Get ready to uncover the intricacies of Gestalt counseling theories with our special guest, Angela Nauss. Angela's unique perspective illuminates the Gestalt cycle of experience and its profound implications in today's therapeutic landscape.
We question boundaries in psychotherapy, scrutinizing controversial practices of old psychoanalysts like Freud, and examine the complex web of consent in therapist-client relationships. Our discussions are further amplified by Angela's expertise in trauma.
We focus on the therapeutic methodologies adopted by Perls and Bion, and the potential merits of a blended approach. Join us as we champion Gestalt's emphasis on authenticity and healthy expression of emotions. This episode promises to enlighten clinicians and psychology enthusiasts alike, with an in-depth understanding of Gestalt counseling theories.
More about Angela Nauss, LMFT
More about James Marrugo, LPC:
https://morningcoffeecounseling.com/
If there are questions you want answered or topics you want me to cover, send me an email at
James.Marrugo@MorningCoffeeCounseling.com
Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay
Get ready to uncover the intricacies of Gestalt counseling theories with our special guest, Angela Nauss. Angela's unique perspective illuminates the Gestalt cycle of experience and its profound implications in today's therapeutic landscape.
We question boundaries in psychotherapy, scrutinizing controversial practices of old psychoanalysts like Freud, and examine the complex web of consent in therapist-client relationships. Our discussions are further amplified by Angela's expertise in trauma.
We focus on the therapeutic methodologies adopted by Perls and Bion, and the potential merits of a blended approach. Join us as we champion Gestalt's emphasis on authenticity and healthy expression of emotions. This episode promises to enlighten clinicians and psychology enthusiasts alike, with an in-depth understanding of Gestalt counseling theories.
More about Angela Nauss, LMFT
More about James Marrugo, LPC:
https://morningcoffeecounseling.com/
If there are questions you want answered or topics you want me to cover, send me an email at
James.Marrugo@MorningCoffeeCounseling.com
Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mental Health, Without the Bullshit. For today's episode, I wanted to talk about one of my favorite counseling theories that I also teach my clients, which is my theory that I use, which is Gestalt. But before we get into the thick of things, I have a returned guest, Angela. Go ahead and introduce yourself.
Speaker 2:Hi, my name is Angela Noss. I'm dual license in California, in Colorado, and I specialize in trauma and PTSD.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thank you for that. So, angela, before we recorded this episode, I'd mentioned to you I wanted to do an episode talking about the Gestalt's cycle of experience, because it's something I teach my clients and you had proposed joining in and learning about Gestalt, which is super fascinating for me. I haven't met too many people in the clinical space. As a clinician who recently learned Gestalt it's more of, I talk about it with other professionals who practice it and use it and have been doing it for years. So you're coming in with very fresh eyes, very fresh questions, which is gonna be super exciting. You had mentioned you wanted to talk about Fritz Perls and who he is for a little bit, to get kind of just a background of Gestalt, counseling and psychotherapy. So take it away, teach us about Fritz.
Speaker 2:Of course. So just a little background for listeners. James asked me to give Gestalt the chance and I successfully avoided it up until now. So I read two books about it and that's my effort towards giving it a fair shake.
Speaker 2:Fritz Perls was born in Berlin in 1893. He does three years on the Western Front in World War I. Then he comes back, he finishes studying medicine and he becomes a licensed doctor, typically psychotrain to be a psychoanalysis, a psychoanalyst. Back then it was two years. But he spends seven years in analysis after the war because he's suffering from what we would probably call today post-traumatic stress disorder or some kind of stress disorder.
Speaker 2:He is in the absolute zeitgeist of psychoanalysis, which is one of my interests, like old psychoanalysis. So he's in Berlin, vienna and Frankfurt in the 1920s and 1930s. He stays in Germany until 1933, when the National Socialist Party comes to power, he flees to South Africa and does World War II there. Later he comes to America and he joins the Esalen Institute and basically starts a cult about himself and this type of psychotherapy that he has meshed together out of different kinds of psychoanalysis from the 20s. So he did not invent Gestalt psychology, he did not invent most of the concepts he talks about, but he builds this huge following in the 60s and the 70s and people love him and all of that. Anyway, that's Fritz Perls.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. Thank you for that. So one of the things I love talking about when it comes to Gestalt and its perspective on counseling and helping clients is the Gestalt cycle of experience. What do you know about the Gestalt cycle of experience and what's your perspective clinically and how this impacts clients?
Speaker 2:This is pretty typical psychoanalysis stuff. So all of those hallmark psychoanalysts who come out of the 20s and 30s have some kind of version of this. Why don't you break it down for the listeners, since this isn't like a commonly talked about thing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so, as far as before you get into all of it. The reason why I love teaching this to my clients and my practice is from my perspective and the results I've seen from my clients. It builds a lot of self awareness, mindfulness, just kind of an objective. Look on the individual. When they look into the mirror they just see who they are and what they're doing and how their behavior is helping or hurting their mental health journey. So there's various stages and stages have been added since Fritz Perl started using the Gestalt cycle of experience.
Speaker 1:Modern Gestaltists like myself typically use the most recent version of the cycle of experience and I do this because I feel the additions that Fritz Perl started with and everything that has transformed to I think it best fits our modern day culture. So I would consider myself a modern Gestaltist leaning on a pure side, pure meaning. I don't really blend in any other types of theories to my work. There are some complete purists who will only use Gestalt and nothing else, which is totally fine. It's just personal preference and clientele. So for people who are trying to understand different versions of Gestalt, mine is the more modern outlook. So the Gestalt cycle of experience and how I approach with my clients. It's an organic and natural thing we all do and experience. It's focused on getting our needs met and how we interact with our environment and what that does to our emotions, but also whether or not our needs are fulfilled. So I approach it like that with my clients If there are needs that are unfulfilled in your life, there's probably a cycle for that need and it's not being addressed. So then inherently it's not fulfilled, your cycle is not complete and you feel stuck and perpetually unhappy in some way angry, sad, anxious, accommodation thereof or just general lack of satisfaction.
Speaker 1:In the various stages each one has a label, terminology I tend to explain, because some of it just doesn't automatically make sense. So, to begin, I tell clients you know, when a need first arises, there is a sensation to it. It's just beneath your conscious mind, you don't know that it's there, but it starts to bubble up, kind of like when water. You're trying to boil water and it's starting to bubble, but you don't really need to sit and watch the pasta because it's not completely boiling yet. That's where sensation is, and the way you can interrupt your cycle at this stage is by numbing yourself. Gestalt calls it desensitization. I say it's numbing because it makes more sense to my clients, and numbing the example I use is substance use.
Speaker 1:When we have people who habitually numb themselves out their sensations, they don't always understand what their needs are because they don't let themselves feel anything Emotionally, sometimes physically, a combination they're of. If a person does not numb themselves, they move on to awareness, and this is where you're consciously aware of a need that is currently unfulfilled. And the way to interrupt this awareness process is deflection. The way I term this to the clients is coping is actually a way of deflecting. A lot of therapists talk about clients need to cope and we have to teach coping skills, and this is true. There are healthy and effective ways of coping, but there's also destructive ways of coping. One would be chronic drug use. If you start using heroin as a way to deal with your life and its problems, but then that's the only thing you really do, you build up a tolerance to the heroin. You need more to get that same effect and then that repeated process causes addiction, which then causes other issues. So deflecting is a way of coping. As therapists, we see this in our clients in sessions all the time. For example, if a client is talking around their sadness or grief and I say to them I notice that you're having a sense of grief in you. They could deflect and then talk about something else entirely. They're coping with what I'm poking at. It's a deflection because they're taking their awareness and pushing it somewhere else. That's a deflection. If a person does not deflect, they automatically move into mobilization, which is a fancy gestalt way of saying thinking of a solution. So when you're problem-solving in your head and you're thinking, all right, I have a knee that's unfulfilled, I'm aware of it. I want to get this thing filled. What are my options? The second you hit what are your options? You're mobilizing, you're trying to solve a problem, to take action.
Speaker 1:The way you interrupt mobilization or thinking of a solution, gestalt calls it an introjection. That's a fancy way of saying of judgment. It's when we judge ourselves for what we do, what we need, what we want, or when we take on judgment from someone else and use their judgment to make our own decisions as humans. We teach little humans how to do this. The kid will try to solve his own problem and the parents or the adults in the room will introject and say do it this way. This is how it's done correctly, that is, passing upon judgment, thus for teaching that individual to then judge themselves.
Speaker 1:If this gets out of hand and that person becomes an adult, they often struggle getting past mobilization problem-solving because they judge themselves for the things that they want to do or need to do or the needs that they have. They introject or they don't trust themselves and use other people's judgment as a way to solve their own problems. If a person decides on what they want to do to solve the problem, they come into the action phase and that is a person actively engaging and solving the problem. You're not thinking about it. You've made a decision and now you're trying to physically follow through with whatever it is you're trying to solve, whatever need you're trying to address.
Speaker 1:The way to interrupt this phase is a thing called projection. It is termed in Gestalt as denying something about ourselves and attributing it to another person. I see this with playing my clients when they have a person in their lives who has a habit of interrupting them, when they talk in an inappropriate manner, just talking over them, or they start yelling or they're just not even listening to the first place to interrupt them, and my client will say hold on, let me speak, you just interrupted me and the first person will say no, you interrupted me. They're projecting. They are the one who interrupted first and when they get interrupted they deny that attribute about themselves and attach it to someone else.
Speaker 1:I first experienced projection in class when I was learning about Gestalt and its fundamentals. My professor had asked everyone in the room look around the room and find one object or person that resonates with you and describe it. What you like about it, what you wish this thing was that you had to. Interestingly enough, I chose two of my classmates who were sitting next to me and I described them as cool, bearded, intelligent and funny. I decided to admit this in front of everybody and raised my hand and say I'll admit my projection, cause I realized what was happening.
Speaker 1:I was denying attributes about myself and attaching them to other people. The hilarious part is these two guys who I was projecting on literally looked like me and I thought they were intelligent and funny and that's something people describe me as being intelligent and funny and I have a good beard. But I denied those attributes about myself and attached them to other people and, admitting this, I realized everybody projects. It's just a way of dealing with things. I was dealing with my insecurities at the time of who I am as a student and as an upcoming professional. I viewed myself as less than, and so I denied my own positive qualities and attributed to other people around me who literally look like me. Anyway, it was quite hilarious. I don't wanna get too far into the Gasol cycle experience without giving you, angela, time to speak about this Cause I know this can be a heavy topic. What thoughts or concerns or questions or statements you have so far? That came up as I was talking about the first half of the cycle.
Speaker 2:Sure. So, like I said, most psychoanalysts have some kind of version of this. I like comparing and contrasting Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt or whatever, with Wilfred Bion, who's a more established, like an establishment Kleinian figure. I resonate with Klein and so it's a framework that's hard for me to turn off now. It's like broken and broken the way I interpret things.
Speaker 2:Bion's version of the life cycle is something he develops and it's called the grid. He doesn't use it literally. It ends up becoming more of like a framework, but it's literally like an X and a Y axis, and the vertical axis is the development of thoughts. So the same thing Fritz Perls is talking about. How conscious is this thought? What is my awareness of it? You know, and Bion's system is extremely complicated for no reason. So it's called like beta elements, totally unconscious, alpha elements, a little bit more conscious.
Speaker 2:Eventually you're getting to the point of knowledge, because it's the point of therapy for everybody. And then the horizontal axis is the use to which these thoughts may be put, and Bion classifies these as hypothesis. So like maybe you're depressed notation, okay, maybe I'm depressed. Attention, you have my attention about this Inquiry. Am I depressed Action? What am I gonna do about it. What I like about Bion's model is he has an extra category for PSI, which is the analyst reassuring themselves they know what's going on when they don't actually know what's going on. Either way, I love this cycle of paying attention to something, and how ready are you to listen to this truth?
Speaker 2:I think a lot of times in therapy the core struggle is knowledge or away from knowledge. Bion literally starts to classify sex by sex sessions of therapy as K or minus K. Are we moving towards knowledge today or are we moving away from knowledge today? So I think the example you gave of yourself in class, that would be like a positive K session You're noticing. Yes, I do wanna recognize this about myself, but I can't. I think the negative K session would be where you come in and you project on those people and then you deny the analysis Like no, I have nothing in common with them. This is ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Such fascinating perspective. I love that because so far throughout my career I've only really focused on Gestalt and solution-focused brief therapy, but 90% of my time is spent in Gestalt, so other people's perspectives through their own theoretical lens has always been interesting to me because there's so many parallels. And that's something I've always appreciated about the Gestalt perspective is I've always felt Gestalt itself is kind of a mix of most other common modalities. There's a bit of psychoanalytic there, psycho dynamic, humanistic. There's a bit of existential there, and I've always it's always been explained to me that Gestalt as a perspective is holistic and systematic and not all of our theoretical approaches are. Whereas when I look at a client, I not only see that client but I'm also evaluating and engaging in their entire life, their religion, how politics and government impact them, the finances, the people in their lives, their jobs, and all of it impacts their psychology, their mental health, but also their Gestalt cycle of experience. Because they have various needs in different areas and in order for me to help them and educate them on things and point things out, I have to understand how they interact with their environment. Which is something really important to Gestalt is every person has hundreds of relationships at any one point in time Relationships with other people, but also relationships with inanimate objects. Which is really interesting in the Gestalt lens is anything outside of the individual automatically becomes their environment and they are interacting with their environment in various ways. But by slowing down, being mindful, building that awareness piece, we're able to examine these relationships and then choose how we respond.
Speaker 1:Gestalt has a lot of focus on not only being authentic, our authentic selves, but also focusing on how we choose to respond instead of just having reactions to things. And when clients are going through their Gestalt cycle and I point out, you have awareness but you deflect you are deflecting your awareness away from your environment and that's why you feel stuck there, because you're pushing away this awareness and without it you can't actively decide on how to respond. You're kind of just reacting to whatever's happening. And they appreciate that because one I handle it in a very forward and direct manner. You have awareness, you're deflecting, and I just put it out there like that and I explained to them briefly how that interrupts their cycle, what that does to these relationships around them, such as when I get a individual in habitual fights with their spouse and then they give their spouse the cold shoulder.
Speaker 1:I'm like you're deflecting. You need to engage with your wife in order to solve these marital problems, but if you keep deflecting awareness from these issues, what makes you think they're ever gonna go away on their own? Because not all problems do that is your relationship. You just ignore her and usually they're like oh yeah, I do, because I'm strung out and I don't know what else to do. I'm like you problem solve with this person, try that, and that's me trying to push that person to mobilize and, depending on what happens there, I point out that they're judging themselves or judging their spouse, or judging the situation of just finding acceptance for what is and working through that process, and that's why I like this thought.
Speaker 2:I love this and I do wanna talk more about the in the moment experiencing, and I definitely wanna talk about Phil Helmreich. However, we need to finish the stages, especially once we're about to get to like the really orgasmic metaphors here. So I can't talk about Phil Helmreich until we get to that.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I love that. I'm excited. So after a person reaches the action phase and they decide on a solution, they act it out, they come into final contact, which is them concluding their action. You can interrupt this by a term called retroflection. It's a fancy way of saying of putting up a wall. What I tell clients is, when you retroflect and you put up a wall between yourself and your environment, it does multiple things. One, nothing comes in, which is why you're doing it. It's a defensive mechanism. It's there to protect you, which is totally understandable. At the same time, nothing gets out. So if you're angry at someone and you put up a wall between yourself and this person, odds are your anger is gonna bounce off this metaphorical wall you've put up and it's gonna come right back towards you and you're just gonna be angry at yourself instead of at that person who's hurt you. So when we put up this wall, we disconnect ourselves from our environment and it causes isolation too, because if someone's trying to love on you and you've put up a wall, their love can't reach you, your love can't reach them and you feel alone. That's retroflection. If a person doesn't retroflect, they reach a point of satisfaction. That's the next stage.
Speaker 1:The way to interrupt this is called egotism, which is a fancier way of saying of being in your head. Oftentimes clients will tell me I went through all these stages, my plan worked out great. I'm not happy. And I ask them what are you thinking about? And then I get a litany of all these problems they're thinking about and I'm like, well, you're not in the moment, you're not enjoying you solving a problem, you're automatically thinking of the next one. You're not even there. It's like talking to someone and then mentally checking out and then asking them what'd you say? That's egotism. Instead of just quieting your mind and being in a moment and absorbing that moment in time with immediacy, you're just in your head on some other problem, some other planet. Basically, you could equally just watch yourself in this space and that's you being in your own head. If a person does not interrupt their own satisfaction, they reach a point of withdrawal which, in the Gestalt terms, is just neutral. You're not happy, you're not sad, you're basically a creature at peace, you're just relaxed.
Speaker 1:You can interrupt this with a term called confluence. I tell my clients when you know you have confluence, when you don't know where you end and something in your environment begins. When people Google confluence, they've told me it's when two streams meet and become a river. I'm like that's a really great perspective, because it's just you don't know which water came from which stream. It's all just one big thing.
Speaker 1:Now, confluence is an interruption because if we have our own needs as individuals and you see this a lot in family structures, where people are trying to get their needs met but they get confused if it's their own need or if they're being told this is their need or if it's someone else's need entirely that's confluence. You can't get your own needs met, so you don't know what they are, and it interrupts you being at peace because you might have completed a cycle, but if someone else's need supersedes your own, then you technically didn't complete that cycle and you keep thinking I have more stuff to do, which then pushes people back into egotism almost automatically. So confluence is where you don't know where you end and something else begins within your environment. Not getting through that, what happens after withdrawal? A lot of people ask me what do I do? Another need arises and you start this whole cycle all over again, which is why this cycle is. It's circular, because it's technically never ending, which sounds really bad, but we always have needs and they come and go.
Speaker 1:We'll have a need for food in the morning, we'll eat and then that need is over with. But you're gonna eat again in like three to four hours. That needs are gonna repeat. Other needs are one offs right. You might need a promotion. You get the promotion, you're good financially, so then that goes away. So there's always a need to be met, to be completed, to focused on when it's a very natural thing we do, which is why I like teaching it to clients. Angela, you would want it to talk about other things. Regarding the stalt counseling, what do you have for me?
Speaker 2:I like these stages. The context is kind of important here, I feel like. So traditional psychoanalytic training is very cold. You're not supposed to offer anything emotionally and people start to push back on this, especially after World War I. So like the guy I'm obsessed with of course, phil Helmreich and Ferenzy they start to say no, there has to be like a relational experience.
Speaker 2:Reich did the Italian front in World War I and he also goes through what's probably called some kind of post-traumatic stress. After that he does two years of counseling with pearls and he's the one who eventually he sees the most improvement with. And Reich's method. Let's see, phil Helmreich is like the Cardi B of early psychoanalysis. Like if you were gonna describe Cardi B to someone who didn't know her from reality television or had never seen her music video, your description might start with like oh boy, or like oof. And that's Phil Helmreich for me.
Speaker 2:So Reich is a Bolshevik and a communist and he starts what are basically women's health clinics where he counsels teens about sex, and his reason for doing this is out of the tradition of using the human body as a metaphor for oppression. So historically, analysts, especially during this time period, are unable to see any metaphors in their own work, but they can see metaphors in each other's work and people start to look at Freud and the oppressive father that he describes and they say this is capitalism and this is the Austro, the Austro-Hungarian empire that we live in, and these autocratic systems of rule that we're subjected to. And Freud hates this. He's like no metaphors ever. Reich uses these women's health clinics to teach kids about Bolshevism and communism, and wouldn't that be great if we did that here in Germany. Now it's 1920, so you can give him a little bit of a pass, but not too much of a pass for doing this. Like he doesn't know how bad things are in Russia right now because he hasn't been there, but he's read all of the thinkers so he knows how they feel, and I mean Freud even calls him out on this. He's like you wouldn't be allowed to do this in Russia.
Speaker 2:Anyway, reich's whole thing is people have armor and you have to get past that armor and you do this by forming a relationship with them, and Reich and Forenzie are united on this front that you have to process emotions in the moment, and that's not as valuable as offering an analysis to a person. If you can get a person to acknowledge in the example of the fight with their wife. I'm doing this, I'm deflecting with my wife because it's too painful for me to enter into a serious emotional connection with her. It's more valuable than you saying that to a client and I think it's the reason that Reich and Forenzie's work is so enduring. Reich becomes a really big advocate for physical movement and body posture stuff.
Speaker 2:Now if this sounds like Pat Ogden and Peter Levine, it's because nothing new has been written in psychology in a very long time. If it sounds like I have a tinfoil hat on, that's fine. But Reich is like okay, I see you hunching your shoulders. Are you hunching your shoulders because you're sad and you're a bully who's been beaten? Sensory motor psychotherapy does a lot of this. They'll be like oh, you're hunched over like this because you're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.
Speaker 2:I think, metaphorically looking at client behavior and being like you're tapping your toes. What's the significance to that is valuable. I don't think analyzing the weight of the world on your shoulders is clinically useful or even helpful. If you come from the same cultural background as me, I might be able to guess what that means for you, but if you're not a 30-year-old white woman from California, I can't guess and I'll probably get it wrong if I try. A lot of people from different cultures don't make eye contact. It doesn't mean they're shy or they hate me. It means they grew up in a culture where you don't make eye contact with strangers. That's just one example, but how do you feel about this?
Speaker 1:I completely agree. So Gestalt does have this notion and I was trained in doing this in kind of analyzing people's body language and behavior, and I do it only a little bit, but not as much as I was originally trained to do. For the same reason, I feel like I'm grasping for straws and pulling out hunches out of my ass. When someone slouched in front of me, I'm like I know you're slouching. It means something Gestalt promotes that emotions are energy that needs to come out physically, and so there's always a physical representation, intentionally or otherwise, of people's emotions. They're hunching to me, I know, at pinpoints and emotion they're probably feeling a sense of sadness or exhaustion. How much? Where is it coming from? I don't know. They might not acknowledge that either.
Speaker 1:I've had several clients watch their chest and I'm noticing when I talk about a certain topic they stop breathing and I'll call them out for it and say, every time I bring this up, you hold your breath, what's up? And I just leave it like that. I don't know. I don't make a reference to everything that they're doing physically because I don't know what's going inside their head, but I'm noticing a repetitive pattern of their behavior through their body language and physique. But that's as far as it goes for me. I don't go into a full analytics of you're slouching because you're a beat up bully who's kind of. I don't know if maybe you're the bully and that you're sad about it.
Speaker 2:Rike literally was like here are the organs that correspond to emotions and stuff, and I'm not into that. But I think it's also extremely important to note the historical context here. So there is a tradition in the 20s and 30s in Germany of ascribing oppression manifesting as physical symptoms. So one of the thinkers who writes about this is Gustav Landauer, and this sounds.
Speaker 2:I wanna read this quote because he says aspects of the environment have long become part of my very nature, my life, even my physical posture and facial expression. That it was like cramping up and almost perishing under overwhelming pressure, that I was short of breath and that my heart was pounding in my throat, and quote and I think that could be attributed literally to Fritz Perls, that could be Peter Levine, that could be Pat Ogden, any of these thinkers who use this metaphor of emotions manifesting in your body. Gustav is obviously talking metaphorically and he's talking about capitalism, he's not talking about psychology stuff. So I think it's important to note, number two, the metaphorical intention with which this is sometimes meant, not literally and number two, that this does come out of anti-capitalist writing 100%.
Speaker 1:yeah, the history of counseling theories has always been really interesting because there's a lot of overlap and a lot of these ideas, where they come from, aren't always psychological in nature, because when you look at these theories and the people whose attributed names are attached to it like Freud and Peter Levine, ogden the list goes on and on you kind of have to acknowledge that they were in the midst of a lot happening for themselves but also in the world, when they were coming up with these theories and how to help people with their mental health and diagnostic criteria and all these things. It's always been really interesting. The thing I find most fascinating with a lot of the more traditional theories that a lot of us use is how they're still quite applicable today, but with a lot of adjustments. One thing with a lot of these early pioneers regards to mental health and psychology was their perspective on physical contact and women at the time, which this does not how we function today.
Speaker 2:So this is a perfect segue, because so, as you may know, I didn't know this, but Gustav Landauer was one of the guys who inspires, like the Kabutz movement. And I'm not Jewish, excuse my awful pronunciation. But later in his life, after Freud, or sorry, fritz Perlz goes to America, he becomes paranoid about the second rise of fascism when Nixon gets elected and he moves to Canada and he decides to start a Gestalt Kabutz and it very predictably just turns into a cult where everyone has to call him big papa and it's just like a very sexual situation and Fritz has canceled for that. There are infinite examples of the old psychoanalysts sleeping with their analysis. Freud keeps asking them to stop and they don't stop. Walreich is doing this pioneering women's like liberation movement. He's also banging all of his analysis. It's awful, it's absolutely awful, and I think the traces of that have continued today.
Speaker 2:A lot of these somatic therapies are now connected to, like the psilocybin MDMA movement which, if you aren't aware, is plagued by sexual scandals. You can check my Twitter. I posted an article about it. But how can someone consent to something if they're under the influence? How can someone consent to doing something with a therapist? And so Fritz Perls would have sex with his clients. He admits that he would fondle them in session. Part of his work was you know, sit in my lap and I'll reparent you, let me hold you. Reich would do the same thing. You need a daddy, I'll be your daddy. Of course it becomes sexual.
Speaker 2:The old psychoanalysts believe that, in terms of projection, if I'm attracted to you as a client, you're doing that to me and that's your sexual transference, that I'm feeling, and it's not my fault. You can kind of you know, maybe read my language. I'm not into this. I think it's disgusting and messed up, but I'm not sure how we extricate this history of like sex therapy and sex positive therapy from you know, wholesome movements. Like you know, we should talk about sex, we should have sex therapy. Maybe we should even have, you know, psychedelic therapy. What do you think, james? How I wanna ask you about that. And then I wanna ask you one other thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's fascinating. When I was learning about Gestalt and some of the history behind it, that's where I was just like I'm glad that we started drawing lines and what is is not okay, regardless of the justification, because there is, in modern times, discussions in Gestalt textbooks about how to handle if a client is attracted to you, the counselor, or if you, the counselor, are attracted to your client, and what to do if it's mutual and this follows modern perspectives is you don't cross those lines, you don't cross those boundaries. It's completely okay to process and to talk about it, and you have to have a lot of caution though, because it's one thing if a client admits that they find me attractive in a romantic or sexual way. It's completely fucking different if I say that to a client, regardless of how they feel towards me. That's not the same thing.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, and I mean you know, the maps protocol, which is the protocol they use for psychedelics, has instructions on touching and how to touch your clients and how you should be. If they're processing something somatically, and this is in the very righty and sense, like if they have a feeling, a tenseness in their stomach when they talk about trauma, you should touch their stomach to help them process it. That's like literally 1930s therapy and in my mind I'm like who does this today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting. So from my perspective, from the Gestalt lens, in terms of physical touch between a client and a therapist, I don't ever reach out to my clients ever. They've offered me hugs I'm okay with those, on the end of sessions and like really emotionally charged sessions we're talking about like heavy trauma or something comes up right, they're quite emotional. Those are rare and I keep them rare. I also always establish boundaries, like I'm not going to reach out and never touch you. Handshakes are totally fine. The professional hugging if you're foreholding onto each other for more than like a second and a half, I'm not okay with that. Hugs need to have like a brief purpose, for a therapeutic only, and I never initiate, I never do. And I have had clients female clients tell me that they find me attractive and would wish I would flirt with them and I'm like that's fine, I'm happy you're vulnerable and telling me that that's I'm never going to do that.
Speaker 1:We can process that we can talk about it. Let's dig into why. One, you felt the need to tell me. In two, what is? What does this mean to for our relationship? In three, does this show up anywhere else? And we could use our relationship as a way for you to manage other relationships, and that's usually where it comes from is they just have their own history with male attraction. As a woman and me not flirting with them has totally different meanings. For them, it means that they're less than and they're unvalued, and I'm like me. Not flirting with you is because I see more than that in you. That's the truth.
Speaker 2:That's what I wanted to ask you about. So there are therapists who will say there is value in these enactments. So the enactment of I need a man to hold me, will you hold me, james? And their therapist will be like that's clinically relevant and you should care about that. I found this paper written by Wilhelm Reich.
Speaker 2:There was a moment in the well, there was a lot. There was a lot, a long moment in the 1920s and 1930s where it became very anti-Semitic in Germany. And so there's this like, all of the psychoanalysts have to leave the reaches of the German Empire and they eventually just concentrate in Berlin, which is too small a city for that many people with these big of egos. And so Wilhelm Reich and Freud are starting to split. And Reich writes this paper where he does this enactment with a client. The client starts screaming in session and he's acting out like his childhood rage. He needed mother to comfort him and she wasn't there. And he kicks his legs and he screams and Wilhelm Reich is like oh, this is like such a great breakthrough, isn't it? And then the client starts doing it every session and Reich is like all right, I don't think this is a breakthrough anymore. You know beyond what say this is now minus K. We need to move back into K. And so Reich starts acting out with him. He's like I'll be a child too. And the client sees he becomes an adult again and he sees how ridiculous he is and he's like all right, I'm done processing that. Thank you for being crazy with me.
Speaker 2:And a lot of the response to this paper is colored by the political times. So this is like at the peak of Reich's Bolshevism and half of the psychoanalytic community are socialists and Freud is mad at Reich. And so he taps one of the other psychoanalysts and he's like do you want to write a reply to this ridiculous paper that Reich has published? And the guy is a socialist and he's like I would love to drag a communist today. Let me do this. He basically just drags him until Reich is bald, he eviscerates him.
Speaker 2:And my question is because we still have these conversations today and the backbone of should we touch clients? Should we let them sit in our laps? Should we spoon them on the floor? All of this stuff I've heard that real people do is it therapeutically valid? Now, I think in the example that Reich gave, he accidentally made a case for no, it's not therapeutically valid. Like no change. At the end of the day, he did four sessions with these guys. He's back to start at the end. What do you think? Is there value in fully acting out?
Speaker 1:you know these, whatever the enactment is, For me, it depends on the context, right, because I've I've already established I don't cross physical boundaries with clients. With some of the female clients I've had, they've told me that one thing they want to work on for the sake of maintaining a relationship is like physical touch, physical boundaries, but also how to stay safe in public areas, right, and I'm like okay, so one of those I can help you with, because I'm not going to touch you. I'm not going to sit in the same side of the couch as you. We're not even going to sit in the same piece of furniture. What I can do, though, is help you establish where your boundaries are, and I will tell clients. I'm going to pretend like I'm going to go over there and touch you. I'm never going to touch you, you'll never feel me, but I want you to practice verbalizing when you're no longer comfortable, and I'm just going to push on that boundary and let you practice this over and over, but, as a reminder, I'm not going to touch you, regardless of how fast I come or how close I get. I'm not going to get within two inches of you. It's just for the sake of you practicing establishing your boundaries and vocalizing them. That way you can understand what types of people and who is or is not okay past these boundaries for the sake of your relationships. That to me totally clinically relevant.
Speaker 1:Without me ever having to touch people I have at one point a client of mine was never allowed to be a child as a kid and she had mentioned she never, like, really played with Barbies or had toys. She was always expected to be an adult, even at like age six. So clinically this person just never had a childhood. I brought in kids toys to a session. I brought in Barbies for her, which I know is gender norming, but I didn't know what types of kids, I didn't know what she would play with and I also brought like Power Rangers for myself and she didn't go through the experiment but it brought something up in her that she doesn't allow this childlike self of her that's goofy and fun and playful to exist as an adult.
Speaker 1:And again, I was able to establish these enactments without actually crossing any physical boundaries. My perspective you have to be extremely careful. I'm okay hugging clients, but I never initiate. They don't last more than like a second, second and a half. I'm literally counting in my head one Mississippi, two Mississippi. I let go. All right, we're done no more because I'm not crossing these boundaries to open doors to things that I don't think are clinically relevant.
Speaker 2:Even in the two examples you just gave of enactments, I feel like they were pretty brief and pretty benign, like I find almost I find very limited use in these enactments and I'm happy with both examples you gave.
Speaker 1:Yeah, most of the stuff I do with my clients in the good to consult fashion, I focus on the helping the client become self aware, mindfulness, and then being authentic and having acceptance for whoever they are, even if they don't like that piece of themselves. I encourage my clients. We can accept that you don't like this version of you, and accepting it means you could try to do something about it. If you don't like how you respond to your own anger, you can accept the fact that you don't respond very well. You do things that are regrettable, and then we can work on ways to manage these reactions. That way you can have a higher quality of life.
Speaker 1:My enactments in Gestalt terms I think they call them experiments, which is kind of just a really loose term. I don't do these frequently. It's very, very specific. They're brief. I don't go on with these things. It's for them to experience it in the moment, with immediacy. But I in Gestalt believes that you let clients process things on their own. I agree with that. When clients hit huge turning points, I'd rather not talk so much and preferably end the session if I can, and let them process that on their own without me interrupting their cycle, because my presence could be a reason for them not to engage in themselves, which is not the point of therapies. To engage in yourself and see what's going on, take care of it, change it or let it heal, have awareness of it. My experiments, my enactments are brief, to the point, extremely specific. Even if someone is coming to me with I struggle with some kind of physical boundary, I don't cross it. We'll find another way around that, but I'm not crossing that boundary.
Speaker 2:It's almost like we'll to use Clinian terms again the function of an enactment is to move a client from PS to D, or either the Clinians have this theory, this whatever of the paranoid, schizoid position, which is where everything is split, it's either good or bad. Everything is either good or bad. Then, in the depressive position, everything is good and bad. Just to simplify, people come in and they're like everything is bad and I hate my boss and I hate you and I hate myself. I can see where we are today. You have to constantly be moving from one to the other. Within a single session you'll get someone to move from PS to D. I guess my job isn't all bad. I make money to live or whatever.
Speaker 2:Beyond gives this his own name of container versus contained. Contained is the thing in the container and it's like you have big emotions and you don't know how to think about them. Then the container is like all right, we found a way to think about them where they can sit nicely on a shelf. I think the container contained concept almost is a one to one, with the idea of a gestalt, an unfinished gestalt becoming a finished gestalt. Can you speak a little bit? What is a gestalt in that sense, how do you have one that's not finished and how do you finish it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So an unfinished gestalt relates back to the gestalt cycle experience and basically, if a gestalt is unfinished, something there was never completed. Usually this comes up with individuals with past trauma that they'd never fully processed is a way to explain it. So there are gestalt cycle there. They're need to deal those emotions. They're need to process any unmet needs, a need to let themselves cry or need to talk about their trauma. Just at least let someone else acknowledge that they've been through some serious shit. If these things don't happen, if the cycle is not completed, it results in an unfinished gestalt.
Speaker 1:Unresolved stuff is literally what I tell clients. It is there's something from your past that just never got finished and we all have it. It's normal, it's unrealistic to finish everything we start in life, regardless if it's major or not, it's just a fact of life. So when this happens, there's a piece of this person that is has not moved. When there's an unfinished gestalt, an unresolved issue, such in a popular one, is trauma. If someone receives emotional trauma at the age of 10, and they're 30, a piece of them, from the gestalt perspective, is still 10 years old because that never got processed, that never got finished. So then a piece of them has these childlike responses because they never finished that gestalt and that creates this sense of stuckness there. And the goal with an unfinished gestalt is to finish it, to resolve it. And that's where gestalt doesn't really care for history or the past. Only when things are unfinished do we bother going back there. Everything's immediate and right now. So when someone is currently struggling with an unfinished piece of themselves, an unfinished gestalt, then we effectively just go there. We bring the past to the present.
Speaker 1:I've had clients engage in talking to their child selves during session using a technique called the empty chair technique, where they effectively talk to an empty chair in my office and they talk to whomever or whatever is is needs to be processed.
Speaker 1:And for one client in particular, she had plenty of childhood trauma and her child self was never loved, hugged, accepted, thought of and that resolved in just a lot of pain for her. That never got resolved and I had her engage in the empty chair to finish this gestalt and at the end of the empty chair technique she physically hugged herself in session. But who she was actually hugging was a child version of herself. At the end of that, at the end of her tears and her laughter and her passion and her anger. She told me she felt more whole, she felt like a piece of her was finally moving forward to be free to be loved and accepted, because she talked To that version of herself that was never addressed before. And that's the process of getting a Gestalt to be finished. It's a way of Taking something that's uncompleting it not completed, completing it and allowing that piece to move forward, and that allows the person to then focus on another cycle that is currently unfinished.
Speaker 2:Now I do like this about Gestalt and I think you know it's my beef with a lot of models where the the you know mechanism of change what is it called is either catharsis or deep breathing. I'm like that's not good enough for me. So one thing I like about Gestalt is the catharsis is like step two, step. One realize the unfinished Gestalt. You have the catharsis. God, I never got over this. What do you do with it now? And I think that's where the money is. That's my beef with a lot of the newest therapies as they stop at that catharsis.
Speaker 2:So a lot of the somatic models. Like you know, the AIP is included in this, which is, you know, the MDR thing, or the sensory motor ones I've talked about Pat Ogden or Peter Levine. They're like alright, you feel it. Now let's do body sensations around. You know that's what processing it looks like you don't have these body sensations anymore. I'm like that's not good enough for me. I need the cognitive piece. How am I gonna think about this? What's gonna be different about it when I think about it? How will I categorize this Traumatic incident so that it can sit neatly on my shelf? Because you'd be amazed how many clients I've had, where their traumatic Reconceptualization of the event is just I don't want to think about this anymore or it's not important to me. It's not like a like a big, you know profound thing, it's more of like it's just not important and I think the cathartic models really miss that opportunity to like change the way people think about it. Thoughts on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would agree, and Gestalt well focuses on lot on that authenticity piece, and having what they term in Gestalt language is an Emotional explosion or just an explosive reaction in which Gestalt.
Speaker 2:Every single metaphor is a sex metaphor. It's super it really is.
Speaker 1:That's I Tense to use modern terms for them, because I recognize it and learning it, and it's just a sign of the times when all this started and the perspective of the people involved at that time. But basically the goal with an emotional explosion is it's catharsis, is to let the emotion out and its most raw and truest form. And I had one client experiences that still stands out with me. He was using the empty chair and was angry at his ex-wife and I was encouraging him, talked to the empty chair as if she's there what would you say to her right now? And he started talking and I noticed you're, anytime we talk about her a lot of anger shows up, but I'm not hearing it right now like, let yourself get angry, it's totally okay. And he Repeats himself and I was like okay, what would she say? That would piss you off. Then he starts having this back-and-forth dialogue where he's literally talking out loud and Literally saying what she would say to him, and I'm pretty sure this was a conversation they actually had that he ended up memorizing and at some point he stands up and just starts screaming, just letting his anger out. He was cursing and pacing back and forth in the room and sweating and just letting all this out. And I was in the room, smiling Because he was reaching a point of just letting all of this pent up frustration out In a way that was, for him, very relieving.
Speaker 1:That explosive moment he stops yelling, sits down, looks at me and he's like I totally fucking forgot you were in here. And I think I really need to address my anger with her, because we share custody of a kid. She's gonna be here forever and this is really not healthy for me. I haven't felt my heart rate get this high in years. This can't be good to hold this in. We I'm gonna schedule for next week, but I'm done for today. Thank you, I'm leaving. And we were 30 minutes in and he was like I'm done, like I need to go process this, I'm tired, I don't feel good and I was like, yeah, go ahead, your session, your time. I'm not gonna hold you here if you don't want to be here.
Speaker 2:Oh, but I love this.
Speaker 1:Yes. He came back next week and Was like I've been thinking about this empty chair and I have a lot of shit to say to a lot of people, both things that make me sad and angry and I was like, yeah, man, do it Week. You could do the empty chair anytime you want, you don't always need me in the room for it. And he started exploring through this, all of his emotions. And this man had a lot of depth and he started seeing me in his Late 40s, told me he'd lived his entire life without actually exploring his emotions, and the rest of our time together for a year Was very deep into his psyche because he let out this emotion and acknowledged how much is in there. It was beautiful.
Speaker 2:I, I love this and I think you know the 1920s version of this is the, the book that Wright wrote, where he's like we are Sexually repressed so that we are more easily politically repressed, and I need someone to write the book about. You know, 2020s America, that is, we are emotionally repressed so that we can be more politically and socially repressed as well, because I think it really is like an epidemic, at least in this country, of do not feel emotions, do not acknowledge them, you know. And what purpose does it serve? Well, if you're not in touch with your emotions, you're not in touch with anger, and if you don't get angry about things, how will you know when you're being mistreated? Well, you won't. It's a Function, not a bug, you know.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, and that's the one thing I like about Gestalt is the focus on being true to your emotions and getting them out in ways that are healthy for the individual, but also authentic in how they come out, and that's that's something I really encourage with all of my clients Is just let yourself Exist and stop interrupting yourself. Let your emotions be there and acknowledge them. You don't have to like them. I don't like getting angry. I don't wake up and hope I get pissed, but I do know that it's. It's normal and natural, and Not letting myself feel angry is probably gonna cause more problems and it's gonna solve, so I'd rather just let myself Feel and be human.
Speaker 1:That's what I tell my clients. You're having a human moment and by done, by denying your own humanity, you're rejecting it. One was the last time you got rejected by another person and you were just fucking ecstatic. No, it feels shitty to be rejected, even if you don't like that person, because we're when we feel rejected it. We feel often it's an attack on our humanity and that's extremely sensitive to everyone because it's it's so core to us. So, and then we repress our own emotions. We're denying our ability to be human, which Problems.
Speaker 2:You know to put on my tinfoil hat. No, I don't think it's a coincidence that the biggest, most popular models of therapy All involved to some extent denying your emotions. I think EMDR is a great example of this. You know, you don't even have to talk about the trauma and you definitely never have to talk about emotions. And I think, to a sense, I've seen people do this with IFS, where they're like let's lock every emotional part of you in a box and Only talk about, you know, functional changes we can make that will get you back to work as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:Yep, yeah, that's not my approach. For me it's it's more of a traditional consult mentality of what are you feeling? How are you interrupting yourself? Where can I help this person build awareness of themselves so they can start addressing these issues? Start, you know, evaluating the relationships they have, not only within themselves, but all the relationships in their environment. A lot of the signs clients will eventually tell me.
Speaker 1:I keep people in my life that are honestly pieces of shit and I'm not sure how to handle these relationships. I'm like, well, what do you, what do you want to do? What do you need to do and how can I, how can I help? What's my process in this? Let's, if you have need and you're addressing it, let's fucking go. And their response is I just want these fuckers out of here. Like I have some really bad people in my life. They're toxic. I just want them out now. I'm like, well then, what's holding you back? If you know what you need and you know what you want, let yourself complete the cycle. Just stop talking to him or tell him you're done. Whichever works for you, what do I care?
Speaker 2:and usually they're Exactly it's, it's that's it, that's the Kassar catharsis, and then you spend the next eight sessions talking about okay, now how do I actually say that to them?
Speaker 1:Right and they? That does happen, it's you know, and that's why I tell them you. We can do them to chair. You can practice with me.
Speaker 1:They describe this person now pretends to be them, and you practice handling this relationship, and we'll gauge how you feel about your responses, because the only thing you can control is how you respond to your environment. You can't do anything about your environment. You can disengage from it, leave it, but you don't really have much impact or influence on it, just how you respond to it. So then, if you like how you respond, great. If you don't, well. This is why we're doing it To give you a safe space to then practice and then acknowledge how you respond, and that helps them formulate their plans, their processes, their needs and wants. By just exploring it, you know, with congruency, authenticity in the moment, which is what I love about Gestalt is whatever it is you're going to bring to the table. Let's pretend it's happening right now so we can gauge your response to it, because that's ultimately, the only thing you can control is how you respond. That's it.
Speaker 2:I know and I love the existential piece, I bring it in as much as possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you always have.
Speaker 2:You always have control over your own actions, thoughts and behaviors.
Speaker 1:Yes, that is something I often discuss with my clients and teach them on it, Even when they tell me well, I have these emotional reactions. I'm like you can't control what emotions you experience. You can't control how you respond to them. Just because you're angry Doesn't mean you have to yell at people. There's literally like a million fucking different ways you can choose to respond in any given moment. It's just a matter of slowing yourself down enough to examine what are your options and then choosing which one you feel is in your best interest at that time, and it's not really going to be the same one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can dialogue with automatic thoughts. You can have the thought I want to kill myself, and then how does that make you feel? How do you want to talk to it? You know?
Speaker 1:yeah.
Speaker 2:I've really want to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've done that in the Kassel perspective as well is is let them encourage them to say whatever's coming up in their mind. As it happens For me, this helps them practice acceptance and mindfulness and builds awareness of the self. And I will ask those those challenging questions what's what do you noticing about yourself as you say that? And that becomes the thing we process and through that experience they learn about themselves. But then have a chance to let it out, because that's the biggest issue from the Kassel perspective is that people are incongruent and full of shit most of the time.
Speaker 2:Most of the time I did, I ended up doing an unintentional I wouldn't call it a deep dive, I'd call it just a casual glance into the history of therapists, you know, touching their patients and like having sex with their patients Because it kind of proliferated, especially in the early 1920s.
Speaker 2:There were no rules, it was really just kind of wild west. So there are a couple of noteworthy people. There's this guy named George Grotic who does massage therapy on his clients, and to me this sounded like exactly, almost like the same language as the maps protocol, which is, you know, it literally advises you, maybe you just need to touch your clients to help them physically process what they're going through. And his whole thing was, you know, same, same deal. I just got to massage you to make you comfortable.
Speaker 2:I think it's just so bogus and so BS. You know, there's, like you pointed out, there's so many other. There are myriad ways you could accomplish this that don't involve touching people. Not to mention, you know the ethical implications. As we now know, and I think generally, except in this field, a patient cannot consent Just because of the power imbalance in this relationship. I wouldn't trust a patient's consent, even if they told me it's okay for you to touch me, I'd say I have no way of validating whether you're saying that because you think I'm in a position of power and you don't want to disappoint me, and I don't trust you to really like say that you honestly want me to do this and so I'm not going to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's always been an interesting thing in the Gestalt text. So in like the modern forms of Gestalt text, it's in alignment, right, you don't touch clients. There's boundaries there. Even if it's, even if it could be justified as clinical relevancy, you just don't do it regardless.
Speaker 2:Well, patricia Clarkson, the book that you sent me. She's like you can touch clients sometimes.
Speaker 1:Like I do. I did that and I'm just like. Under what context, though? Because for me, like I have my own personal boundaries with it and they're pretty. I think they're pretty strict from my perspective and that's intentional, and my clients are all aware of it. You know I've yet to have an issue. Hopefully I never do, but that's you know, eventually it'll probably become a thing that I need to seriously address with someone at some point.
Speaker 1:But Gestalt is some parts of it are, I would admit, strange, because in some Gestalt texts like it's it's if part of my job as a Gestalt therapist is to be authentic with how I interact with my clients and the feedback I have, it's not just clinical skills, it's also my opinions towards them are clinically relevant and from my perspective, I would agree I have given my clients feedback and my opinions on who they are as people, because we are in a humanistic relationship. Despite that, there is a very specific purpose for it. I'm not going to deny that I'm a person. In this session, I am more than a therapist and I tell all of my clients that now that doesn't mean every thought and opinion I have towards my client comes the fuck out of my mouth because I don't find them all relevant. Just sometimes I find them relevant, but that's something I'm kind of gauging on my own in my head, as it happens.
Speaker 2:Okay. So you brought up the one thing we haven't talked about, which was the role of the therapist in session, and you and I are opposites on this. So I'm much more with Wilfred Bion, who says that, you know, an analyst should have no memory, no desires, and you're much more of a Gestalt therapist, which is like the therapist needs to be in the room, which comes from like the forensic right Pearl's tradition. Just quick, brief background, because I do think it's relevant here. In World War I, both Pearl's and Bion go through what's probably like their index trauma. Bion has a moment where he's in a tank corps and he witnesses one of the people in his core get shot and he would rather get shot than be taken prisoner. And Wilfred watches this happen and he says later that he could understand that person's courage, but he could not feel the courage. He could not understand the thing himself or feel it, and so his therapeutic approach is because I cannot understand the thing itself, which he calls the oh, like the true meaning. My role is to sit here with you and watch it, and so soothing clients is anathema to him, as it is to me Like I would never touch you anyway, because I don't want you to be soothed. I think you need to feel. Whatever you are feeling, you know and for Bion I think it comes from this place of I can never understand what you're feeling anyway. So, what you know, what is my right to take that away from you?
Speaker 2:Pearl's index trauma is probably. He's a medic, with the engineers, which are the people that release the gas, and so his job is to, you know, treat people who come back from raids, because after you release the gas, you go into the other trench and you club everyone to death to save ammunition, and in one case they misjudge the wind and the gas blows back into the trench and he talks about how he only has four oxygen canisters for an entire trench worth of soldiers. And so he and Reich both come out of the war and they're like we need to do more. I will not sit here and watch people suffer and not say anything and not do anything.
Speaker 2:And a lot of Pearl's interventions are famous for being yelling and mean, and I think in his old age he does this kind of like as a satire of himself where he'll just say why are you doing this? Then stop. I, as you know, I'm on team. No, I'm not going to sue you. You need to feel the uncomfortable emotions because you've probably been avoiding them your whole life. Which team are you on?
Speaker 1:Um, a mix. So I think they're both valid. So for me I've done.
Speaker 1:I tend to not soothe my clients at the same time. I understand where Pearl's is coming from, that I need to do something at the same time. So I try not to soothe my clients, but I do allow my passion to come out and intervene in things that, from a Gestalt perspective, are just not self-serving. So if a client has a habit of beating themselves up, being unkind to themselves, lacking in self-compassion, I don't let that happen. I called them out on it but I don't try to stop the fact that they feel like shit for beating themselves up. But I will acknowledge and I'll make it a point to bring it up to their awareness. You do this Every time you do it. I'm just going to point it out that it's happening. But if you do it, it's going to let you do it. I'm just not going to pretend like this is not part of the reason why your mental health is in the pits. So that's my approach.
Speaker 1:It was a thing that kind of depended upon a blend, and part of the way my authenticity shows up is I selectively give my clients my opinion.
Speaker 1:Most recently I admitted to a client that one of the things that she does that aggravates the shit out of me is that she refuses to acknowledge anything good about herself. She always puts herself down, never gives herself enough credit and she works incredibly hard. She's actually very accomplished. For whatever reason, her brain doesn't acknowledge it right, and that's something we're working on, and she fears people getting agitated with her and I was like, look, sometimes you annoy the fuck out of me and I don't always bring it up because it's not always relevant, but if you're scared that people you being annoying to people is the reason why you'll be alone, let me tell you I could have fired you at any point in time or pushed you off or done something to get rid of you as a client. It's not like it's impossible. This is some of the things you do that fucking drive me nuts, because I care about you, I think you're an amazing person and you just will not acknowledge your accomplishments and I hate the fact that you beat yourself up.
Speaker 2:God, we're just opposites on this. I mean I love it, but, like you said, there's room for both approaches, like, do you say something you know I think soothing? And then also, how involved are you in the interaction is another question. I'm primarily, I do like being just reflections. You know, I use some projective identification, so the idea that, like, I can feel what you're feeling because I'm watching you feel it you know, of course, never the same emotion, but like, yeah, whatever, it makes me sad. When you talk about this sad thing, I wonder if you also feel sad as far as I would go, whereas for you you'd be like you're sad right now, you're really. Why don't you own that? Why are you just sitting there and trying to convince me this is not upsetting for you? Like God, I'm frustrated too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the costa perspective is that my emotions and who I am as a person is part of the therapy. So I'm not in a position to deny my own authenticity and in doing so I model authenticity for the people in the room with me For that, so that way they have an example, one example of their authentic selves and how that interacts with their environment, their relationships. So I'm encouraged to some extent, give my opinion, give feedback and let them self-disclosure would be the clinical skill and it's something that gets thought. It promotes it without ever saying the word, because back then I don't think self-disclosure is like a clinical term. But that's essentially what I'm doing is I'm just just closing what's going on behind my eyes.
Speaker 1:I do it very selectively. There is a lot of shit going on in my head. I don't bring up the clients because I don't see how it's relevant. And same with touching I never approached that. Anytime a client and I've had physical contact, it's been always non-sexual and I never initiate it and it doesn't last longer than like a couple of seconds. Even handshakes. When I first meet a client, I don't offer my hand. I literally do not. Most of them walking into the room with that ever shaking my hand. I don't give a shit. I don't know what that's gonna do to them, like I don't know why they're here. Perhaps me offering my hand would trigger them, and I don't want to. We're in the fucking waiting room.
Speaker 2:See the distinction that I, the disagreement that I have with you is I believe the feelings that I'm having in therapy are primarily not even my own. They're your feelings that I'm now sharing because I have to watch you and listen to you. Like you're sad and you're talking about your depression, I'm not feeling my own depression, I'm feeling yours, and this, you know this is being communicated through verbals and nonverbals. It's not magic, but the idea that, like you're talking about an abusive relationship and you're not acknowledging it's abusive and I'm becoming angry, it's not. I don't believe you know theoretic orientation. I don't believe it's my own anger being triggered. I believe it's your anger that you've disowned. You know, like an elephant sitting in the corner of the room, that now I'm feeling for you and so for me. It's not about, like, bringing my own personality into it, because there's no personality to be brought into it. There's only your things, which you are not owning, and I'm feeling. To bring into it would be the difference.
Speaker 1:And I would agree with you 100% right Like part of us being in the work that we do, the things that we feel are not always our things, that we're feeling from the Gisla perspective. If the client is struggling to feel their own feelings, it behooves me to let that out so that way they can confront it. I am the mirror, so then I just reflect back and if it's not my anger that I'm feeling but I'm still feeling it all the same, which, from the Gisla perspective, doesn't make it any less real or less true but if they're feeling it and cannot fully engage in it, then I should let my anger out. Let them experience their anger through me, because perhaps that's a safer way for them to engage in it and to learn how to engage in it is through this therapeutic experience, even though it's not mine and that's something I like about Gestalt is it requires and I think it's just I like it so much because of my natural personality you should just be more active. And even if it's not mine, just like well, then if it's your anger, I'll fucking give it to you, take it, do something with it, engage in it, stop ignoring it, because it's not gonna fucking go away.
Speaker 1:And if I'm reacting like this, gestalt believes that the therapeutic relationship is just one example of how this person interacts with all of their environment. So then, if I'm like this, there's probably people in your environment that feel the same way that don't say anything. I'm not gonna continue enabling this behavior. I'm just gonna fucking say something. And if you're not aware of this is how you come off. Now you fucking know, I've had several male clients be women in their life, have made remarks towards their sexualized behavior and I'll be like, yeah, if I was a woman, I'd feel like you're coming onto me or that you're kind of fucking misogynistic, and they're like what really? I'm like, yeah, bro, that's how you come off to people. I'm just one of the few who says anything.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:I think anger is such a and they appreciate that.
Speaker 2:Anger is another good example of this, where you'll get people who will come in and they'll be like no one knows when I'm angry and I'm like I'm sure everyone knows when you're angry. It's been obvious since day one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, this has been an absolute blast. I had so much fun doing this with you. I know we're running out of time and we didn't get to Sorry, I could talk about this forever.
Speaker 1:No, no, no this was an absolute blast. There's so much stuff we still couldn't get to. More than happy to have a follow-up to this, because this was great and I loved your perspective. I loved I still think your eyes on this, being as fresh as they are, was really impactful to the episode. Angela, thank you so much for showing up for this. This has been an absolute blast. Your input and insight into the Gestalt perspective was just fascinating to me and I know the listeners can get so much value out of this. If people want more of you, angela, where can we find you?
Speaker 2:You can find me at my website, nostherapycom, or on Twitter as ComTest to Saks.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I'll put all that information your contact info to the description of this episode below. Angela, once again, thank you. You're so much fun. If you ever want to talk about Gestalt therapy, ever again, open door on that. This was an absolute blast. So all the listeners, thank you. I'll catch you next time. Kangaroos, game, music, you.