Gestalt Therapy Verbatim 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.

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

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.

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.

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