Gestalt therapy has become a common form of psychotherapy to treat different presenting issues, including depression, low self-esteem, anxiety, substance misuse, stress, and relational difficulties.
As opposed to other forms of therapy, Gestalt therapy’s focus is present-centered, incorporating past experiences only insofar as these are relevant to the here-and-now experience of the client.
Due to Gestalt therapy’s relational approach, it is well suited to help with relational and/or attachment difficulties in relationships.
Let’s discuss a few different ways to find a Gestalt therapist near you.
Want to skip right to the suggestions for Gestalt therapists? Here are our 2 recommended therapy solutions:
Gestalt therapy platforms
BetterHelp is an online platform that provides access to licensed Gestalt therapists, while the GTIP Associates Directory is a website that can help you find a Gestalt therapist located near you.
Below, we’ve reviewed each of these options for finding a Gestalt therapist, to see which might be the best choice for your specific needs.
1. BetterHelp
Explore emotional well-being with BetterHelp – your partner in affordable online therapy. With 30,000+ licensed therapists and plans starting from only $65 per week, BetterHelp makes self-care accessible to all. Complete the questionnaire to match with the right therapist.
BetterHelp is an online platform that provides access to affordable gestalt therapy sessions anytime and anywhere – all you need is stable internet and a laptop, mobile, or tablet.
Before getting started on BetterHelp, you have to fill out a short questionnaire that will help the site match you with the right gestalt therapist. You can specify what you’re looking for in a therapist, such as their gender, and the fact that you’re looking for a gestalt therapist.
This information also helps your future therapist to learn more about the issues you want to overcome.
Once you answer all the questions, BetterHelp will help you match with the best available therapist for your specific needs. All the therapists available are accredited professionals with extensive experience in their field.
You can attend therapy sessions at a time that works for you, including outside of business hours, and you can contact your therapist via text messages, audio calls, video calls, or live chat. You’ll have one therapy session each week, typically over a video call, or over live chat if you’d prefer.
Moreover, you can change your therapist at any time in case you don’t feel completely satisfied with their service.
BetterHelp has financial aid options available for certain groups of people, including students and unemployed persons, which can make it an affordable platform for online therapy sessions. In addition, all the therapists who offer gestalt therapy on this platform are licensed and have thousands of hours of counseling experience, ensuring that they have the knowledge necessary to help you work through your issues.
2. GTIP Associates Directory
The Gestalt Training Institute of Philadelphia (GTIP) has an extensive directory of licensed Gestalt therapists, that you can search on their website.
This directory includes not just mental health professionals who have graduated from the GTIP, but also therapists from other gestalt therapy training institutes who have achieved the right qualifications.
The biography of each therapist in the directory includes detailed information about the service they provide, making it easy to evaluate different counselors.
In addition to their client focus, you can also find the working philosophy of each mental health professional. Each therapist will also provide a bit of information about who they specialize in helping, and the types of issues they focus on in gestalt therapy.
You can find their address and other contact details from the therapist’s provided information. Moreover, you can see whether they offer virtual assistance or not, in case you’re looking for online therapy.
This directory also provides the fee range of each therapist, allowing you to see what counseling sessions will cost. This means that you don’t have to reach out to each therapist to see what you’ll end up paying, which is a nice touch.
What is Gestalt therapy?
Gestalt therapy is a form of psychotherapy that is an effective treatment of different mental health conditions and their effects on the human body.
It is a talk therapy focused on increasing a client’s awareness and personal responsibility and efficacy through a relational, here-and-now focussed and dialogic approach.
The Gestalt therapist holds a non-judgmental attitude, bringing curiosity to ‘what is’ and relational support for the client’s growth and healthy process.
Gestalt therapy is holistic, meaning it takes into account the client’s whole process, including relational and societal aspects (wider field considerations), emotions, cognition, behavior, and felt and embodied sensations.
Gestalt therapy aims to stay close to the client’s individual differences and experiences, holding that each person has his/her/their own subjective experience. Furthermore, Gestalt therapy is existential, making it a very valuable resource when dealing with bereavement, loss, purpose and/or life transitions.
Gestalt therapy aims to help people gain increased self-awareness, make positive changes in their lives and be open to new perspectives. The sessions allow clients to safely explore and express who they are in order to facilitate growth and a healthy process.
Why might you need Gestalt therapy?
You may like to see a Gestalt therapist if you face mental health problems. Gestalt therapy is suitable for a wide variety of mental health presentations including anxiety, depression, stress, low self-esteem or self-worth, and difficulties in relationships.
Gestalt therapy can also help with some physical conditions, such as migraines.
Focus of gestalt therapy
Gestalt therapy can help you deal with different mental and emotional health issues by focusing on the following aspects
Increased awareness
Gestalt therapy helps you to become aware of your emotions, behaviors, thinking, and your position and perspective in current relationships.
Increasing your understanding of ‘what’ exactly is happening and ‘how’ this has come about. This empowers you to live life with increased agency and psychological choice.
When you are disconnected from your emotions, worldly affairs, or immediate environment, you cannot identify or understand your body’s sensations. Healing is only possible when you are more mindful and self-aware.
Gestalt therapy focuses on self-awareness, so that you may be able to reduce your distress by knowing the cause of your emotional disturbances.
In addition, this type of therapy helps you understand that your physical and mental health are interrelated, so you may have a better quality of life by looking after yourself more holistically, allowing you to deal with your issues more effectively.
Significance of your personal context
Therapists may use different tools to help you become more aware of your thoughts, experiences, embodied sensations and emotions in the here-and-now.
The here-and-now includes the context of your past experiences, current and historic relationships, culture, and other field conditions, insofar as they are relevant to your current situation. This prevents you from unnecessarily dwelling on the past and/or becoming preoccupied with the future.
Your Gestalt therapist validates the rationality and truthfulness of your experience, no matter what you share with them.
Your Gestalt therapist will take a non-judgemental approach, accepting that everyone’s experience is subjective, unique and different.
However, your therapist may offer you different perspectives, to support your personal choice and sense of freedom.
The here and now
Gestalt therapy supports you to focus on what’s happening ‘now’ in the therapy in-room and in your life. Emphasizing that effective growth and change can only happen in the present moment.
Focusing on the here and now instead of the past does not mean the therapist will not include your relevant personal history or potential for future growth.
You are asked to discuss your difficulties, thoughts, feelings, embodied sensations, and memories in the present context. Past experiences may be investigated to uncover what made a specific memory emerge in that moment, or how past experiences influence your current mental health, experience of self and/or relationships.
Essentially, in Gestalt therapy, you can deal with presenting issues most effectively when you become aware of your present experience and situation. This encourages you to focus on what is most important for you right now and highlight what resources you have available or you wish to expand in the here-and-now.
The client’s unique experience
A therapist helps you to share your personal experience without judging you, and allows you to gain increased awareness of your own experiences and who-you-are.
This in turn helps to stimulate your innate change process towards growing into a more wholesome version and experience of yourself. Your therapist will be committed to understanding your unique experience.
Dealing with painful experiences
Gestalt therapy can be effective and helpful in dealing with painful and difficult experiences, including emotional dysregulation, bereavement, trauma, and relational difficulties.
Gestalt therapy opens a space for you to share and explore your thoughts, feelings, memories, nightmares or dreams, and experiences safely and freely.
Methods used in gestalt therapy
This form of talk therapy is available individually and in groups. Gestalt therapy includes a focus on experience and experiment.
In Gestalt therapy, you might encounter some of the activities explained below, to help you become more aware, resourceful, alive and present in the present moment.
Empty chair work
This therapy technique involves visualizing and taking part in an imaginary conversation with yourself or another person. This is especially helpful in case you experience unresolved feelings.
For example, you might be sitting in front of a vacant chair while your therapist invites you to imagine someone you have unresolved feelings towards sitting in front of you. Then you may talk with the person you imagine sitting in that empty chair. This helps you to explore and express feelings safely.
It may be good to know that your Gestalt therapist will not ‘just’ suggest empty chair work to you. Only if this so appropriately flows from your therapeutic process. At times, this experiment may be offered to you in adjusted forms.
This therapy exercise can help you to heal your trauma, give you greater awareness of your unresolved feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, and make you aware of who or what is or has been happening.
Two-chair work
This is the same as the empty chair technique, but in this Gestalt therapy exercise, you take turns and switch between the two chairs every so often. When you are in the other chair, you answer the questions you asked before, as the person you’re imagining yourself talking to.
You can also use this method when you experience an internal impasse or conflict. In that case you will be exploring the different parts or energies within yourself through moving between the two chairs. Integrating towards a more unified and wholesome outlook (helpful in decision-making and in felt stuckness).
This experience gives you greater awareness of your own experience in a relational context and/or about opposing forces that may exist within you. Enabling you to effectively navigate relational difficulties, decision-making, self-doubt and complete previously unresolved experiences.
Discovering emotions
Emotions are held, expressed by, and processed in the body. During therapy sessions, when you share emotions, your therapist may ask you where you feel that emotion in your body.
For example, you may experience it as a feeling in the chest, a tensing of the shoulders, or a lump in your throat.
By knowing this, you may become more aware of your feelings and how they affect you on a physical level, as well as what these emotions specifically (and physically) mean and represent for you.
This also supports growthful awareness of yourself and your embodied process. Also supporting you to better self-support through your body – you will learn how your body and posture can positively impact emotional experience.
Focusing on “I” statements
The language, pace and tone you use matter a lot in Gestalt therapy. As you are motivated to take responsibility, you may learn to use language that shows personal ownership and responsibility. Encouraging you to explore I-statements and active language.
For example, Gestalt therapy encourages you to utilize “I” statements to inspire personal accountability. Instead of saying, “it made me annoyed” you could say, “I feel annoyed.” The use of “I” enhances self-awareness and responsibility according to the philosophy of Gestalt therapy.
Creative experiments
Creative experiments such as drawing and painting can help to improve self-awareness in the present moment.
Sometimes, it’s more helpful to use these types of creative activities than sitting down and speaking with your therapist, as creative experiments may enhance understanding of aspects of experience that are not purely logical and cognitive.
Creative work may include exploration of dreams, symbols, use of metaphor, drawing with a non-dominant hand, and/or drawing a card from an emotion card deck.
These activities often bring about new awareness, possibility and insight (‘aha’ moments). In Gestalt therapy, it is important that the creative experiments appropriately flow from the therapeutic process. The creative experiments are process-based and not outcome-based (allowing material to surface freely).
Also, this Gestalt therapy technique is beneficial for you as it aids in enhancing awareness about yourself, and your perception of previous experiences.
Body process
Your therapist works closely with you during the sessions, observing and noticing gestures, gait, movement, eye contact and facial expressions.
For example, the therapist may ask, “I notice you put your hand on your belly when talking. What’s happening for you as you do that?”
Your therapist may ask you to give your body parts or facial expressions a voice and talk from that place.
Focusing on your body’s expression (and bodily knowledge) with your therapist gives you greater awareness of what you are doing and what it means for you, which your therapist can use to help you work through your issues.
Enhancement/repetition
As well as working with your body process in dialogue, your therapist may ask you to exaggerate a gesture you made or repeat it a couple of times during the session.
This may be particularly helpful when it is hard for you to explain the current situation or your feelings at the moment, especially when you are working through complex issues with your therapist.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a form of psychotherapy that will offer you increased awareness, personal freedom, and aliveness in the present moment, Gestalt therapy can be a good solution for you compared to other therapeutic modalities such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
If you’re still not sure how to find the right Gestalt therapist for your specific needs, feel free to leave a comment below and we’ll respond as soon as possible.