Pastoral Counseling

A Gestalt Approach

Ward A Knights, Jr, Harold G Koenig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317788478
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This contemporary counseling approach seamlessly meshes with pastoral theology!Gestalt therapy is designed to be simple, free of jargon, and emotionally liberating--ideal for pastoral counseling in the context of a variety of faiths. This primer is designed to give pastors and rabbis a working knowledge of the basic techniques and attitudes pioneered by Dr. Fritz Perls. Pastoral Counseling: A Gestalt Approach shows how this holistic approach, with its emphasis on the here and now, is a natural counterpoint to pastoral theology. This comprehensive book gives specific instructions on using Gestalt techniques to increase the depth of the pastoral care and counseling you provide. Pastoral Counseling explains the basic goals of Gestalt work, which are to achieve spontaneity and expressiveness and to move toward personal authenticity. It also reveals how you can employ these techniques to help you and your congregation move toward realizing your God-given potential. Pastoral Counseling illustrates Gestalt theories from several perspectives, including:

• theory and techniques
• case studies
• a folk tale
• session transcripts
• a sermon

Pastoral Counseling guides you toward a broader understanding of the simple power of the holistic approach. Pastors and priests, rabbis, and other members of the clergy who engage in counseling will find its simple wisdom refreshing amidst the desert of dry theory. Gestalt counselors will find its pastoral perspective enlightening in their work with clients.

Chapter 1

A Meeting at the Center of Vital Awareness

As a pastor, when I am with people my intention is that our meeting will be at the center of their vital awareness, a meeting which accurately and meaningfully contacts them literally where they are at that moment. Paul E. Johnson, one of the pioneers in modern pastoral care and counseling, referred to this stance as empathic and emphasized the necessity of the pastor beginning at this point if deepening levels of communication were to occur.¹

I believe that the pastor's work involves meeting people at the center of vital awareness to explore spiritual growth with them. While I will have more to say about this later, I think that it is important to state this very clearly at the beginning. Charles Kemp has aptly referred to this basic identification of the pastor as being a “physician of the soul.”² It is in relation to this task that the pastor seeks a better understanding of people and more effective ways of helping them.

Contemporary psychology and psychotherapy offer new understandings and tools for the pastor. But as the pastor looks around, there is a bewildering array of possible models of understanding and working with people. Orlo Strunk has surveyed these various approaches, both traditional and avant-garde, and notes their variety and complexity.³ Which one ought the pastor to follow?

Psychoanalytic (Freudian) counselors suggest that if we can find the original cause of a problem, all will be well; client-centered counselors imply that only if we listen well to a person can that person find himself or herself; the rational-emotive approach seems to says that if we straighten out our thinking, all else will follow; primal therapy promotes abandonment of emotional control as the path to authenticity; encounter groups promise that great things will happen to us if we join a group and “let it all hang out”; and chemotherapy seems to imply that it is all chemical balances in the final analysis. The list goes on and on. It is patently obvious that no one of these approaches can be entirely right, can be the approach to use. Are they all wrong? I think not. Speaking from my own personal experience, I can say that each of these approaches makes a contribution to the achievement of human wholeness. At one time or another, I have participated in many of these approaches. Some I have experienced only as a dilettante, others I have studied extensively. I have found much that has helped me as a person and pastor. It is as though each has added another piece to the puzzle of human experience, human growth.

For example, I can remember how important it was for me at one time—and occasionally still is—to be really listened to by another person who did not give me easy answers and who truly valued me as a person. I have also gained a healthy control over my emotions as I learned to identify my beliefs that made me upset myself. Encounter groups also helped me experience the give-and-take of relationships on an intense personal level, seeing myself through the eyes of others, and seeing others through their own eyes.

Perhaps in these various journeys I was, at first, looking for some easy way to understand and work with people as a pastor, as well as an easy way to understand myself. I came to realize rather early, however, that no easy and simplistic approaches are effective for the pastor; nor for anyone else. Simplistic approaches to understanding and working with persons are inadequate because they tend to be deductive. Too often they work toward reducing the meaning of human experience rather than expanding it, and thereby the fullness of experience is neither captured nor adequately dealt with. It was through my study with Paul Johnson that I came to see the desirability of moving toward an expanding, rather than a receding field of perception and meaning; let each approach to understanding people enrich the work of the pastor, but let no one approach encapsulate that work into a rigid way of seeing and relating to persons.

So, although I came to appreciate many aspects of these various approaches to understanding and working with persons, I believe a holistic approach is needed. In order to be effective, we must utilize a holistic approach that includes spirituality, so that we may truly meet people at the center of their vital awareness. Only in this way can we help persons become fully human.

THE GESTALT PERSPECTIVE

Gestalt has proven invaluable in helping me move toward being a “physician of the soul,” providing a holistic perspective for understanding myself and others. It is an approach to human experience that is inductive, providing a perspective that can help direct us to the path that leads toward claiming our spirituality.

The Gestalt approach had its inception in the work of Frederick S. Perls (1894–1970). “Fritz,” as he was known to everyone, was trained professionally as a physician, psychoanalyst, and training analyst in the Freudian tradition. He practiced for a number of years as a psychoanalytically-oriented psychiatrist, but he eventually abandoned the psychoanalytic approach and the sexual theories of Freud and developed new theories and practices. He called his approach Gestalt, appropriating the rich meaning of that German word which has to do with wholeness. Life, said Fritz, consists of ongoing gestalts which continually form, reach completion, and recede for the next emerging gestalt. Life naturally contains a spontaneous flow and moves toward its own completion. It is only when our gestalts are not allowed to move to completion that life loses meaning and vitality, that we become neurotic and psychotic.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s Fritz began to articulate his new theories which were published in his first book, Ego, Hunger, and Aggression.⁴ The term “Gestalt Therapy” was used as the title of a book written in collaboration with Ralph Hefferline and Paul A. Goodman, both of New York City.⁵ As time went on there was an increasing tendency to refer to Perls' work as “The Gestalt Approach” rather than “Gestalt Therapy” because it has often been seen as an approach to personal growth and wholeness, rather than only a way to treat the sick. We are currently seeing an increasing proliferation of articles and books about the Gestalt approach as the experience and thinking of Gestaltists accumulates.⁶

Fritz stepped back, as it were, from the focus of the Freudian perspective, and took a broad look at the total life experience. Influenced by earlier contacts with Gestalt psychology under Kurt Goldstein at the Frankfurt Neurological Institute, and by existentialists like Martin Buber and Paul Tillich, Fritz began to formulate his view of human experience. He took into consideration the common observation that there is a natural flow to life, a spontaneous meaning that emerges as life is actually lived, and that the meaning of life is found more through living fully in the present than by rehashing the past.

From the Gestalt perspective, individual life experiences are seen most clearly as organism/environment structures. Contact between the individual (organism) and its situation (environment) provides the necessary experience for assimilation, differentiation, and growth. This contact comes by the focusing of a figure of interest against the ground of the organism/environment field. This is a dynamic interaction that produces awareness. Awareness is a natural occurrence as the organism becomes attentive to a point of contact where a transaction is taking place. Awareness allows for spontaneous and innovative expressiveness which, in turn, if the necessary fulfillment takes place, produces closure and completes the gestalt. This is a continually ongoing process. Fritz proposed the following equation to express this process:

ATTENTION = AWARENESS = EXPRESSIVENESS = CLOSURE

One of the simplest illustrations of a completed gestalt would be in relation to hunger. As the individual's attention is drawn inward, there is an awareness of certain physical sensations which are recognized as hunger. The body responds with appropriate food-seeking activity. As the body receives food, the need is satisfied and closure comes. The person is no longer hungry. Another awareness emerges, perhaps the need for sleep, etc.

If all our experiences continued in this way, life would be completely fulfilling and satisfying. The natural cycle of contact/withdrawal is, in reality, complicated at many points. Awareness can be a particular problem for so many of us who actually make little use of our senses. Sight and hearing are perhaps most frequently used in our attempts to become aware of what is around us, but too many of us have isolated ourselves from our other senses so that we are largely cut off from these avenues of our vital awareness. Even sight and hearing may be severely limited so that, as the scripture says, seeing we do not see and hearing we do not hear (Mark 8:18). To this we might add that far too often we taste but do not taste, smell but do not smell, and touch but do not feel. In our society we tend to downplay the body and refuse to let it share its wisdom with us or, more correctly, we deny this part of ourselves.

From the Gestalt perspective, we are seen as relying too heavily on our minds—our “computers” in Gestalt jargon—and often refusing to acknowledge input from our senses. This, from the perspective of the Gestalt approach, is far too characteristic of contemporary life, and the consequences are seen in the unhappy and fractured lives of so many people today.

Of course, even if we utilize our full awareness, gestalt completion may be blocked either by the individual or by circumstances. In relation to the illustration above, that of the satisfaction of hunger, let's assume that a person has become fully aware of hunger but there is nothing to eat. If this gestalt is not completed it will continue to seek completion; and the more acute the hunger becomes the more this need will become dominant in the organism/environment field. It may eventually result in actions that the person might not consider appropriate in other circumstances, as when David ate the holy bread from the altar (I Sam. 21:1–6). Only when the bread was eaten and the hunger receded, only when the gestalt was complete, could the next emerging gestalt become the focus of awareness.

Incomplete gestalts, often referred to in the Gestalt approach as unfinished business, whatever their cause, tend to repeatedly seek completion, but are unsuccessful because they are blinded by their own incompleteness. This results in frustration, unhappiness, incompleteness, sickness, and neurotic behavior. It may even be manifested in the extreme forms of pathological behavior, which we call mental illness.

Unfinished business must be finished if life is to have a normal flow. Unfinished business can arise in interpersonal relationships as well as in the way we meet, or do not meet, the needs of our own body. Unmet or aborted psychological and spiritual needs also may result in unfinished business. A love affair that ended abruptly and that had no closure, the need to say good-bye to something or someone we love, the denied need to move our bodies in simple exercise, or even to curse or bless God can all create unfinished business. Unless such gestalts are allowed to flow to completion, our lives become less than they could be and we too readily become miserable and ineffective.

It was this perspective that Fritz developed after immigrating to the United States in the late 1940s. I am convinced that we have a great deal to learn from him, although some in the religious field might question this because he acknowledged no formal religious commitment. Still, there is a growing recognition of the deep spirituality inherent in Perls' work. Naranjo, for example, has astutely commented that Fritz's spirituality is disguised, but no less real. Fritz deplored sham and pretense and sacrosanct beliefs that blocked personal authenticity and authentic encounter.⁷ We miss the spiritual nature of Gestalt, also, if we are not aware that Fritz utilized a rather distinctive vocabulary. Where many today use such words as Higher Self, and others use the words soul or spirit, Fritz used the word organism. This use of such common or simple scientific words, did not require a belief system for one to understand his meaning. At times, this has tended to make the Gestalt approach appear simplistic thus obscuring the great heights and depths of Fritz's thinking and thereby also obscuring its spiritual nature.

GESTALT AND CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVES

The Gestalt approach has a very important contribution to make to our spiritual life. Its theory offers a fresh perspective on the human spirit, and its process is capable of promoting spiritual growth.

for our purposes, we will consider the words soul and spirit to be synonymous. Biblical authorities are by no means unanimous on this matter, but there does seem to be considerable agreement that a lack of consistency exists in the way these words are used in the biblical material. In the Old Testament, for example, the words soul, spirit, and heart seem to be used with the same meaning at times, but with different meanings at other times. However, scholars do point to an underlying agreement in a basic concept of these words as they appear in the Old Testament. That concept is that there are two inseparable elements in human nature—physical and psychical. A similar situation exists in the New Testament. At times Paul tends to use the Hebrew understanding, at other times he does not. Jesus taught the indestructibility of the soul as the nonphysical aspect of life, while retaining a holistic perspective.⁸

Therefore, although some variance may occur in terminology in the biblical material, there seems to be a basic agreement in seeing human nature as (1) consisting of psychical and physical elements, and (2) that these two elements are inseparable. Here it may be noted that Perls strongly emphasized our unitary nature, denying that there was any separation between the mental and the physical.

In the biblical perspective the individual is seen in holistic terms. The individual was created a living nephesh, a living soul or spirit. The individual is seen as being a soul or spirit—not having one. This concept was basic to the life and culture of ancient Israel.

James Lynwood Walker suggests that the soul may appropriately be defined as “the center of the personality.” He suggests that the Gestalt approach provides an avenue for givin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1. A Meeting at the Center of Vital Awareness
• Chapter 2. Becoming Fully Human
• Chapter 3. Peeling the Onion
• Chapter 4. Once Upon a Time
• Chapter 5. A Taste of Our Own Medicine
• Chapter 6. The Royal Road to Integration
• Chapter 7. Where the Rubber Hits the Road
• Chapter 8. We Are Fallible Human Beings
• Appendix A Biographical Sketch of Frederick S. Perls, MD, PhD (1894–1970)
• Notes
• Index