Gestalt as a process of creative adjustment

December 20, 2018

MERRY CHRISTMAS
AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Sally Denham-Vaughan with Dominic Hosemans

At Relational Change we are committed to supporting research. In particular, we believe we need to promote research that underscores the importance of relational (specific contextual processes) as opposed to normative (stable across time, place and person) factors.

While out working with our Australian partner, Gestalt Therapy Australia, I had the pleasure of meeting face to face with our Researcher in Residence, Dr Dominic Hosemans. Dominic is the holder of the Relational Change/New Gestalt Voices bursary award for individuals we judge as making a significant contribution to the development of ground-breaking and important research demonstrating the efficacy of relational and gestalt approaches.

I was significantly impacted by my meeting with Dominic. We found we both shared a love for clinical work, an appreciation of research methodology, immersion in psychology, and a passion for gestalt approaches. In particular, we both identified with a sense that gestalt is a dynamic, bespoke, creative modality that resists the strictures of classic research methodology, designed to demonstrate replicability of outcomes across different time and person. At the heart of our emphasis on phenomenology is an insistence on spontaneous, emergent and creative processes that are deeply relational in terms of arising from those specific contexts and people.

In this newsletter, Dominic discusses his career, practice and work with Relational Change.

GESTALT AS A PROCESS OF CREATIVE ADJUSTMENT

I work as psychologist in private practice in Melbourne. I initially became interested in psychology after studying philosophy for five years at the University of Melbourne. Being influenced by existential and phenomenological writers, such as Camus, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, as well as the ideas of self-actualization by Maslow and Rogers, I became excited by the practical aspects of existential-phenomenological philosophy.

After completing an honors year in philosophy and social theory, I commenced the arduous task of becoming a psychologist!

In Australia, as in the UK and other countries, becoming a psychologist is not an easy process. First, one must complete a Bachelor of Psychology, followed by an honors year. Subsequent to these four years of theoretical training, in order to become a practising psychologist, one must also complete a two-year Masters in Psychology followed by a two-year registrar program that includes intensive supervision as well as professional development.

In addition to this, I took a further couple of years completing a Doctor of Philosophy in the area of counselling psychology. As you might guess from my career path, I believe that education is a life-long endeavor, and therefore will be commencing a Masters in Child Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy next year.

My doctoral thesis examined the phenomenological experience of equanimity according to long-term meditators. Equanimity is more of a Buddhist concept, and according to many Buddhist scholars, is the outcome of practising mindfulness. Equanimity is essentially an open and receptive attitude towards one’s phenomenological world.

The results of my thesis indicated that the experience of equanimity is very much interwoven with a right hemispheric predominance, and themes discussed by the long-term meditators included a sense of oneness, wholeness, a felt-sense of containment, and receptivity to the world. Each of these ideas was associated with right-hemispheric functioning, which sparked my interest in the idea that therapy, or gestalt therapy more specifically, aims towards cerebral hemispheric integration. I have recently written a paper on this, which will be published in the Gestalt Journal of Australia and New Zealand.

Prior to commencing training in gestalt psychotherapy, I completed a certificate in existential practice. Additionally, I've completed clinical training in play therapy, and as children comprise about 80% of my clients I use this as my main modality. During my academic training, I had also read a number of books on gestalt therapy and was applying such ideas within my work with children. The ideas and the space created by virtue of a gestalt theoretical lens, I experienced to be very well received by the vast majority of clients I saw, save those who were looking for the quick fix through finding that elusive strategy that would solve their human condition.

Something that I often think about in terms of the effectiveness of this approach is my work with an eight year old who had experienced quite severe neglect and abuse. This child was in the custody of the Human Services and was identified to have a very low intelligence and extreme mutism, potentially the outcome of substantial relational trauma.

I saw this young client for almost two years on a weekly basis. At the beginning, as you could imagine, the development of a therapeutic relationship was very difficult, with sometimes my presence being met with a scream ‘no’ that would reverberate through the building where I was working. Over time, and persistence in working with a gestalt lens, this particular client started to open up, sometimes stating at the end of the session, "five more minutes ...", to which I would reflect that it felt like there was not enough time today. In each of these sessions the client played and I followed, reflecting and validating what was happening in the play. Each of us met as whole persons on the same level. We did this together consistently for almost two years.

In one of our final sessions we were further discussing ending, which was met again with resistance and denial, but she had written on a piece of paper that she did not want to leave, “Because I love being here. I love seeing you". And on the paper, in very big letters, my young client had spelt out the word 'LOVE'. At this stage in the therapy the client was doing relatively well in class and really liked to talk to whoever would be around.

For my research with Relational Change and New Gestalt Voices, I am therefore developing and focusing my interest in the phenomenological process of relationality according to the client’s experience, and how meaning is derived from this. I essentially became interested in this topic following much reading of the gestalt literature, whereby the experience of relationality was predominately discussed within a theoretical lens, missing the human element.

To me, gestalt therapy is not just a therapeutic lens. Rather, it is a political response to the current climate of manualised psychological treatments for specific disorders. Gestalt argues, as opposed to a number of in-vogue modalities, that particular maladaptive ways of functioning in the world were developed as potential survival responses to a particular context. However, a change in context means that the response is no longer adaptive and therefore can now be considered a psychological disorder.

In line with these views of gestalt, I was interested in being a part of Relational Change due to the focus on the bottom-up level of psychological distress. Many current ideas within the psychological arena argue for a top-down process, where the individual is solely responsible for the distress that they experience. However, it is important to look at the context, or rather, the socio-political and cultural elements that essentially affect mental health.

In this way, gestalt therapy is a protest against seeing psychological distress and suffering solely as an individual’s problem to endure and resolve. Instead, the issue is viewed as arising from a multiplicity of factors including relationships with others and specific factors emerging from the whole situation, including lack of fit with the dominant normative culture. Thus, issues become not just the sole responsibility of the individual who presents with them but must be carried by the whole of society.

RELATIONAL
ORGANISATIONAL GESTALT

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