What is Gestalt Therapy? – In this video, online therapist Emma Ruiz explains how the popular alternative to conventional psychoanalysis works.
Gestalt comes from the German, meaning ‘shape’ ‘form’ or ‘whole’.
Gestalt therapy is an experiential and humanistic approach to therapy developed in the 1940s. Emma says her practice is founded on three pillars:
✅ Problems in the & now
✅ Awareness of our wounds & how we feel
✅ Self-responsibility & the power to change
Emma Ruiz explains how in Gestalt therapy, the client has the key to his/her own answers. The therapy guides the client to get back in touch with themselves.
She says her clients mainly come complaining of relationship troubles, work-related stress, depression and anxiety.
She says doing therapy is a ‘gift to yourself’ and talks about the ‘beautiful results’ that the therapy can bring to your life.
Emma Ruiz calls herself a ‘seeker’ and an ‘eternal learner’ who was drawn to Gestalt therapy in her quest for personal & spiritual growth.
She says Gestalt therapy helped her see with ‘love and acceptance’ all of who she was. She is a trained Gestalt therapist living in Barcelona, but working online since the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this video, Emma also explains how group therapy can be a fantastic way to get back in touch with yourself.
Find out more about Emma Ruiz and Therapy Sweet Therapy here.
(0:30) MumAbroad – Tell us, what is Gestalt Therapy?
Emma Ruiz: “It’s a humanistic approach to therapy, where I believe that the mind has his or her own answers and basically I’m just here to help the person get in contact with themselves and find what’s best for them. It’s based on three pillars. One is the here and the now, which means when a client comes to therapy we work with the most important issue that person brings to the practice. We work on what’s important now, as everything now is linked to the past anyway. The second pillar is awareness, so raising awareness to how we feel, what we’re doing, and what I call the awareness behind the awareness – realizing what’s really behind, at the bottom, where’s the wound. We react to things in the way that we’ve been brought up by our experiences and also if it’s something that hurts us it comes from our wounds. Ee have these wounds that originate mainly in childhood that we’re not even aware they are there.”
“And then third leg of the gestalt is self responsibility, which is learning to see what is mine and belongs to me that I’m responsible for – not guilty – and let’s look at what doesn’t belong to me and belongs to the other person. I’m not there to control it. Deep down, we’re only responsible for ourselves as individuals.”
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