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33 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
Philosophy |
Based on the premise that individuals must be understood in the context of their ongoing relationship with the environment. Designed to help people fully experience the present and gain awareness of what they are doing. Clients are assumed to have capacity to do their own seeing, feeling, sending and interpreting. Growth occurs through the I/Thou relationship which is the context for experiments. |
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Key Concepts |
Here and now, direct experiencing, awareness and bringing unfinished past business into the present. Basic principles of holism, field theory, figure-formation process, organismic self-regulation. Attention to the body and non-verbal cues. Resistance is challenged (introjection, projection, retroflection, confluence and deflection.) |
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Goals |
Attaining awareness and expanding choices. Initial goal is to expand awareness of what clients are experiencing in the present moment including knowing the environment and oneself, accepting oneself and being able to make contact. With awareness the client can reintegrate the denied aspects of the self. |
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Therapeutic Relationship |
Stressing the I/Thou relationship and the therapist as a person. Contemporary (relational) Gestalt stresses presence, authentic dialogue, gentleness, direct self-expression by the therapist and trust in the client's experiencing. Client is seen as expert on their own experiencing and the therapist lets client make own interpretations. Client does the identifying of unfinished business that is interfering with present experiencing by bring them to the present and re-experiencing them. |
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Techniques |
Therapist is a guide/catalyst and invites client to try experiments to increase awareness, freedom and self-direction rather than moving towards preset goals. Collaborative process of experiential learning. Reliving painful events, caring dialogues between conflicting aspects within, role playing, playing out all parts of dreams, empty chair technique. |
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Applications |
Not for severely disturbed individuals. Good for couples and families, elementary and secondary classrooms and clinical applications. |
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Awareness |
Process of attending to and observing ones own present-centered experience. |
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Blocks to Energy |
Paying attention to where energy is located, how it's used and how it can be blocked. |
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Confrontation |
Invitation for client to become aware of discrepancies between verbal and nonverbal expressions, feelings and actions, thoughts and feelings. |
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Contact |
Process of interacting with others and nature without losing ones sense of individuality. |
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Continuum of Awareness |
Staying with the moment-to-moment flow of experiencing leading to discovery of how individual is functioning in the world. |
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Deflection |
A way of avoiding contact and awareness by being vague and indirect. |
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Dichotomy |
Split by which a person experiences or sees opposing forces, a polarity |
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Dream Work |
Bringing dreams back to life as though they are happening presently. |
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Emotion-focused Therapy |
Practice of therapy informed by understanding the role of emotion in psychotherapeutic change |
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Empty-chair Technique |
Role playing where client plays conflicting parts in an imaginary dialogue between different sides of themselves. |
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Exercises |
Ready-made techniques that are sometimes used to make something happen in therapy or to achieve a goal. |
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Experiments |
Procedure aimed at encouraging spontaneity and inventiveness by bringing the possibilities for action into the therapy session. Designed to enhance here and now awareness. Activities as a way of testing new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. |
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Field |
A dynamic system of interrelationships. |
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Field Theory |
Paying attention to and exploring what is occurring at the boundary between the person and the environment. |
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Figure |
Aspects of experiencing that are most salient at any moment. |
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Figure-formation Process |
Describes how individual organizes the environment from moment to moment and how the emerging focus of attention is on what is figural. |
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Ground |
Aspects of awareness that tend to be out of awareness or in the background. |
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Holism |
Attending to client's thoughts, feeling, behaviors, body and dreams. |
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Impasse |
Stuck point in a situation in which individuals believe they are unable to support themselves and seek external support. |
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Introjection |
Uncritical acceptance of others' beliefs and standards without assimilating them into one's personality. |
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Organismic self-regulation |
Tendency to take actions and make contacts that will restore equilibrium or contribute to change. |
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Paradoxical theory of change |
Theoretical position that authentic change occurs more from being who we are than from trying to be who we are not. |
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Phenomenological Inquiry |
Through "what" and "how" questioning, clients assisted in noticing what is occurring in the present moment. |
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Projection |
Process by which we disown certain aspects of ourselves by ascribing them to the environment. |
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Relational Gestalt Therapy |
Supportive, kind and compassionate style emphasizing dialogue in the relationship (as opposed to confrontational style of Fritz Perls.) |
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Retroflection |
Act of turn back onto ourselves something we would like to do or have done to someone else. |
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Unfinished Business |
Unexpressed feelings dating back to childhood that now interfere with effective psychological functioning/clutters present-centered awareness. |