Thursday, June 14, 2018

Counselling & Psychotherapy in the 11th arrondissement

If you've found this page you're probably looking for counselling or therapy in English. I offer both. I am a Gestalt psychotherapist with a Clinical Diploma in Gestalt Psychotherapy from Metanoia Institute, London and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Contemporary Trauma Practice. I have been working in Paris since 2010.

My private practice is near Charonne metro station in the 11th arrondissement.

Gestalt psychotherapy is a way of working that seeks to raise awareness, explore issues and restore healthy self-regulating. We look for new, creative solutions to where you are stuck.

I am experienced in dealing with:

  • anxiety & panic attacks
  • being between French culture and where we grew up
  • borderline-style process
  • burn out
  • couples therapy
  • depression 
  • emotional intelligence and awareness
  • existential crises/meaning of life crises
  • highly sensitive persons
  • loss & grieving
  • narcissistic-style process
  • relationship issues
  • trauma
  • writers' block and procrastination
I am a British therapist, 48, who has been living in Paris since 2003. Around half my clients are first language English and the other half second language English, from all around the world. I also sometimes work in French - I'm 95% fluent.

Poetry and writing is a big passion of mine.


My fee is 75 euros for a 50 minute session.
Sessions are usually weekly and the number of sessions depends on the issue being worked on.
I am a registered member of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP).

Don't hesitate to get in touch if you have questions.

Contact:

06 26 90 13 26
db44@mail.com

Sunday, August 14, 2011

What is Gestalt therapy? A practice of developing awareness

Some thoughts about what Gestalt therapy is.

“The primary aim of Gestalt counselling and therapy is the development of awareness through a sustained enquiry into clients’ subjective experience.” (Mackewn, 1997, p.34) 

“It is this ongoing experience of awareness that can be enormously healing in counselling.” (Joyce & Sills, 2001, p.28) 

What is awareness?

“Awareness is the spontaneous sensing of what arises in you, of what you are doing, feeling, planning; introspection, in contrast, is a deliberate turning of attention to these activities in an evaluating, correcting, controling, interfering way.” (Perls, Hefferline & Goodman, 1951, p.323)

The invitation in Gestalt therapy is to develop awareness, without judgment of what is. To explore your process, paying attention to both internal and external worlds.

Judging ourselves for what we find within is counter-productive. Because it leads to keeping parts of ourselves dark, out of our own awareness, sometimes potentially harmful because we act on them without responsibility.

Awareness is sometimes thought of as having 3 zones. An inner zone, including all bodily sensation and emotion. Desensitising to this produces a sense of deadness or absence within.

An outer zone, which is our awareness of contact with the outside world. Through the 5 senses plus our ways of reaching out to touch the world through speech and movement.

A middle zone, where we think, make sense of things, remember the past and anticipate the future.

When I was 17 and buried in my school work I very much lived in the middle zone – especially in thinking. I experienced both a lack of richness of life lived and a reduced sense of my own aliveness – I felt very much like a head walking around without a body, in a world that seemed detached.

Joyce & Sills describe awareness as the conscious experiencing of being present in the here and now. This is where we find our aliveness, the richness of living fully. Brighter colours, stronger tastes.

“The young child often seems to inhabit a world of boundless awareness and enthusiasm and has an aliveness and spontaneity that is often lost in adulthood.” (Joyce & Sills, 2001, p.27)

Compare the rather joyless behaviour of some adults with the aliveness of children. A possible goal in Gestalt therapy is to recover this lost aliveness. How would you recognise it in yourself?

Gestalt therapy: 
Raising the client’s awareness of his own process. 
Listening with awareness to the client’s story.

Developing a client’s awareness is a key part of restoring their aliveness, their vitality, their joy in living. This is key in a therapy which seeks to restore the normal, healthy self-regulation of the human being.
 
“It is this ongoing experience of awareness that can be enormously healing in counselling.” (Joyce & Sills, 2001, p.28)

The focussed awareness that a therapist employs in paying attention to a client’s story can be profoundly healing for the client. Especially so if they have had a history of being isolated, ignored, or judged. Having my therapist treat my story, and the subjective meaning I gave to it, as important instead of deflecting or denying my truth, was a profoundly strengthening experience.

Making meaning

Awareness "is a meaning-making function which creates fresh Gestalten." (Clarkson, 1989, p.32)

It is in awareness that we make sense of the world and ourselves,  organising our experience into meaningful patterns, gestalts. As healthy adults we move round the cycle of awareness, allowing new needs to become figural, then mobilising to meet them, satisfy ourselves and withdraw to wait for the next need. This healthy flow around the cycle of awareness is what Gestalt therapists seek to restore.
 
We carry private stories and beliefs about ourselves throughout our lives. These may be carried out of awareness, perhaps because they were never articulated, just implied in the way people acted around us.
By doing awareness practice – exploring what is present in the here and now from a position of curiosity and non-judgment - we discover clues to what is going on for ourselves out of awareness, and bring this into awareness where it can be explored, owned, integrated. In this way we can surface old, unhelpful beliefs about ourselves and challenge them.  

Awareness is at the heart of the phenomenological method through which we pay attention to all that the client (and ourselves as therapist) are in the here and now – a person’s phenomenology. For example, how I am avoiding eye contact or hanging my head.

Gestalt sees this investigation of the here and now as a rich area for therapeutic work, healing and change. If we know what we are doing and what else is possible, we have choices.

“…Gestalt’s primary aim is the development of awareness as a means of increasing people’s choice and flexibility.” (Mackewn, 1997, p. 36)

Gestalt’s assumption is that we are naturally capable of healthy self-regulation. A healthy person regulates themselves through paying attention to what enters awareness and responding.
The growing edge is located at the frontier of awareness. It is there that we learn new insights about ourselves and the world and integrate them.
By increasing our awareness of our thinking, feeling and sensing, and also how we impact on others, we increase the area in which we can make choices. When these things are out of awareness it’s as though they’re in our blind spot, and our scope for choice is reduced.
Awareness is key to Gestalt therapy because  “it is the dynamic behind the paradoxical principle of change.” (Joyce & Sills, 2001, p. 40)
This principle states that people do not usually change through striving to be different – but change when the cease striving and simply explore themselves as they are, raising their awareness of themselves and accepting or embracing what they find.
When we cease struggling against ourselves we free up energy to know and learn. And having integrated what we have learnt, our behaviour changes. We are able to make different choices.

Experimenting with new ways to be you

In the service of helping the client to explore parts of themselves and different ways of being, a therapist may suggest experiments. Awareness is key for the client to learn and integrate. For example, in recounting a recurring nightmare of being attacked by a werewolf I was invited to put myself in the place of the wolf and see how that felt. It was amazing to have this unfamiliar feeling of power, in place of the helplessness I associated with the nightmare. My posture and voice changed dramatically and I became much more alive, loud and vital – it freed up a lot of energy. What might it be like to access that energy in my life?

The therapist’s own awareness is a vital tool.

“The most important of the therapist’s tools is herself – her responses to the client and her own awareness in the here and now.” (Joyce & Sills, 2001, p. 33) 

The Gestalt therapist uses her own awareness to know the client and to bring up things for comment, as well as to model awareness to the client and invite them to explore their own awareness.

Awareness is both goal (healthy process) and method for Gestalt practitioners (notice your process and own it.) 

Raising awareness allows clients to see new choices.



References


Clarkson, P. Gestalt Counselling in Action, London: Sage
Joyce, P. & Sills, C. Skills in Gestalt Counselling & Psychotherapy, London: Sage
Mackewn, J. Developing Gestalt Counselling, London: Sage
Perls, F.S., Hefferline, R., & Goodman, P. Gestalt Therapy, Gouldsboro: The Gestalt Journal Press Inc.

Friday, August 12, 2011

The client-therapist relationship in Gestalt therapy

Client and therapist work together on agreed goals.

The therapist has no agenda. His stance is one of curiosity and exploration without judgment. A stance of interest in what it is like to be the client and in how they organise their world.

He offers an authentic, accepting relationship with a real human bieng - fallible, imperfect, but strong enough.

He is not silent. Not a 'blank screen', saying little.

He is not a mirror - only offering back what the client has said.

He is not an expert with all the answers. His role is to be a partner in the client's self-exploration, to facilitate that.

He is a real presence in the room with the client - feeling, reacting, interacting, initiating. Available to really meet the client - wherever that takes them. Both may be changed by the encounter.

He is there to accompany them on their journey.

What is Gestalt therapy?

A 'gestalt' is a form, a shape, a pattern that is more than the sum of its parts.
Human beings continually organise what they experience into gestalts.
In this way we make meaning.
The aim of Gestalt therapy is to explore the gestalts we make.

This is an exploration of how you are in the world in the here and now.
Rather than speculation about why.


In this exploration there is the invitation to accept that you are how you are.
...and build from there.

The best support for change is to first stand on the solid ground of how you are now.

Character is a fixed gestalt. (Perls, 1992, p.9) It is when we have a fixed way of organising the world and an inflexible way of being. The goal of Gestalt therapy is to loosen this fixedness so that we can choose a more useful way to respond to the challenges of the present moment.

When we don't recognise the gestalt there appears to be no meaning. Life makes no sense, is absurd.

Gestalt therapy sees human health as a natural forming of gestalts, one after another, each related to the most important need in the moment.

A possible goal of Gestalt therapy is the restoration of this natural process.
In which needs arise and we organise our experience into gestalts in order to meet them.

Needs might be for water, for sex, for comforting, for beauty, for fun, for challenge, etc.
Gestalt therapy assumes that in health humans evolve these needs in a way that is compatible with living in community with others.

When we are stuck, feel ourselves to be at an impasse, some people seek therapy.
Gestalt therapy invites clients to explore the impasse in the here and now so that alternatives become available and change becomes possible.

'The task of therapy is to develop sufficient support for the reorganisation and rechannelling of energy.' (Perls, 1992, p.149)

The Gestalt therapist offers care and interest in how the client forms gestalts and responds to the world in the present moment. He or she has no agenda. (e.g. that the client be different.)
The Gestalt therapist offers observation and invitations to experiment with other ways of responding to the here and now.
Attempts to meet the client where they're at, offering a fully human relationship in which the client is valued for who they are.

Quotes from
Perls, L. (1992) Living at the Boundary, Gouldsboro: The Gestalt Journal Press


Rubin vase: What gestalt do you make? What meaning? Is it a vase or 2 faces?