Gestalt Therapy Quotes

Gestalt Prayer I do my thing and you do yours. 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, then it is beautiful. If not, it can't be helped.

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.

Man transcends himself only via his true nature, not through ambition and artificial goals.

We must, for instance, face the fact that we blandly commit what to the experimentalist is the most unpardonable of sins: we include the experimenter in the experiment!

Every individual, every plant, every animal has only one inborn goal—to actualize itself as it is.

Awareness is like the glow of a coal which comes from its own combustion... In awareness a process is taking place in the coal (the total organism).

But the self is precisely the integrator; it is the synthetic unity, as Kant said. It is the artist of life. It is only a small factor in the total organism/environment interaction, but it plays the crucial role of finding and making the meanings that we grow by.

Thomas Jefferson thought that the United States ought to have a revolution every generation so that democracy could periodically purge itself of contaminants. He meant political revolutions; we have watered down his advice and created a succession of “lifestyle” revolutions instead. Just at the point when a radical innovation or movement might begin to elicit significant discussion within our social order, it makes the cover of Time and receives testimonials from one or two Hollywood stars. Thus elevated into harmlessness, it is soon discarded, leaving little more than a vague, residual stain on our cultural fashions.

Things change as they are discovered.

Apart from detailed analysis and taking apart (destruction), there can be no close contact, excited discovery, and true love of any object (which, as we use the term, always includes persons).

Fear is excitement without the breath.

Fritz Perls, MD, the psychiatrist and founder of Gestalt therapy. He said, “Fear is excitement without the breath.” Here’s what this intriguing statement means: the very same mechanisms that produce excitement also produce fear, and any fear can be transformed into excitement by breathing fully with it. On the other hand, excitement turns into fear quickly if you hold your breath. When scared, most of us have a tendency to try to get rid of the feeling. We think we can get rid of it by denying or ignoring it, and we use holding our breath as a physical tool of denial.

To be aware is to be responsible. In Gestalt therapy, this word is used in two ways. First, we are responsible if we are aware of what is happening to us. To take responsibility means, in part, to embrace our existence as it occurs. The other and related meaning of responsibility is that we own up to our acts, impulses, and feelings. We identify with them, accepting all of what we do as ours. These are distinct and different meanings. We are responsible for things we clearly do - for being angry, or obstinate, or irresponsible; for breaking dishes and giving gifts. We are responsible as well for the injuries inflicted on us, and the presents we receive, for what is done to us. Here we are responsible for our part in the event - for the pain we feel and the taking of the gift. When it rains, we get wet. While we didn't make it rain, we are responsible for being wet. We are also responsible for our middle mode experiences, for the things we participate in and give ourselves to. We do not make ourselves love, or hate, but they are the feelings we have. We are responsible for having those feelings, not because we caused them to be, but because they are our existence at this moment.

Humanistic therapies (existential, Gestalt, and client-centered) help people make rational choices and realize their potential in life while showing care and concern for others.7 Behavior therapy assumes that many problems are due to learning and uses principles of Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning to change maladaptive behaviors.

My own odyssey of therapy, over my forty-five-year career, is as follows: a 750-hour, five-time-a-week orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis in my psychiatric residency (with a training analyst in the conservative Baltimore Washington School), a year’s analysis with Charles Rycroft (an analyst in the “middle school” of the British Psychoanalytic Institute), two years with Pat Baumgartner (a gestalt therapist), three years of psychotherapy with Rollo May (an interpersonally and existentially oriented analyst of the William Alanson White Institute), and numerous briefer stints with therapists from a variety of disciplines, including behavioral therapy, bioenergetics, Rolfing, marital-couples work, an ongoing ten-year (at this writing) leaderless support group of male therapists, and, in the 1960s, encounter groups of a whole rainbow of flavors, including a nude marathon group.

The word ‘emotion’ comes from the Latin e for exit and motio for movement. So emotion is a natural energy, a dynamic experience that needs to move through and out of the body. As children, however, we are often taught not to express our emotions; for example, we might have been told, ‘boys don’t cry’, or ‘don’t be a baby’. Or when we are angry we are taught that it’s not appropriate to express it: ‘Don’t you dare raise your voice to me!’ At some level most of us are taught that emotions are not OK. As healthy adults, we need to let go of the emotional patterns from the past that mess up our lives and no longer serve us. As Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, often said, ‘The only way out is through.’ It’s not easy, and the vast majority of people deny the symptoms or anaesthetise themselves through work, TV, food, alcohol or some kind of drug. By discharging negative emotions attached to past memories we become more able to respond spontaneously in any given moment, allowing us to be more present in our relationships and to the gifts of the world around us.

Experts touted confrontational "encounter," gestalt therapy, bioenergetics, "sensitivity training," meditation, massage, breathing, drugs, and even easy recreational sex. Any or all would bring out the inherent spirituality of the self, enlarge human potential, and light up the dawn of the New Age.12

Tightened jaws may be inappropriate in present therapeutic situations, but they either indicate that there is much that still needs to be expressed or that this mode of physical response has become habitual.

Self-deprecation is still self-worship,” she is telling Calvin. “It’s the flip side of the same coin. It’s still about self.” It’s our second week here and the staff has divided us into smaller groups to experience a Gestalt-like therapy they call chair work. Adam, Calvin, Troy and I—the troublemakers—have, to our relief, been placed under Lorraine’s care in a nearby building. And she’s in the midst of prepping us to undergo this intense form of trauma healing. “I suck at self-deprecation,” I whisper to Calvin. Lorraine overhears and says sternly, “Remember that humor is a wall. It’s a form of denial, just the same as repression, rationalization, globalization, and minimization.

I do my thing and you do yours. 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, then it is beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.

The past is past. And yet — in the now, in our being, we carry much of the past with us. But we carry much of the past with us only as far as we have unfinished situations. What happened in the past is either assimilated and has become a part of us, or we carry around an unfinished situation, an incomplete gestalt. Let me give you an example. The most famous of the unfinished situations is the fact that we have not forgiven our parents. As you know, parents are never right. They are either too large or too small, too smart or too dumb. If they are stern, they should be soft, and so on. But when do you find parents who are all right? You can always blame the parents if you want to play the blaming game, and make the parents responsible for all your problems. Until you are willing to let go of your parents, you continue to conceive of yourself as a child. But to get closure and let go of the parents and say, “I am a big girl now,” is a different story. This is part of therapy — to let go of parents, and especially to forgive one’s parents, which is the hardest thing for most people to do.

We could, as Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, would have suggested, deal with this in what he called “the here and now.” Perls believed that the dynamic set up in the session between the therapist and patient is the same dynamic the patient sets up between herself and the rest of world.

Learning is nothing but discovery that something is possible. To teach means to show a person that somethingis possible.

Contact is the lifeblood of growth, means for changing oneself, and one's experience of the world.

A basic gestalt principle is to accentuate that which exists rather than merely attempting to change it. Nothing can change until it is first accepted.

To say what one wants to say is a magnificent act of creation, easily overlooked because people talk so much.

Shakespeare refers to thoughts which "in their currents turn awry and lose the name of action." Perlsian poetry calls this "mind-fucking".