, and somehow they are not able to find this in themselves. The pain persists, but what is the nature of the pain? Is the pain the feelings themselves, or is the pain the resistance to the feelings themselves? Gestalt therapy recognizes that the pain is in the resistances. As you give up resistance, you are left with a raw feeling itself, whatever that feeling is, and you get to experience that feeling. And in experiencing the feeling, the feeling dissipates and disappears. It dissolves, it digests on its own. So this brings us to the primary purpose of therapy, and it is this.
Speaker 1:The purpose of therapy is to transform your experience of living so that the situations and emotions that you've been trying to change or have been putting up with clear up just through awareness itself. To transform your experience is to experience your experience and out of experiencing your experience, situations and emotions clear up just in the process of life itself. You've been trying to change or avoid your feelings and it has never worked. You can only change your feelings by feeling your feelings, and sometimes with laser focus. That's the paradox of therapy, and it is a paradox of therapy that is at the heart of Gestalt.
Speaker 1:Change is already always happening anyway, maybe not in the direction you would wish or are afraid of, but you never know the direction of change. Where things go is completely unknown. And so out of this unknown, we make up what we want or what we expect will happen, our doom and gloom scenarios, and out of this fear, we try to control. We try to control ourselves or control others or control our situation. We dare not live our lives in the present because we dare not trust the unfolding of life. Therapy is learning to approach every situation of life with a sense of curiosity and adventure. Life is going to go where it goes, whether I resist it or force it, but I get to ride the wave in the direction it's going. If I'm resisting the flow of life, I am continually being battered by waves crashing in my face, and if I'm forcing it, I'm trying to make the river flow faster than it does. But the flow of life is not just outside of me, it is inside as well. The health of the organism is a function of flowing with one's internal experience. Therapy helps you experience your life in a new way, beyond the constant effort to change things.
Speaker 1:So what is the process of therapy? Therapy involves exploring and addressing feelings, which are here and now events. Feelings don't exist in the past. You have felt many feelings in the past and all of these past events are over. You felt what you felt and now you feel something else, in this present moment. However, you may still carry present feelings from these past events, and that is what is necessary to work on to get free of persistent emotions. Many clients have difficulty dealing with feelings like guilt, shame, fear, grief, unworthiness, uncertainty and feelings of inadequacy I'm afraid of or I'm not good enough, there's something wrong with me, I can't stop crying, and so on. These feelings often originate from past events, but they are still present experiences. They are present, unfinished feelings. Therapy helps clients become aware of their feelings, allowing them to acknowledge, accept and release these emotions. This process involves being present with one's feelings, exploring them and ultimately, letting them flow and go. It's about getting unstuck from past issues and persistent emotions, allowing life to flow more freely.
Speaker 1:What is the therapist's role? The therapist's primary function is to listen, and listen actively and accurately, providing unconditional, positive regard and asking focusing questions. Clients often generalize or distort their experiences, which serves to keep them stuck. Clients tend to live in the story of their lives, that is, in past memories, events and situations, instead of the here and now reality of their lives. That is why I continually bring them back to their present experience. If a client says I feel anxious, I don't ask why do you feel anxious? But how specifically do you feel anxious and how do you feel that anxious feeling right now? You can think of the therapist's role as being a mirror. And what is the function of a mirror? But to reflect. A mirror doesn't judge or direct what it's reflecting. It reflects the object in its pure state. And that is exactly what the therapist seeks to do to reflect the client in their pure state, to get a clear image of their experience and how the client is verbalizing their experience.
Speaker 1:However, there are places in the client's expression that are important to shine a light on when the timing is right to notice where the client is incomplete with their experience through avoiding or distorting their experience. The places where the client stops or interrupts himself or fails to distinguish between knowing something and believing something, living in generalizations versus the concrete reality of the here and now, or leave something out in the articulation of their experience. Taking something to be true but not knowing it's true. Living in the articulation of their experience, taking something to be true but not knowing it's true. Living in the past or the future, missing the now, claiming mind reading of what another thinks or feels. Assigns meanings to situations that don't mean anything. Assigns attributes to another that reflect their own unaware attributes. Assigns blame on external circumstances or past events for feeling what they're feeling. I feel this way because Tries to explain things versus experiencing things.
Speaker 1:Looks for causes of feelings, why something happened, saying what one thinks, leaving out what one feels. All of these are unconscious strategies to maintain the unwanted feelings. There is only one cause of the client's experience, and that is the client themselves. Each of us are the creators or perpetuators of our experience. Cause does not mean blame. To be at cause means to experience one's creative power. We are either at cause of our experience or we are the victim of our experience. If we maintain our victimhood, we are helpless to change anything. We are helpless to change anything the outcome of therapy.
Speaker 1:The outcome of therapy is the intended outcome expressed by the clients coming into therapy. For most people, their intended outcome is freedom from the symptoms or condition for which they are coming to see a therapist, but the freedom from their condition is more a byproduct of awareness, a byproduct of living in awareness, which is the ultimate goal of therapy. Living in awareness is living in the flow of life. All symptoms, such as anxiety or depression, are simply expressions of emotions that the client is not dealing with. Awareness is the antidote to these emotions. Awareness is the space in which these emotions can complete themselves. Living in awareness is living in the here and now, where all of life exists. It is knowing yourself as awareness itself and knowing yourself as awareness itself. The difficulties of life clear up just in the process of life itself. Living in awareness is learning to give up resistance to the life process and returning to the flow.
Speaker 1:The ultimate outcome of therapy is transformation, a shift in identity from simply being human to being itself. This means realizing that you are not just this human form living in time, but a being living in formlessness and timelessness. That's the ultimate goal of therapy to live in timelessness or awareness. And what does it mean? To live in awareness but to live in the here and now, which is where we live anyway. But we tend to miss the obviousness of the moment. Do we ever get there? Yes, we do. We're always there. We need but recognize the flow of the moment, always available here and now, and it's all on a nonverbal level.
Speaker 1:The purpose of therapy is to transform your experience of living, helping you to get out of your own way and allow life to unfold naturally. In therapy, we aim to create a space where you can explore and resolve the issues that prevent you from living a full, vibrant life. Join us on Eyewitness to Therapy as we delve into these therapeutic journeys and observe some of these ideas in action, one conversation at a time. Thank you for listening to this edition of Eyewitness to Therapy. Thank you for listening to this edition of Eyewitness to Therapy. If you, the listener, desire to be interviewed in a similar fashion as this one, feel free to contact me at courtcurtis at yahoocom. Peace, love and peace.
