12/26/2017
I think this is all you need to know about what you’ll learn in my Training Program that begins January 5-7, 2018.
“I have deviated from the more harsh and confrontational, traditional style of Gestalt that was developed by Fritz Perls in the 1960s.…I’m out on a limb here, and open to criticism from the existential purists. I want to set a course that raises the bar high, modeling and insisting on ways of being with one another that are enriching and safe, while consciously stretching our self-imposed boundaries of restraint.”
My Style
The clinical roots of my style of psychotherapy derive from Gestalt psychology and practice. Gestalt therapy, in its truest form, is a lively and holistic, experiential approach to healing and personal growth. It emphasizes the development of awareness—emotional, physical, intellectual and spiritual—and the capacity to make healthy contact with one’s self, others, and the environment.
Expanding on the traditional experiential and creative approach of Gestalt, I have designed my own unique style of working. It is saturated with my bias that people heal in an environment of love, forgiveness and compassion. In this sense, I have deviated from the more harsh and confrontational, traditional style of Gestalt that was developed by Fritz Perls in the 1960s. Regardless of his personal and stylistic failings, the basic theory of Gestalt remains brilliant and efficacious, especially when it is heart and soul based.
So as they say, in taking the best and leaving the rest, my approach is experiential, and supports my belief that as people are damaged by experience, so are they healed by experience. To this end, all my clients participate physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually in their own healing process. Words are not enough. Imagery is not enough. Human support is not enough. After more than thirty-five years of working with people, I know that when I was offering insight, it was not enough. The organism of each client holds the secret to what it needs, and what is enough. People have to return to the source of the injuries to discover whatever it is that they needed back then; the missing piece. If they need the experience of bonding with a loving mother figure, they will need that all the days of their lives until they get it. The quality of their lives and all their relationships will be adversely affected until they do. This work is powerful, dynamic and almost always profound.
Because we are all unique in our life experiences, and therefore our emotional injuries, the response to a client’s need is always specific and individualized. There are a lot of quick fixes that suggest a “one size fits all” cure. Talk shows, radio interviews, and newspaper columns are filled with them. A new approach every week. Prefabricated formulas. No one approach can possibly fit multitudes of people.
To this end, when developing an exact moment of healing, I must be willing and able to risk being creative and innovative. I must listen carefully, and help my client access inner wisdom, so that I may accurately assess the burning need. I may need to supply a person with a loving mother, resurrect a deceased spouse, create a judge and jury or create a live choir. Whatever it takes—whatever is needed—I must design it.
With Compassion
Let’s talk about compassion. When the word compassion is broken down, com-passion, it means to have passion with, or to feel sympathy with another. When you receive compassion, it moves you out of isolation and into a state of interrelatedness, where you are embraced in the arms of understanding and empathy. Compassion opens you like a love letter; it gives you the safety to risk. Whether with groups or individuals, I work hard to model and establish an environment where people can trust they will be offered support, respect and love, and will be honored in their struggle to heal. Anything less is unacceptable.
In my last workshop at Esalen Institute, there was a woman who appeared hard and rigid and angry. She was in her late forties, blonde, petite, fit and attractively dressed. She was encased in such a hard outer shell that I noticed her disconnection from everyone in the room. She seemed immovable. When she got up to do her individual work, she spoke of the death of her 19-year-old only child, a son. He had died, along with three of his friends, in a car accident on an icy road, where the car had hydroplaned into a brick wall. He had been the driver.
She revealed that she didn’t want to live without Matthew; since that tragic day 5 years earlier, she felt dead inside. I could feel a softening of my own reserved response to her toughness, and my heart extending to her. As I looked around the room, I noticed others offering compassion with their tears. I imagined they felt, as I did, there is nothing more unbearable, more intolerable to the soul, than the death of your child.
The work I designed for her exact moment of healing included having her choose someone from the group she could trust, and hold as her son. She said to him all the things she needed to say, including the nearly impossible “Goodbye.” Simultaneously, to provide her with perpetual access to his presence and love, I asked her to place an image of her son’s eternal love into her heart. Realizing she had been totally isolated and had created a walking death for herself, she began to let the group come close to her, touch her, and offer heartfelt empathy and support. She showed us pictures of her son, and played his voice, saved from a telephone message, while 25 hearts around her broke. By the end of the workshop a smile had returned, the fluidity of her body motion was restored, and her connection with people was realigned. Upon leaving, she told me it was the first time in 5 years that she felt like she didn’t have to be dead because Matthew was dead. She was resurrected in the arms and spirit of human compassion.
In this instance, it seems easy to extend compassion, and I suppose it is for me. Where it really gets tricky is when a person in a workshop reveals that he or she has physically or emotionally harmed someone as an aggressor, has abandoned his or her children, or has been a sexual predator. If they are in my group via their own motivation to heal and change, they have every right to the same love and compassion as anyone else in the room.
One workshop had a number of participants who had been sexually abused, and so it was shocking and jarring to them when one man revealed he had sexually abused his sister. It was also confusing to many who had become close to him. He worked on his deep remorse, actively simulating a dialogue with his sister, in which he apologized with such gut-wrenching sincerity, that the truthfulness of his apology could not be in doubt. This was a sacred moment; unanticipated compassion poured forth from the group. One man, who had been violently, and sadistically, sexually abused as a child, was so moved that he could barely speak the words, “I didn’t think I could ever sit in the same room with a perpetrator, much less have empathy and forgiveness in my heart. Thank you—I needed to hear those words of apology so much.” Extraordinary transformational power resides in the heart of forgiveness. Mercy showers over the forgivers and the forgiven. In that moment, we all heal.
This insistence on loving compassion flies in the face of more traditional Gestalt models that leave space for whatever is to emerge, avoiding direct leadership from the therapist. They are more existential, less interactive, and have no expectations of high-level contact functioning. I don’t have the time or tolerance for less. I’m out on a limb here, and open to criticism from the existential purists. I want to set a course that raises the bar high, modeling and insisting on ways of being with one another that are enriching and safe, while consciously stretching our self-imposed boundaries of restraint.
When people work with me, they know they will be expected to rise to their highest selves and give what they can to others. I’ve been criticized for controlling the group therapy environment by being an active leader, with clear biases. To that I say, yes, that’s exactly what I want. I do use evocative music to set a tone. I do open every group by forming a circle with everyone holding hands. I do lead group exercises that build in and promote mutual support. I do interrupt and redirect destructive interactions in a group. I do lecture and teach about the power of love, gratitude and forgiveness. And within this structure, I still follow the organic unfolding of each person’s experience.
From "Tales of a Wounded Healer." Copyright © 2008 by Mariah Fenton Gladis.
We know that investing in you is key to sustainable success and satisfaction. That's why we are proud to announce our new Contemporary Gestalt Training Program, distinguished by its use of state-of-the-art Gestalt skills, which will begin with a student weekend workshop, Friday evening to Sunday aft...
