Author: Gilead Yeffett

→Couples and individual psychotherapist, working in: 6a Bessborough Place, Pimlico, London SW1V 3SG Longcroft House, 2-8 Victoria Avenue, City, London EC2M 4NS

15 March 2016: Everyday Gestalt

In this post, I will try to make Gestalt therapy ideas and concepts applicable to everyday life. I hope to open up the therapy room and lift a bit the weight from the individual seeking therapy and place it where I believe it belongs: the relationship. What I mean by that is that if we see issues less as individual issues, that is, within the person and more between people, we may be able to create more supportive, sustaining and enduring relationships.

A very brief intro: In the 1940s, Fritz and Laura Perls and Paul Goodman, the early founders Gestalt therapy, developed

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Spotted in a London loo

intheend This was written on a wall in a London restaurant/ bike shop. As it was not signed, I give it an anonymous credit. I was inspired and touched when I read it.

“In the end we all hope that what we do matters and whilst we can’t change the world, we can all change someone’s

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The Chinese farmer – a short story

In her book ‘Embracing Uncertainty’, Susan Jeffers tells a story of a Chinese farmer (or maybe he wasn’t Chinese) who discovered that his horse had wandered off into the forest. His neighbours said to him “how unlucky to have lost your horse” the farmer said “maybe it is, maybe it isn’t”.

Two days later his horse came back with another horse it befriended in the wild. His neighbours said to him “how lucky to have two horses” the farmer said “maybe it is, maybe it isn’t”.

The next day, while the farmer’s son tried to tame the new horse, he

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Today I failed

missed-target

Getting to know ourselves is part of what therapy attempts to offer; thorough becoming aware of what drives us, our wishes and our fears, we can experience the wider spectrum of who we are. As I see it, psychotherapy’s role is not only to broaden this spectrum but also to enable us to navigate it more freely.

This means a journey to the edges of the spectrum of who we are. this can be painful, it takes us to where we are most uncomfortable and most vulnerable; this is also where our

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Context is king

A context in which time is a commodity – as happened during and post industrialisation – efficiency and productivity are goals in themselves and activities that don’t adhere are seen as undesirable and problematic. Thus we get labels such as procrastination, lack of commitment, instability, flakiness or simply laziness.

A context in which, for whatever cultural reasons, men are dissuaded from expressing the full range of human emotions, will naturally lead to limited expressions. For some, the range is so

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Switching behaviours on and off

Few are the concerns in human behaviour that can be measured in binary terms, that is, either/or situations. And fewer are the recoveries that psychotherapy can offer that can be measured in binary terms, as in: I had a problem, now I don’t.

Many concerns can be measured on quantitative scales or continua, bearing in mind that for each person there will be a different cut-off point in which a quantitative change will become a qualitative one as well.

Anger and depression are two good examples that I

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Elements of psychotherapy: part 2

Change, resistance and loss

In my previous post I wrote about the various factors that I believe make up psychotherapy and their contribution to its success.

Successful therapy is a subjective concept and hard to measure, it depends on what people say about how they feel. Often, people come to therapy because they want to feel good and therapy can help in achieving that. Aside from feeling good, therapy has another purpose, to help people

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A short zen story

After a long, hard climb up the mountain, the disciple finally found himself in front of his great teacher. Bowing, he asked the question that was burning inside him:

‘Master, how am I to become wise?’

‘Good choices’ replied the teacher after a long pause.

‘But teacher how do I make good choices?’

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Elements of psychotherapy: part 1

What makes psychotherapy work

The question why some people report making good use of therapy and others do not has been on my mind for a while. I believe it is important to understand what works and what doesn’t in therapy and adjust it accordingly. Research into therapy can help to keep it relevant and up to date.

The following thoughts are based on research by others (*) and my own ongoing research. There are many variables in therapy and accounting for all of them is not always possible, some are very subtle and others remain unknown. The following pie chart

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Beating the bounds

Beating the bounds is an ancient custom still observed in some English and Welsh parishes. Under the name of the Gangdays the custom of going a-ganging was kept before the Norman Conquest. A group of old and young members of the community would walk the boundaries of the parish, usually led by the parish priest and church officials, to share the knowledge of where they lay, and to pray for protection and blessings for the lands (Wikipedia).

Younger generations learned from older ones where

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