Articles on Therapeutic Method

The Perils of Character Development

June 10, 2011

In Gestalt we’re often working with the Here and Now, with what’s arising in the present moment. But of course, what’s arising is often predicated upon our habitual patterns of coping, on our creative adaptations (as they’re termed in Gestalt). These adaptations we consider “creative” because it’s these that have enabled us to accommodate to [...]

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Download Our Paper

April 26, 2011

We’ve been busy this Easter and are pleased to report that our paper Working with Couple Interactions is now available for download as a PDF document. The paper describes a model we successfully use with couples to examine and improve the quality of their interactions. To get the paper, sign up for emails from the [...]

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Therapy as Alchemy

March 20, 2011

Psychotherapy and relationship counselling make use of a wide range of theory and practice that’s constantly evolving. In our own field of Gestalt, for example, current practice has developed from a somewhat individualistic perspective to one that is very relational. The true meeting of the therapist(s) with their client(s) (and how they co-create that meeting) [...]

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Understanding the Emotional Brain

January 20, 2011

Last year we attended the ANZAP seminar Understanding the Emotional Brain. This started with a stimulating talk by Lea Williams and Russell Meares followed by a lively discussion on the subject. Lea Williams presented some recent work by her and her group on, amongst other things, the brain’s response to fear and its bias towards negativity. Our [...]

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Sharing our Vulnerabilities

January 18, 2011

We don’t have to be Zen practitioners to hear truths from Zen – particularly when they come in the form of a lovely book like Nothing Special: Living Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck. Here’s a quote from this book that resonates with us and with the work we do with couples: I recently heard a [...]

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The Hendricks and the Essential Co-Commitments

December 9, 2010

In their impressive book Conscious Loving (see our Book Store), Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks list the core commitments for transforming co-dependent relationships. What’s a co-dependant relationship? Well, that’s a subject for a whole other post, but at the moment let’s just summarise it as being one in which the partners have made unconscious agreements – [...]

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Psychotherapy: Beyond Self Repair and Improvement

November 1, 2010

On the subject of psychotherapy and nonduality,  here’s a beautiful piece by John J. Prendergast that includes this summary on the possibilities as he sees them: It seems that more people are beginning to have intuitions of the insubstantiality of their conditioned self and of an underlying unity with the whole of life. Some of these people happen to be psychotherapists [...]

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Carl Rogers and The “Gloria” Films

October 25, 2010

There’s a whole complicated background to Everett Shostrom’s “Gloria” films of 1964, much of which we’re not au fait with. The three films, as we understand it, were the first time that then famous psychotherapists worked with a (same) real client, on film – these being Carl Rogers (human -centered), Fritz Perls (old-fashioned not-so-relational Gestalt) [...]

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