Psychotherapeutic work with voice and expression

From the perspective of Gestalt Therapy we pay attention to perceptions, emotional impacts and how we do with this, how we act. We intend that the person who comes to therapy is aware of how he/she influences and is influenced by his/her environment, becoming more aware of the way he/she does. We also look at how they experience what they do and what happens to them. The objective is, therefore, to discern what has to do with the past and what no longer makes sense today. In this way, we help the person to discover new and more useful ways of doing things, learning to adapt and adjust to each situation.

The objectives of Gestalt Therapy and, therefore, the objectives that we at Terapiados work on in the therapeutic process are:

• To help the patient in his problems, making him more aware of how he has reached the point where he is.
• To expand the field of possibilities, giving back to the patient the ability to choose which option he/she wants to take to face life.

Thanks to this, the person can know him/herself better and recover lost creativity.

Gestalt Therapy is a therapy belonging to Humanistic Psychology, which is characterized by not being made exclusively to treat diseases, but also to develop human potential.

It focuses on the experience that the person seeking help has in the present moment, in the way of relating to other people, as well as in the way of being in the world and the ability to self-regulate and make their own decisions.

It is a type of therapy that focuses more on processes than on contents. It emphasizes what is happening now, thinking in the present and feeling in the moment. In this sense, we speak of the here and now, not to leave aside the history of the person, but rather that this history is looked at from the present, how the past events are lived, how they affect, etc. today. The person is who he/she is, among others, because of what he/she has lived. It is about looking at the past to understand what our present is, and to resolve from now on the issues that prevent us from moving in the direction we want to go.

From the perspective of Gestalt Therapy, we pay attention to how we act, our perceptions, our emotional impacts and what we do with them. We want the person who comes to therapy to be aware of how he/she influences and is influenced by his/her environment and to become more conscious of the way he/she acts. We also look at how they experience what they do and what happens to them. One of the objectives is to discern what has to do with the past and what no longer makes sense today. In this way, learning to adapt and adjust to each situation, we facilitate the person to discover new and more useful ways of doing things and relating to others.

Gestalt Therapy is also heir to Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory, from which it extracts that the organism (in this case the person) is inseparable, indivisible from the environment, so it affects and is affected by it. Gestalt Therapy stops looking at the individual in isolation to consider him/her as another element of the situation, in such a way that the person creates and is created by the situation, he/she is an actor and an actuator of it.

From Gestalt Therapy there is no a priori criterion that indicates the number of sessions that are necessary since it depends on the reason for consultation and the amount of time we have been living with the situation that causes us discomfort.

In addition, there are other important factors such as what happens to the person between sessions and, above all, what in psychology is known as extratherapeutic factors. About 13% of the total variance in the outcome of people’s improvement is explained by the treatment (therapist, alliance, model or technique, loyalty and placebo effect), leaving 87% of the variance attributed to the client or to extratherapeutic factors.

The recommended initial frequency is once a week or every fifteen days. It must be taken into account that, as we advance in the therapeutic process, we will space out the sessions according to the needs of the process itself.

The price of online therapy is the same as face-to-face therapy because, as psychologists and Gestalt therapists, we use our usual forms of presence and diagnostic criteria regardless of the format. There is no need for a paradigm shift because we focus on the experience here and now.

As therapists we focus on being present in the therapeutic encounter, with our body, our sensitive capacity, our theory and knowledge in order to be able to approach the therapeutic encounter in the best possible way. Therefore, in online therapy nothing changes in this regard.

Within the large families of psychotherapy modalities are cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and humanistic therapies, among which is Gestalt Therapy, which we practice in Terapiados. CBT is the modality that is mostly taught in Spanish universities and practiced in “official” health care settings, such as hospitals and health care centers. It is, therefore, the modality that one encounters most frequently when “going to the psychologist”. Gestalt Therapy is widespread throughout the world and is recognized and supported by research, but it has traditionally been known more in private and “unofficial” settings.

There are many differences between the two approaches, both in substance and form. We can highlight that the CBT approach focuses on a symptom that the person has and tries to “extinguish” it. For example, if a person feels fear of something, the objective is to stop feeling it, and for this purpose techniques such as exposure are applied: to be in front of that which causes fear so that the fear is gradually reduced. If the person has anxiety, there is a lot of psychoeducational work so that the person learns breathing techniques, concentration, etc., that help him/her to reduce his/her anxiety when it rises. It is an approach that focuses a lot on the supposed problem and tries to train the person. The other aspects of the person are not taken into account as much.

In Gestalt Therapy we have a so-called “holistic” approach, which means that we do not focus only on the bothersome symptom, but also on the other aspects of the person’s life. If someone comes for consultation with an anxiety problem, our attention is not so much in the direction of “giving them tools”, that is, giving them anxiety control techniques, but in trying to understand what are the sources of anxiety of the person to try to do something with them: family, personal, work relationships, emotions, important events in the history of the person, their desires for the future, etc.. The approach is global, exploring why the symptom has appeared in the person’s life and what needs to be changed for the symptom to disappear, not just to “get it under control” as tends to happen in CBT.