Choosing Gestalt Therapy
People are often drawn to gestalt therapy to explore stress, dissatisfaction, relational patterns, or for support with life transitions. Often, they have explored problem-based treatment modalities and found them unsatisfying. They want to understand themselves and their circumstances better. They are drawn to a therapist who will journey with them.
Gestalt therapy is dynamic and deeply compassionate. It moves us away from ideas of personal shortcomings or disease and pathology towards curiosity, and compassion for how our experience makes sense.
What is involved
Gestalt therapy holds that all people strive toward growth and balance. The focus of therapy is on helping people to accept their feelings and experience. Change results from a deep acceptance of ‘what is’, and not from the distress and fragmentation that can be associated with quick fix solutions, or patronising and pathologising narratives that impose a change agenda.
Gestalt therapists are creative and respond to the immediate needs and contexts of the client. The therapist attends to the emergent relationship between client and therapist and the focus is on immediacy and the embodied here-and-now lived-experience of both client and therapist.
Choosing a gestalt therapist
Our ConnectGround Clinic offers low cost and long-term therapy with Gestalt Therapy Australia interns and volunteers. See more here.
Where to get started
Our ConnectGround Clinic offers low cost and long-term therapy with Gestalt Therapy Australia interns and volunteers.
There are many gestalt therapists working in Melbourne and country Victoria, many of them are graduates of our program. You can google “gestalt therapist Melbourne” or check the PACFA website.
Benefits
- Deeply respectful style of counselling that values your prior experience as a starting point for healing.
- Capacity for longer-term psychotherapy as a support relational healing.
- Develops your ‘here and now’ awareness and supports better relationships.
- Therapist and client work together in a process of sustained inquiry.
- Develops your capacity to respond flexibly and ‘choicefully’ to life.