Gestalt Pastoral Care

Before introducing Gestalt Pastoral Care, the basic philosophy of Gestalt Therapy needs to be outlined. Gestalt Therapy, first formulated in 1947, is the creation of Dr. Fritz Pearls along with his wife, Lore Posner Pearls. Fritz Pearls was a humanist and believed that individuals could develop “here and now” awareness and act accordingly. Gestalt therapy moves away from talk therapy and is experiential in nature. Through “experiments”, the therapist encourages new awareness, reactions, and behaviors that enhances growth potential. Gestalt therapy assumes that each person has the power within themselves to make necessary changes and that all human beings are constantly pushing toward healing and wholeness.

Present moment awareness teaches us about our reactions to past experiences as we retell our stories. Talk therapy will focus on merely the telling about the story allowing only partial experience of the event. The Gestalt Therapist will focus on current moment reactions during the telling of the story. For instance, while telling a story about a particularly painful childhood event, your breathing becomes shallow and labored, your hands are held in fists, and your voice becomes tight and words become choked up in a tight throat. The Gestalt Therapist would ask you to become aware of your reactions to the telling of the story. You may then fully experience the holding of your breath as “holding back” past cast-off emotions as you tell the story, your fists may be allowed to share the anger related to the event as your voice becomes louder as your throat loosens and expresses the words necessary to fully experience the event in the “here and now”. As you re-experience the event in the “here and now” you become alive in the present to this past experience. Fritz Pearls believed that our bodies never lie and that means, Gestalt Therapy allows for present moment reactions to the truth that needs to be revealed. This newfound awareness helps to restore the person's integrity and purpose and results in the full integration of the self.

The Gestalt Therapist introduces “experiments” to facilitate this present moment awareness. The therapist may ask you to breath deeply when noticing the holding of your breath. As you breath deeply a sound may come out. The therapist may ask if you are willing to have the sound repeat itself and you repeat the sound. Through the sound, you realize that your throat is “loosening” and words flow. The therapist may then ask “Would you be willing to speak your words to the one you have held back speaking to?” Through “experiments” the full expression of yourself will escape making room for present moment awareness, leading to new insight and new behaviors. The Gestalt therapist merely assists you in cooperating with your natural push toward health and wholeness thus embracing a health model rather than a model of sickness and what is “wrong”.

Since Gestalt Therapy works from a health model, natural resistance is deeply respected. Resistance is learned in childhood as a coping skill to protect the fragile child within us. As adults, resistance helps to dam the flooding of overwhelming emotions, memories and experiences. A Gestalt Therapist honors resistance, while giving up responsibility for the process, allowing the person seeking help to control the process of their own healing.

Gestalt Pastoral Care incorporates Gestalt philosophy while allowing multidimensional growth; emotional, physical, and spiritual. Gestalt Pastoral Care incorporates a sense of holiness and reverence in the process of healing. According to Norberg, founder of Gestalt Pastoral Care, A Gestalt Pastoral Care minister uses skills that invite healing and a quality of presence and attention that is rooted in being rather than doing. The Gestalt Pastoral Care minister's work is rooted in loving attention to God's healing within us and in surrendering to God's desire to heal, knowing that God is already at work. Out of this contemplation comes direction and discernment about how to proceed. The Gestalt Pastoral Care minister seeks to discern what God is already doing, and assists in the opening to the grace that is already there, thus entering into a spiritual companioning relationship with the one coming for help.

In summary, the Gestalt Pastoral Care minister:

attempts to see where health is emerging and where it is blocked.
focuses not only on what is being said, but on body language and the accompanying body reactions.
coaches the individual to become aware of what is happening in the present.
devises “experiments” from the material presented to further the awareness and healing process.
supports resistance by pointing to its healthy origin of protection.
Incorporates the concepts founded by Fritz Pearls and enters into spiritual companioning and mutual discernment, direction, and discoveries to be made together, thus guarding against the emergence of personal agendas.
suggests, as appropriate, that the one coming for help invites God, or some personal symbol of God, into the process incorporating faith imagination and healing prayer with or without the laying on of hands.

To learn more about Gestalt Pastoral Care, you can read Tilda Norberg's book, Consenting to Grace, or the web at www.gestaltpastoralcare.com