Healthcare Training Institute - Quality Education since 1979
Psychologist, Social Worker, Counselor, & MFT!!

Section 1
Track #1 - Introduction

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Welcome to the Home Study Course sponsored by the Healthcare Training Institute, homestudycredit.com.  This course is dealing with Gestalt therapy techniques.

Our primary intent for this home study course is to provide quality education to foster your professional growth.  The Institute has provided quality education since 1979.
 
Hi.  My name is James Brennen.   I will be the narrator of this CD set.  We appreciate that you have chosen us as a vehicle for you to earn your Continuing Education Credit.

The purpose of the course is to assist you in increasing your knowledge regarding how to treat patients, clients, etc. by using Gestalt therapy techniques that bring the client into the "now".  As each case study is given, if the concepts seem to be applicable to your situation, I encourage you to turn your CD player off and make a few notes regarding the application of the principle to your setting.  However, these notes are for your purposes only and are not to be sent to the Institute.  Also each track is very content dense.  So feel free to replay the track to review the content either for your own purposes, or if you feel appropriate play the track in an individual or group session for client education.  Also permission is granted to reproduce this CD.  We encourage you to duplicate and give copies of this CD to colleagues, clients, etc. as you deem appropriate. We feel the information on our CD's is valuable.  Thus, we have an interest in distributing CD's in as many ways as possible, to benefit the greatest number of people, who have a need and are receptive to this practical information.

The questions in your Answer Booklet are sequential and deal with the section of content that preceded it.  For this reason, to facilitate the answering of each question, you might read the question from the Answer Booklet prior to listening to that CD track.  By knowing what the question is ahead of time, you will then know the content to listen for that contains the answer.  So just a hint, after you write down the answer to a question in your Answer Booklet, read on to the next question in order to give you a “heads up” to listen for the content that contains the answer to the next question.

Merely write the correct letter on the corresponding blank line in your answer booklet. Each answer is only used once. Keep in mind there is nothing tricky or hard about these questions.  They are merely intended to verify the playing of this CD.

For the purpose of brevity, most generally, I will use the term “therapists” or “mental health professional.”  However, don’t let these terms deter you from applying the concepts to your situations.  When you hear the word “therapists,” if your job title is social worker, psychologist, marriage and family therapist, mental health counselor, professional counselor, resident director, program assistant, etc. merely substitute the appropriate term that is the most meaningful to you. In short, don’t let my use of the term “therapists” cognitively set you off track from hearing the content because your job title is school counselor, for example.  I will also use the term “client” for the purposes of brevity.  However, if you deal with patients, residents, students, consumers, etc., transpose “client” for the term that is the most meaningful to you in your work setting. 

On this CD set we will discuss such topics as: guidelines for Gestalt therapy, awareness and the now, techniques for enhancing client awareness, changing words, changing sentences, addressing nonverbal behaviors, identification and projection, fantasy, dialogues, helping the client presentize, responsibility, bipolarities, avoidance, and acceptance.

So  let’s get started

Just to make sure that we are all on the same page, I'd like to begin this CD set with a brief review of the approaches in Gestalt therapy.  As you know, Gestalt therapy focuses on enhancing a client's awareness of his or her "now."  This awareness is defined as "knowing what one is sensing, feeling, and thinking." Thus, the therapist focuses not on interpreting the client's behavior, but on the "what" and "how" of the client's present.  The basic assumption of Gestalt therapy is that through this focus on the client's "now", the client's most pressing need will emerge to be dealt with.  Throughout the rest of this course, we will discuss specific approaches and techniques the Gestalt therapist can use to help the client focus his or her attention on the "now."

On the rest of this track, we will review four guidelines for implementing Gestalt therapy with clients.  These four guidelines are timing in applying Gestalt approaches, gradations in approaches, in and out of counseling, and individual differences among clients.

#1.  Timing.  Clearly, the ideal time to implement Gestalt therapy approaches is early in the counseling relationship, when the client's expectations for the therapy and the therapeutic relationship are still being established.  When the therapeutic relationship is well established, and the client is used to a specific style of interaction, introducing Gestalt approaches at the wrong time can be damaging.  One of my supervisees, Allan, became very excited about Gestalt therapy, and was eager to implement the approaches he had learned with his clients.  During our weekly session, Allan stated, "I don’t know what went wrong.  I was in my session with Betty, and she was mentioning her new boyfriend, and I just got really in sync with the discrepancies between her verbal and nonverbal communications.  So, I brought them up, just like we learned how to do.  All of a sudden, she's hostile and defensive… she just shut down on me!"  Track 6 will outline four ways in which a therapist can respond to a client's nonverbal behavior using Gestalt therapy.

I stated to Allan, "Well, your perceptions of her behaviors certainly seem accurate.  But there seem to be two factors that contributed to Betty's being defensive.  First, you had never responded to her nonverbal behavior in a session before.  Second, you didn't introduce the approach you were using, so Betty did not know what to expect.  In the future, you might want to consider carefully introducing the ideas of Gestalt therapy, and starting by implementing only one or two approaches at a time.  Implementing complicated or multiple approaches early on might overload Betty."

The second guideline in implementing Gestalt therapy is gradations in approaches.  As you know, a client may not be able to respond immediately to a given approach.  Anne had several things she wanted to say to her son, Daniel, who had been killed in a motorcycle accident three years ago.  When I began seeing Anne, she could not even bring herself to say Daniel's name.  Clearly, beginning to work through her feelings in a dialogue fashion was out of the question.  For Anne, working on talking about Daniel was a positive gradation towards being able to talk about, and express, her feelings. 

In addition to timing and gradations, the third guideline I have found in applying Gestalt approaches is discussing behavior in and out of counseling.  I find that it is very important to discuss the difference between in-counseling behaviors and out-of-counseling behaviors with clients.  My client Kevin experienced a great deal of stress due to what he felt to be constant criticism from his family about his decision to go to art school.  As a learning experiment in the session, we role-played Kevin shouting "Shut up!" to each person who criticized him.  We then channeled this experiment into discussing appropriate and constructive assertive responses.  However, I am sure you can imagine the counterproductive nature if this exercise if Kevin were to misinterpret the activity, and began shouting "Shut up!" at his family every time they criticized him.  Do you have a client who needs to be reminded of the difference between appropriate behavior in and appropriate behavior out of counseling?

The fourth important guideline in applying Gestalt approaches is the concept of individual differences among clients.  As you know, a Gestalt approach that works amazingly well for one client may be unproductive with another.  In Gestalt therapy, I find one of the first considerations I make in gauging the appropriateness of a technique often time is my clients is age.  Do you agree?  While a young child might be highly responsive to imagining "being" another person to understand his or her feelings, the same young child might have difficulty accepting the responsibility for how he or she makes himself or herself feel happy, frustrated, or jealous.  As you have experienced, adult clients also differ in the degree of responsibility they can accept for their own feelings.

On this track, we have discussed four guidelines for implementing Gestalt therapy with clients.  These four guidelines are timing in applying Gestalt approaches, gradations in approaches, differentiating behavior in and out of counseling, and individual differences among clients.

On the next track we will discuss three important considerations in approaches for enhancing a client's present awareness.  These three considerations are, awareness helps in focusing on the "now", awareness of self, and awareness of surroundings. 

QUESTION 1
What are four guidelines for implementing Gestalt therapy with clients? To select and enter your answer go to Answer Booklet.