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On the Therapeutic Power of Presence

Posted on October 8, 2025February 26, 2026 by Psychotherapy.net Team

I’ve been a psychologist for almost 40 years, and I am constantly amazed at just how much neuroscience research is enhancing my clinical understanding of what psychotherapy clients may really need most. What I would like to talk about here is how the concept of presence—a state of grounded awareness of the present moment—can inform clinical practice and enhance the everyday lives of our clients.

Why Presence Is Important

Presence is a state of mind of selective and sustained attention where one is intentionally and nonjudgmentally receptive to one’s own senses, is active in reflecting on them, and is consciously directing their awareness to the present moment (1, 2). Presence first requires an awareness that we have, a capacity to experience it, and second, it requires the skills to make it happen. All clients—and clinicians—are on a continuum of both, so each client requires interventions tailored to their individual level of awareness and skills. But I am discovering more and more just how crucial it is to help clients learn how to be present with both difficult and life-affirming emotions. That is, how to sit with, better tolerate, and more fully embody those moments without reactively fighting them, distancing themselves from them, or becoming frozen by them.

Psychotherapy interventions are almost always chosen in the moment, because the timing of them is believed to be most helpful to the client. Cognitive-behavioral therapists may highlight a cognitive distortion, like all-or-none thinking; psychodynamic therapists may bring attention to a protective defense, like projection; Gestalt therapists may suggest the use of an I-statement to replace impersonal or blaming language. Even though the clinician’s application of their theoretical approach may be executed with textbook precision, the intervention can fall short.

For example, if a client repeatedly returns to a conditioned or protective response to difficult situations by jumping to unwarranted conclusions, by blaming themselves or others, or by characteristically pushing away or distancing themselves from their feelings, the best interventions of the clinician may not be enough. This is particularly true if developmental trauma or significant episodic injuries have occurred. When a client has difficulty taking in, processing, or applying the clinician’s intervention, or when emotional underpinnings of their symptoms may be so severe that access to the resources needed to make use of the clinician’s interventions are not available, building skills of presence may be needed.

The concept of presence is foundational to all psychotherapies but especially to somatic psychotherapies. From the early developers like Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone Therapy, Thomas Hanna’s Hanna Somatics, Alexander Lowen’s Bioenergetic Analysis, Moshé Feldenkrais’s Feldenkrais Method, and Ron Kurtz’s Hakomi Method to more modern approaches like Lisbeth Marcher’s Bodynamic Analysis, Pat Ogden’s Sensorymotor Psychotherapy, Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, Raja Selvam’s Integral Somatic Psychology, and from the diverse work of Bessel van der Kolk, clinical practitioners have learned that using mind-body practices opens up new ways to strengthen their effectiveness—particularly for clients with chronic, unresponsive, recurrent, or refractory symptoms.

The Physiology of Presence

Modern neuroscience has provided a wealth of understanding of how presence operates and how it can be fostered. Being present in the moment causes neural and biochemical changes in the visual and prefrontal regions, causing increases in alpha and theta brainwave activity, reductions in autonomic nervous system activation, and changes in how information is processed and monitored. Research has shown that presence causes a cascading series of interactions between several identifiable regions of the brain, which sets in motion the activation of neurological and neurochemical changes that induce felt states of well-being.

More specifically, by setting our intention to be present, we activate a top-down process beginning in the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex, which causes changes in two organizing cortical and subcortical superstructures known as the Default Mode Network (3) and the Salience Network (4). These superstructures coordinate distinct regions of the brain that are responsible for decreasing emotional arousal, reducing unpleasant self-referential thinking, and more effectively tolerating painful affect.

Merely intending to be present facilitates greater calm. When we begin to exercise greater presence, the Default Mode Network slows response reactivity. Additionally, substructures within the Salience Network (the anterior insular cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex) work synergistically with the Default Mode Network to a) detect mind-wandering to distressing thoughts and b) bring us back to a greater felt sense of calm and physiological homeostasis.

If our focus wavers, the Salience Network helps sustain our attention; it filters distractions; it slows our heart rate and breathing and decreases blood pressure and muscle tension; it increases heart rate variability; it downregulates the activation of our amygdala; and quite critically, it enhances our ability to monitor affective body states relative to actual occurrences in our external world. Stated somewhat differently, the neural circuit between the Salience Network and the amygdala allows us to accurately monitor the functional and dysfunctional interpretations we make about our outer world. For example, if we become frightened for no rational reason, presence triggers the Salience and Default Mode Networks that help bring us back to center.

Inducing Presence

There are literally hundreds of ways to induce presence in ourselves and in our clients. There may be several techniques that stand out and really work well for a particular client, and other clients may prefer using a wider variety of methods. Here are a few examples of ways clinicians have helped clients manage their physio-affective arousal by helping them make more consistent contact with the present moment.

Geller and Greenberg (5) believe that therapeutic presence is foundational to the therapeutic relationship, where the therapist’s whole self invites the client to become their whole self. The authors suggest the acronym P-R-E-S-E-N-C-E to organize a series of methods, where the client is asked to:

PAUSE (P)—stopping and creating a moment of stillness

RELAX/REST (R)

EMPTY (E) their mind of thoughts and judgements

SENSE (E) their physical and emotional state

EXPAND (E) their awareness of their external environment

NOTICE (N) the relationship or the connection between their inner and outer worlds

CENTER (C)—reconnecting with their core self and bodily groundedness,

ENTER (E) back into their immediate space or resume their actions or intentions prior to inducing the state of presence.

A method like this can be especially useful as an introduction to the notion of presence, as some clients may be quite unfamiliar with self-reflective and interoceptive processes.

In Somatic Experiencing (6), presence is induced when the clinician encourages the client to notice, observe, and become a witness to attendant body sensations, images, actions, impulses, emotions, or movements. If a calming or relaxing state is needed to temporarily offset the client’s overwhelming level of arousal, SE practitioners are encouraged to invite their client to slowly vocalize the sound “voooo,” which is reported to vibrate the vagus nerve, activating the parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system, and deactivating the dorsal vagal freeze response (7).

In addition to activating parasympathetic activity, the practitioner is also instructed to induce presence by prompting their client to notice their belly vibrating, to feel it do so, and to observe their overall physical reaction to making the sound. Levine also describes the use of Jin Shin Jyutsu, a Japanese mind-body system of self-regulation, where stronger states of presence and relaxation occur from better “energy flow” after performing a sequence of three body holds—placing one hand under the opposite armpit and placing the other hand over the opposite outer arm below the shoulder, placing one hand on the forehead and the other on the chest, and finally placing one hand on the chest and the other on the stomach.

For clinicians and clients who may be more familiar with interoception, Raja Selvam (8) highlights eight techniques for tolerating unpleasant emotions that also can enhance the experience of pleasant emotions. Each technique fosters greater presence with oneself and with one’s emotions:

a) breathing into and with the emotion

b) resonating with the emotion

c) heightening awareness of the emotion

d) visualizing the emotion dissipating, spreading more evenly in the body

e) vocalizing sounds that are congruent or resonant with the emotion

f) using self-touch to both support and make deeper contact with the emotion

g) enhancing one’s intention to make contact with, expand, or support the emotion

h) making very small body movements to release felt stuckness of the emotion

Applying these methods of presence to address an unpleasant emotion softens it and helps to better tolerate it. For clients with low tolerance for unpleasant emotions, the method is used in very shorts durations. At some point in the process, the client becomes aware they are tolerating the targeted emotion, when, at that point, they are prompted to notice the relief of having achieved it. Through the continued use of focused awareness and presence, the client is then guided to expand and make deeper contact with their relief. This typically results in a greater openness to and eventually a welcoming acceptance of the difficult emotion.

Other commonly employed presence inducing methods include inviting clients to:

a) name several things in their environment they can see, hear, smell, taste, and physically feel

b) scan and bring awareness to different parts of their body

c) take a long and audible sigh

d) gently stretch any part of their body

e) to look at something pleasurable in their environment and then to soften their eyes—relaxing their eyelids and facial muscles—while looking at it

f) simultaneously observe objects in their peripheral vision while focusing on a fixed point

g) toggle back and forth between looking at an object at a far distance—becoming curious about its nature, its history, its function—and then to notice how they are feeling about observing the object

Presence can also be fostered using the many forms of pranayama—a yogic breath control technique—an example of which is the mantra meditation So’ham, where on each in-breath one visualizes taking in all the positive energy of the universe and on each out-breath imagining expanding that positive energy to every part of the body. The very act of observing and reflecting on one’s internal states without judgement quiets the mind. Eastern philosophies and practices that emphasize living in the present moment are central to the many forms of meditation practiced throughout the world, which neuroscientific studies have shown similarly affect the brain superstructures discussed earlier (9).

As clinicians monitor their clients’ presence in sessions, they may already be well acquainted with when and how it fluctuates, and they may already be creatively using effective but less structured methods than those I have suggested. For example, I recently observed one of my client’s arousal level waxing and waning throughout a session, influenced by small things that were said by either them or me. By tracking these remarks along with correlated changes in their breathing, movements, and muscle tension, I was able to get subtle clues about what may be fostering or inhibiting presence. Monitoring my client’s real-time physio-emotional arousal, I was able to determine when the client was sufficiently present or needed support to do so—that is, whether they needed to build tolerance for a difficult emotion, rest from the unpleasant emotion, better regulate their arousal level, or expand their resources to address the emotion.

Lin: A Case Study

Lin had been my long-time client, who experienced significant developmental trauma from his father. At one point in our work together, he went through an extended period of unemployment in a vapid job market. Despite his considerable insight about his father’s impact on him and the substantial progress he had made with this issue, the stress of his unemployment was producing exacerbated and pronounced anxiety, which had brought him to the point of helplessness, exhaustion, and withdrawal. Lin’s precipitous overwhelm was also making it extremely difficult to calm him in the sessions, as he became more prone to unending ruminations about his difficulties, almost as if I were invisible to him. He was intellectually aware that his pondering was crippling him, but he could not relent from compulsively engaging in it while shaming himself for doing so. Despite my best efforts and those of his psychiatrist, something more was needed.

I decided to better employ the methods I have been discussing here to enhance Lin’s self-attunement. Although some aspects of what I was witnessing in Lin were related to his childhood, he was not in a resourced enough state of mind at that time to process interpretations about it. He was also not resourced enough to process feedback about cognitive distortions he was caught in, so I proceeded to address his immediate moment-to-moment, physio-emotional dynamic. He needed to become better present with how he was fanning his own flames, shutting me out as a support, and cutting himself off from his own psychic resources.

Because Lin seemed to need the simplest, most easily understood and tolerated intervention, I decided to begin the next session by encouraging him to take his time and look around the room, letting his eyes move the way they wanted to. . . and name five things he could see, then asking him to name two things he could hear, then one thing he could smell. Then I asked him how it felt to do so, to which he responded, “a little better.” I said, “That’s good, Lin.” He then quickly changed the focus and began characteristically ruminating on his troubles.

After empathizing with how tough a time he was having, I asked him how it felt at that moment in the session, and he responded, “Upset.” I then asked him if he noticed the shift he made, which he was able to acknowledge. I replied to him, “It’s excellent that you observed that, Lin.” Then I asked him to take a long, slow, audible sigh, where I could see him begin to settle. I could also feel myself settle a bit, which, in the resonance, helped me confirm I was on a good path in that moment with him. Although he soon began to agitate himself again with self-shaming accusations, it took him a little longer to start doing so. I’ve seen these delays occur with other clients, so it confirmed my intuition that his resilience for, and tolerance of, his troublesome emotions were growing.

I try to continuously monitor in real time my clients’ presence and their tolerance for unpleasant feelings. I think it helps me make better decisions about whether I should help them better tolerate their arousal or help them become better aware that they are tolerating it on their own. Sometimes clients need us to be their resource when they are having trouble maintaining access to their own inner resources. Sometimes it’s more important for them to see and feel our pride in them when they are handling their arousal just fine without us.

Gale: My Experience with Therapeutic Presence

This essay would not be complete without discussing the variety of ways clinicians wax and wane in maintaining their own steady presence with clients. Every day I work on learning how to be with my clients—to be awake, to how I repeatedly lose and regain attunement to them, to vacillations in my own internal emotional and physiological states, and to the subtle effects my degree of presence has on them. Being present is relationally essential: it facilitates empathic resonance, it prevents interpretive and empathic errors, and it makes my work and my life more enjoyable.

Like many, I grew up without being taught about emotions. It wasn’t until my late thirties that I realized I had feelings that I could identify and discuss. Through the study of academic psychology, through my clinical practice, and through my personal psychoanalysis, I have met many emotional mentors, some of whom, paradoxically, have been my clients.

Gale was a middle-aged, divorced client of mine, who regularly attended his sessions but who was highly reactive and talked incessantly without reflecting on his words or actions. Managing my own unpleasant internal reactions to him took some time. Although I recognized my countertransference reaction was stemming from my relationship with my father, this insight alone didn’t provide enough real and lasting emotional relief.

To regroup, I decided to take my own advice—that is, to apply to me and my own process with Gale, the recommendations I was making to my clients. In fact, this essay is a reaffirmation of what I continue to learn—how to authentically embody a better moment-by-moment attunement to “me” when being with my clients;how to give myself flashes of time to breathe, a moment to be with myself, to attend to me, to care for me, and to have an instant where I can honor and affirm my own existence.

As I permitted myself to focus on my needs while with Gale, a variety of methods to be more fully present spontaneously emerged. My next thought with Gale was to experiment with my own movement, so I consciously authorized myself to change my posture. Because I was so intent on focusing my attention on Gale, I realized that I wasn’t aware enough of my muscle tension and joint discomfort. As I crossed my legs, stretched my back, shifted my weight, I found myself quietly sighing. At first, it felt like a release, but it soon evolved into a wondrous return to a safe and grounded place—a place where I could give myself room to be with Gale’s loquacious tangentiality, without judging it or reacting to it.

From this place of peaceful inner calm, I started feeling more genuinely grateful for the relational space Gale and I were co-creating, and with it arose a greater sense of compassion and appreciation of his struggle. As I described in the earlier section on the physiology of presence, I could experience my arousal level diminishing, my dysfunctional interpretations of my outer world with Gale quieting, my capacity to accurately monitor my own body states increasing, and my tolerance for enduring my illusion that I was being ignored strengthening.

As if divinely inspired, my brain’s higher-order functions suddenly kicked in, and I realized at a visceral level that, not unlike myself growing up, Gale had no one in his childhood he could talk to about the things he wanted, for as long as he wanted. He never had anyone who wanted to be with him in the way he needed, to play with him on his terms, who conveyed to him that he was important, that he mattered. So, I sat with Gale, sometimes for whole sessions at a time, intently listening, staying present, breathing with intention, unobtrusively sighing, shifting my posture. . . until one day he began to slow and settle and finally voice, “I’ve had a lot to say,” to which I simply smiled and nodded.

At that moment, I could feel the resonance of his attunement with me and mine with his. Paradoxically, I became aware of what I believed I really wanted with Gale all along—not only for him to be aware of himself, but for me to be truly present with him, to connect with him, and to feel his connection with me.

References

(1) Kabat-Zinn, J. (2003). Mindfulness-based interventions in context: Past, present, and future. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 10, 144–156. https://doi.org/10.1093/clipsy/bpg016

(2) Koch, C., & Tsuchiya, N. (2007). Attention and consciousness: Two distinct brain processes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 16–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.10.012

(3) Malinowski, P. (2013). Neural mechanisms of attentional control in mindfulness meditation. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7, Article 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2013.00008

(4) Philip, N. S., Barredo, J., van ‘t Wout-Frank, M., Tyrka, A. R., Price, L. H., & Carpenter, L. L. (2017). Network mechanisms of clinical response to transcranial magnetic stimulation in posttraumatic stress disorder and major depressive disorder. Biological Psychiatry, 83, 263-272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2017.07.021

(5) Geller, S. M., & Greenberg, L. S. (2012). Therapeutic presence: a mindful approach to effective therapy. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/13088-000

(6) Levine, P. A. (2010). In an unspoken voice: how the body releases trauma and restores goodness. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/shop/inanunspoken-voice

(7) Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393707007

(8) Selvam, R. (2022). The practice of embodying emotions: a guide for improving cognitive, emotional, and behavioral outcomes. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/673734/the-practice-of-embodying-emotions-by-raja-selvam-phd

(9) Bauer, C. C. C., Cabral, J., Stevner, A. B. A., Kirchhoff, D., Sousa, T., Violante, I. R., … & Kringelbach, M. L. (2022). Mindfulness meditation increases default mode, salience, and central executive network connectivity. Scientific Reports, 12, 13219. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-17325-6

Therapeutic Reimagining

Posted on August 27, 2025February 26, 2026 by Psychotherapy.net Team

An Introduction to Therapeutic Reimagining

I’m very proud to have recently published my first book, Reimagine Your Life: How to Change Your Past and Transform Your Future, in which I introduce a process that I have named “therapeutic reimagining.”

There are many reasons why I am proud of this book, but the greatest achievement is to have overcome the intergenerational narrative provided by my “working class” upbringing in the United Kingdom, with its self-limiting beliefs about myself, others and the world.

I come from a family of six siblings, three of whom left school virtually unable to read or write. My father was an Irish immigrant who worked on a building site doing unskilled work, and my mother left school at the age of 14 to look after cows on a local farm. I too was educationally backward as a child, and was never given a book, or helped with reading by my parents. So, if they were alive today and I told them that I have written a book about a new way of doing psychotherapy, it would be incomprehensible to them.

It has taken me 20 years of hard study and practice to put all of the puzzle pieces together and create this process that I call therapeutic reimagining. I simply couldn’t have done it earlier in my life. That is the gift of ageing: being able, over time, to integrate a multitude of different experiences.

Although writing Reimagine Your Life was conceived as a way of helping people who either couldn’t afford therapy or couldn’t access it for other reasons, the core process of therapeutic reimagining was born in my psychotherapy practice in Cambridge, England as a way of accelerating clients’ progress in therapy. Simply put, they were able to get much further forward in their healing journey by being empowered and encouraged to continue their transformational work outside of sessions.

The book cover has a clock face and the question, “How far would you wind back time and what would you change?” This gives us a clue that it is about overcoming trauma by redoing the past.

Often in people’s lives something goes wrong or there is trauma that leads to a whole downward trajectory of events. So, I invite my clients to wind back time to a point before it happened and explore an alternate timeline or alternate history.

This might sound like time travel and science fiction. However, it is actually science fact: the psychology of counterfactual thinking. You may have never heard of it, but it is something we do with our clients all the time. Every time we ask a question like “How do you wish your childhood was different” we are inviting them to imagine an alternate history with a new narrative.

In Gestalt Therapy, we ask the client to go back in time and “Be there now.” In Transactional Analysis, it is called “early scene work;” “enactments” in Psychodynamic Therapy, and “portrayals” in some other therapies.

However, where therapeutic reimagining is different from all of the above, is that it provides a roadmap of how to do the process, so that clients can create their own portrayals at home. It has worked so well with my clients that I wanted to write a self-help book that would allow those who can’t afford or can’t access one-to-one therapy to benefit from the process. It is safe to do at home because the reader is invited to imagine a more pleasant alternative to what actually happened.

The book contains nine stories, written by the clients themselves, explaining how they used therapeutic reimagining to overcome shame, guilt, fear, anxiety, overeating, and even medically unexplained physical symptoms.

One of the stories concerns a theme that many people encounter in later life, the illness and death of their life partner. Stephanie was 73 when she came to see me, full of toxic guilt related to the circumstances of the death of her husband several years earlier. Her guilt interfered with the grieving process and caused her a great deal of emotional pain and suffering. With Stephanie’s consent I am sharing her therapeutic reimagining journey.

Stephanie’s Story: Grief Without End

I was struggling with the knowledge that I had not done everything that I could have done for my husband in his last few days of life. He was in hospital, and the doctors told me he had kidney failure which they were planning to treat with dialysis.

I had no idea that he was going to die soon. On the fourth night, they called me into the hospital because he was dying. He died the next day. All the time that he was in the hospital I believed that they were trying to help him.

All the time he was in the hospital he was asking me to take him home. Once he had died, I realized that he knew he was dying, and he wanted to die at home. I had no way of knowing that he was dying at the time, and I persuaded him to stay in the hospital where I believed that he was getting treatment that would help him, and that although he was seriously ill with lymphoma and we knew that it could not be cured, we thought we had a few years more.

For more than three years after he died, I suffered profound guilt about my behavior during these days. This feeling haunted me, and even though I knew that I wasn’t aware that he was dying during his last days, I found it hard to forgive myself for not paying attention to his requests to be taken home. My intelligent self knew that if I had known, I would have acted differently, but this knowledge had little or no effect on the extremely painful feelings that I was experiencing day after day.

Anthony encouraged me to visualize an alternative narrative. To imagine moment by moment what would happen if I had taken him home instead of persuading him to stay in the hospital. I found this extremely difficult at first, I could imagine investigating the possibilities of bringing him home, of engaging a nurse and arranging for a hospital bed to be brought to our flat. I got as far as imagining the ambulance people bringing him up the flight of stairs to the room I had prepared for him. But it was really difficult to continue the story.

At first, I found it very difficult to imagine him actually in his bedroom and actually dying there. But I persisted and over a week I was able to visualize everything from the point of deciding to bring him home and preparing a room for him and then imagining his death at home. I was able to borrow from the actual experiences. For example, there was a very compassionate nurse who had helped him in the hospital. In my imagination, she was in the bedroom at home. I remembered the night I spent stroking and talking to him whilst he was dying and unconscious, but I reimagined these experiences and saw them in the bedroom in our flat with me sitting on one of our chairs and not the hospital chair.

This new experience became very real to me. Although I knew it was a new narrative, and I knew that it hadn’t happened this way, I was able to experience the events emotionally. It made such a difference, and afterwards I didn’t dwell on the original painful experience to the same extent. Over time that pain has receded: not the pain of his death, but the pain of the guilt that I felt around the circumstances of his death.

In some ways, it feels like magic. I know how things happened. I know the real story of how John died. But I have been able to overcome the extremely painful feelings of guilt and responsibility that had troubled me so deeply and for such a long time. Something had changed, and it has helped me to recover. I’m not sure I forgive myself entirely for not being aware enough at the time to act differently, but I’m not punishing myself for my oversight anymore.

Learning Points from Stephanie’s Story

I’ve re-read Stephanie’s story many times over the last few years, but I still feel very moved by it. Her story gives us an idea of how simple, yet powerful, therapeutic reimagining can be. Although she says, “At first I found it extremely difficult to imagine,” she persists over one week and is able to add all of the details. Crucially, she is able to include the very moving emotional elements of her husband actually dying in his bedroom at home.

As a human being, I felt some resistance to suggesting she imagine this very emotionally challenging scene, especially knowing I would not be with her when she did. However, as a therapist, I knew there was a very good chance that if she did, she would be freed from endless toxic guilt. She would no longer be “haunted” by it and would get the closure that she needed.

In session, as soon as Stephanie said, “If I had known he was going to die, I would have looked after him at home,” I was immediately alerted to the possibility of using counterfactual thinking to redo the past. This was a classic “If I knew then what I know now” example of a situation in which we can use counterfactual thinking to heal a painful regret. In fact, whenever a client says, “If only” or “I wish,” it is a cue for therapeutic reimagining.

However, I don’t wait for the client to stumble across the answer. Instead, I ask questions like “What should have happened?” and “What could have happened differently?” These are the key questions that I encourage clients to ask themselves, in order to reimagine their life.

Another way in which to conceptualize what needs to happen differently is: what happened that shouldn’t have happened, for example trauma; and what didn’t happen that should have, for example being loved by one’s parents as a child, or getting to say goodbye before the death of a loved one. Although she never wrote about it in her brief story, saying all the things she had wanted to say to her husband before he died was another aspect of Stephanie’s healing in her therapeutic reimagining. It helped give her closure and is sometimes called a completion portrayal when done in the therapy room. We had never discussed doing a completion portrayal in session. However, her creative unconscious guided her in doing it on her own.

Trusting the Client’s Creative Unconscious

Although I offer lots of ideas and suggestions, it is always the client’s choice of what new narrative they will create in their therapeutic reimagining at home. Sometimes, I suggest they write a letter to their younger self or even an internalized parent, imparting important information about their future that will help their younger self. However, they often come back the following week and rather sheepishly say, I did the homework, but not as you suggested. I usually say, “Great! I bet your creative unconscious mind came up with something even better than either of us could come up with in the session.” And often, they have.

This was the case in Viktor’s story. He had come to see me about his problem of forming relationships with women. After some time, we realized that part of the problem was connected with his relationship with his mother as a child. I suggested that maybe he should write a letter to his mother from his childhood, warning her that the way she was treating him would have serious consequences for him in the future.

However, he seemed to have intuitively known that his mother from the past wouldn’t have listened to his present-day self, so he chose to do the process in a very different way. He informed me that, instead, he had talked to his present-day mother (the version of her in his head) who “instantly knew what to do,” he said. She then talked to her younger self, explaining why she must desist from her harsh treatment of him. Victor explained that it was hard work even for his present-day mother to get through to her younger self, but eventually she succeeded. This all occurred at home as a conversation in his mind between these parts of himself, which he created entirely on his own.

Now that he had found a viable solution that was believable to him, Viktor was able to imagine his mother being different in his childhood, he was able to experience a number of therapeutically reimagined scenes, where she did not treat him so harshly. Victor reported that the effect of this work on his present-day relationships with women, had been rapid and transformational.

All of the nine stories in the book are very different and so the therapeutic reimagining scenes that they needed were also very different, but it is always the client who decides what they need. However, I do always encourage the client to experience the emotions of the new scenes, so that it feels real, as this is a key ingredient in making the outcome therapeutic.

Why ‘Therapeutic Reimagining’ Works

Some of the theory of why it works comes from the neuroscience of memory reconsolidation and the juxtaposition of old and new memories. Creating an imaginary alternate timeline with a new narrative may allow the brain to un-anchor from the old painful memory. However, it is more important to understand psychologically what was needed in the past and to know how to do the process of therapeutic reimagining than to understand why it works at a neuronal level. This is what the book provides, a roadmap for the process. The nine client stories offer lots of examples of what could be reimagined and how they did it.

Although I do explain some of the theory of why the technique works in the main chapters, I’ve gone a lot deeper into the theoretical underpinnings of the process for mental health professionals in “Appendix A for therapists” at the back of the book.

How Hard do Clients Find Therapeutic Reimagining?
For some clients like Stephanie, who had been dealing with chronic toxic guilt, the solution and resolution of the problem can be surprisingly rapid because they have always unconsciously known the solution. “If I had known he was going to die, I would have looked after him at home,” she said. If we stay alert, we can often notice that the client has already glimpsed an alternate timeline that will allow them to create a new narrative. All we need to do is encourage them to explore that new path.

With others, it may take longer as the client hits some blocks to doing therapeutic reimagining. We saw this in Victor’s story. Initially, he could not see his mother in his childhood treating him any differently, not even if he explained to her the consequences of her actions in a letter. However, he quickly came up with an ingenious solution of speaking to his internalized mother from the present who was able to persuade herself from the past. I’m often amazed and delighted by my client’s creative unconscious ability to find exactly what they need to set themselves free.

There have been a few clients for whom therapeutic reimagining didn’t work initially, until we figured out what the block was. For example, Fergus, who had a problem with catastrophizing events in the future. When he first tried to use the technique, instead of imagining therapeutic outcomes, he simply catastrophized the past instead of the future, and we abandoned using it for some time as it was not helpful. However, one day we did get to the bottom of what function catastrophizing was fulfilling for him, and then he was able to use the process therapeutically.

Is it Safe When the Client’s Sense of Reality is Distorted?
Some clients are already living constantly in a fantasy world, one where they are always the hero. This was beautifully depicted in the film, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty played by Ben Stiller. With such clients, it is important to first confront them with the reality of their actual life before using therapeutic reimagining otherwise they would most likely do what Fergus did above, take his defense into the reimagined past, which would have no therapeutic benefit.

The process of therapeutic reimagining was even used successfully with a client who was recovering from psychosis and hospitalization, and was still taking anti-psychotic medication. However, it was only after thoroughly assessing the client’s current grasp on reality that I considered using it with him. Additionally, I regularly checked with him to see that he was completely aware of the differences between his actual life and the therapeutically reimagined scenes that he created to resolve attachment issues with his father.

Clients who Might Struggle to do Therapeutic Reimagining

One category of clients who often find therapeutic reimagining more difficult to do at home on their own is people with ADHD. These clients, who struggle to remain focused enough to imagine scenes outside of sessions, may need the work to be done as a portrayal in the therapy room instead. Similarly, some clients might need the work to be done in session for their therapist to help them regulate their emotions. My experience, however, has shown me that our clients are often more resilient than we believe and able to reimagine scenes that are healing.

***

Although Reimagine Your Life was conceived as a book that could help a lot of people who can’t for some reason access therapy, therapeutic reimagining was born in my psychotherapy practice as a way of accelerating clients’ progress. Simply put, clients were able to get much further forward in their healing journey by empowering them and encouraging them to continue their transformational work outside of sessions.

Louis Cozolino on the Integration of Neuroscience into Psychotherapy—and its Limitations

Posted on May 31, 2016February 26, 2026 by rezendevknowfully.com

Neuroscience or Neuro-psychobabble?

Sudhanva Rajagopal: Lou Cozolino, you are a psychologist and professor of psychology at Pepperdine University, where you were a teacher of mine. You’re a prolific writer and researcher on topics ranging from schizophrenia, child abuse, the long-term effects of stress, and, more recently, neuroscience in psychotherapy and the brain as a social organ.As a clinician in training, it seems like there is a lot of neuroscience talk out there in our field, and it gets used to legitimize anything from specific interventions to whole theoretical orientations. My first question to you is, for the clinician in training, how do you recommend that we see through the noise of all that to what is actually helpful in the room with a client? How does knowledge of neuroscience play out in the room and what is actually important for the clinician to know?

Louis Cozolino: There are two main realms where neuroscience can aid clinicians. One is case conceptualization and the other is for clients who aren’t really open to a psychotherapeutic framework or an emotional framework. For them a neuroscientific explanation or conceptualization of their problem is often something they can grasp while they can’t or won’t grasp other things.

People who learn a half a dozen words about neuroscience think they’re neuroscience literate.

But there’s so much psychobabble and neuro-psychobabble out there, and the thing is if you say something is the amygdala as opposed to saying it’s anxiety or fear-based, you haven’t really upgraded the quality of the discourse. You just substituted one word for another. So the risk is that people who learn a half a dozen words about neuroscience think they’re neuroscience literate.

Learning neuroscience takes dedication. It takes work to get beyond the cocktail level of conversation and clichés. It took me ten years to feel like I had any sense of what was going on and I studied it pretty intensively. So I think we all have to be careful, but even more importantly, just because you know some neuroscience doesn’t mean you know anything more than the therapist who doesn’t. It’s really about how you use that information to upgrade the quality of the work you’re doing.

SR: In your book, Why Therapy Works: Using Your Mind to Change Your Brain, you say that science in many ways is just another metaphor. Do you think there are dangers to people using neuroscience to legitimize their work?

LC: Well, sure. There’s a fellow, Daniel Amen, who does these SPECT scans of people and he’s been selling them for thousands of dollars for probably 20 years now. It’s hard to know whether any of his data has any meaning. All we know is he’s made a hell of a lot of money doing them. The danger is in selling things before you know that they have any legitimacy, so you have to watch out for snake oil salesmen just like you do when you’re buying carpets and used cars.

SR: So how do you recommend that someone like me goes about finding and learning about neuroscience in a way that’s helpful? How do I avoid the snake oil salesmen?

LC: It’s important to realize that knowing neuroscience doesn’t make you a good clinician—in fact it doesn’t make you any kind of clinician at all. So I would say for beginning therapists, it’s probably best not to pay too much attention to neuroscience.Learn a few things about it but focus on getting the best supervision you can in a recognized form of psychotherapy—psychodynamic, cognitive, behavioral, family systems, etc. And avoid the passing fancy of all of the new therapies; every day there’s a new therapy with a new set of letters in front of it.

SR: Yeah there are so many different kinds of therapies these days.

LC: Try to learn something that isn’t just a fad, because the fads—I’ve watched hundreds of them come and go over my years. But if you cleave to psychodynamic training and cleave to cognitive behavioral, Gestalt, family systems training—those are the things that you can hang your hat on. Then you can learn the fads to add to your tool box. The fads are very sexy and they create the illusion of understanding because they’ve got fancy terms and nice workbooks and such, but really you’re not a thinker when you’re doing those things, you’re more of a mechanic.Now neuroscience is sort of like a sidecar to conceptualization, but you’ve got to remember the motorcycle is the real tried and true way of thinking about clients. You know, what is a particular problem? What is mental distress or mental illness? Where does it come from developmentally and what are the tried and true ways of approaching it and treating it?

Every Therapy is Embedded in Culture

SR: Speaking of tried and true ways of thinking, you say in your book, “Psychotherapy is not a modern invention, but a relationship-based learning environment grounded in the history of our social brains. Thus the roots of psychotherapy go back to mother-child bonding, attachment to family and friends, and the guidance of wise elders.” My question is, where do you think psychotherapy fits in to the context of healing traditions that have been around for millennia?

LC: Well, I think one thing that seems to be different over the last hundred years in psychotherapy is a kind of structured recognition of the fact that the therapist is imperfect and contributes in a lot of different ways to the problems. The tradition of wise elders was one of an authoritarian stance: This is the truth and I’ll take you on this journey with me to change you into my likeness. To whatever degree psychotherapy has evolved past that has to do with the self-analysis of the therapist and the recognition that whatever pathology exists in the relationship between client and therapist, some—hopefully not the majority, but some—pathology in the relationship comes from the therapist.That type of recognition is a step forward. There are probably some steps backward too. Often psychotherapy is ahistorical and acultural—or at least tries to be—but every therapy is embedded in culture. There is a kind of pretense about an objective scientific stance that is just a fantasy. So in some ways, wise elders in a tribal context with a long history are probably advantageous for some people as compared to psychotherapy.

SR: I was flipping through the index of your book and noticed the word “culture” appears exactly once, though you do talk about the wisdom of the ancients, about Buddhism and Confucianism and some of the Indian traditions. Seems to me that once we start relying on these kind of generalized, evolutionary, and biological forces as explanations for things, there’s a risk of painting people’s lived experience with a pretty broad brush. What’s your take on the importance of culture as it relates to neuroscience and psychotherapy?

LC: From an evolutionary perspective, a basic principle is biodiversity, and culture is too blunt an instrument to understand people because there are so many differences within culture. I think in terms of every individual being an experiment of nature. Every family is a culture in and of itself, and the more different someone’s cultural background is from mine, the more there is for me to learn. I think that culture needs to be interwoven into every sentence of every book, not just included in some special chapter of a book.

SR: From my point of view, many of these older cultural practices have been repackaged and rebranded as psychotherapy theories and techniques. The “mindfulness revolution” and transcendental meditation are based on ancient cultural traditions, but they are marketed as if they are especially effective because they are “new” and “evidence-based.” What is your stance on that?

LC: Having studied religion and philosophy and Sanskrit starting back when I was in college in the 70s, the self-awareness of meditation has been part my worldview since long before it became a cottage industry. But even back then there was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the Beatles, and it was coming into the cultural context. Now people have figured out how to package it as a way to sell more therapy, which isn’t all bad, but runs the risk of becoming “the answer.”

I think we’re in a race between global destruction and global consciousness, so we’ll see who gets to the finish line first.

What I’ve been hoping for since I first discovered Buddhism in the 1960s, is that as the world gets smaller and as people from different cultures communicate more, the wisdom of the ancient Eastern philosophies will be interwoven with Western technology and we’ll come to some higher level synthesis of understanding and consciousness. I think we’re in a race between global destruction and global consciousness, so we’ll see who gets to the finish line first.

SR: Can you say more about that?

LC: Well, it’s a slow evolutionary process for the types of awareness that people four or five thousand years ago discovered in India and Tibet, in China, in Japan, to penetrate Western culture. The Western world view is so different—for so many people it’s almost impossible to conceptualize an internal world; everything is external. Everything is about creation, growth, and, in a more destructive sense, conquering and genocide.So there are forces of destruction—of each other and of the planet—on the one hand and then there are the forces of consciousness and wholeness and a sense of oneness of the species on the other. So will we understand that we’re all brothers and sisters on a spaceship before we destroy the spaceship?

“There only needs to be a piece of you that’s a psychologist”

SR: How can psychotherapy play a positive role in this race you’re talking about? Or psychotherapy as we know it in the Western world?

LC: Well, one of the problems with psychotherapy as I see it is that psychotherapists tend to be sort of passive—they retreat from the world of leadership and create very insulated relationships in their consulting rooms. But for the field of psychotherapy to have any impact, it has to be expressed politically and socially. The types of ideas and theories that we’ve researched and studied, like the importance of early child rearing, self-awareness, authoritarian personalities, positive psychology and so much else, need to become part of political discourse both to elevate it and also have an impact on how resources are distributed.

One of the problems with psychotherapy as I see it is that psychotherapists tend to be sort of passive—they retreat from the world of leadership and create very insulated relationships in their consulting rooms.

Evolution is a slow, meandering process. All you have to do is watch the Republican debates to see that. It reminds me of junior high school in the Bronx in New York where we used to engage in chop fights, which was all about humiliating the manhood of other guys just to get a one-up. It doesn’t make me optimistic about the evolution of consciousness, but we’ll see what happens.

SR: I want to move onto something you said in your preface that I liked a lot: “Like monks and soldiers, therapists of all denominations assume that God is on their side.” What do you think are the limitations of psychotherapy and where does it come up short against the human condition, cultural walls or seemingly immovable, systemic injustice? In other words, when do we have to admit that psychotherapy is just not helpful or effective?

LC: The risk with psychology and psychotherapy is that it can lean too much in the direction of helping people tolerate rather than fight against oppression. Self-awareness and self-compassion are crucial experiences and skills that we foster as psychotherapists, but there needs to be a balance there. You can’t become too much of a psychologist. There only needs to be a piece of you that’s a psychologist and there’s another piece of you that has to be willing to go out and fight for systemic change.

As I said before, psychologists tend to watch from the sidelines, and that’s why as a field it has relatively little impact. In fact, the profession gets a lot of bad press because there are plenty of famous psychologists who do staggeringly immoral and unethical things. They are the basis of the cartoon version of the therapist nodding their head and going, “uh huh.”

SR: You talk about psychology as being an essentially solitary profession. Are there people you can think of who aren’t standing on the sidelines?

LC: Psychologists you mean?

SR: Yeah, psychologists.

LC: No. Can you?

SR: Not off the top of my head.

LC: Psychologists are really good at telling other people they should do something. It’s sort of like life by proxy.

SR: Indeed.

LC: Another problem in psychotherapy is a lack of appreciation or respect for anger; anger is always something you’re supposed to manage. Or you’re supposed to learn how to behave appropriately in society, but that’s not always an appropriate response, especially if you’re a member of an oppressed group. It’s really important sometimes to go on picket lines and carry bricks and defend yourself and make a lot of noise.I very much respect the Black Lives Matter movement and I watch them in these Trump rallies, and they’re getting pushed around. It breaks my heart because it reminds me of a lot of bad memories from childhood during the Civil Rights Movement. And I’m sure you’ve seen pictures too of what happened in India with the British, of people being hosed and slaughtered. There’s a tendency in human behavior to objectify differences and we really need to fight against and not tolerate that. I’m hoping that, given that Trump is consolidating and activating the anger of people in this culture against immigrants and foreigners and God knows what else, that it also energizes the liberal base and brings out a new progressive movement as well.

SR: Absolutely, but this idea of psychologists carrying bricks and taking up arms seems really at odds to me with this image we have of psychologists as dispassionate observers, people who are sitting in their therapy chairs saying, “uh huh.”My interests lie in political action as well and I do remember, at least from my dad’s generation and my grandfather’s generation, thinking about British rule and the independence movement in India and the idea of people really taking a stand. But that doesn’t seem like something psychologists really do. Even in the room with a client, we’re not taught to take a stance on things, you know?

LC: In fact it’s the opposite. Everything that we believe is interpreted as countertransference and non-neutral. It creates a real rift in people. It’s hard to imagine that a lot of younger psychologists with any sort of a political drive would be attracted to psychology. It will continue to attract people who want to stay on the sidelines in the world or avoid the conflict.

SR: How is that going to change?

LC: In truth I don’t know. In the 60s we had something called community psychology, which was very radical at the time and which still exists, but it’s not prominent at all anymore. One of the main focuses of community psychology was to identify those people in the community or in the tribe that other people went to for assistance—people like hairdressers and bartenders and cab drivers. These are the people that folks in trouble tended to talk to, so community psychology emphasized educating people in the community that were sort of hubs of interaction. The field has gotten so much more insular since then.

Transitioning From a Beta to an Alpha

SR: I want to go back to something you said about anger that intrigued me. I’m just thinking back to discussions and supervision I’ve had in training, and whenever anger comes up, you’re told there’s something “behind” the anger. You know, there’s shame behind the anger, or sadness behind the anger. How do you feel about anger as just a primary kind of emotion? And do you think it has value both for the therapist and for the client?

LC: If you’re going to become empowered, if you’re going to transition from a beta to an alpha in your life, you really need to be able to get back in touch with your anger because it can be very propulsive, very helpful in life. It evolved along with caretaking and nurturing because it’s not just necessary to feed and nurture babies, but to protect them.Anger is the only left-hemisphere emotion that we consider negative, but anger is a social emotion, unlike rage. It can be engaging, relational, constructive. In order to combat the social programming that leads to shame, we have to get at least somewhat angry—at both the voices in our head and out in the world that shame us, disempower us, keep us from speaking up.

When I think of somebody like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., I think of the courage it took to walk into angry crowds. It’s so moving to me and such a powerful act. We can’t just be passive about these voices in our head and in society. We have to get angry because our anger and our assertiveness and our power are all interconnected. If you give up your anger, you give up your power.

SR: Agreed. Tell me a little bit about your idea of the social synapse.

LC: The more I studied different physiologies, social psychologies, organisms, the more I realized that there is a very complex highway of information that connects us via pupil dilation and facial expression and body posture and tone of voice, and probably a hundred things that we haven’t even discovered yet.What we’re doing in psychotherapy, and in any relationship where we’re trying to be soothing and supportive and nurturant, is connecting across the synapse between you and someone else. You’re trying to create a synergy between the two of you and have an effect on their internal biochemistry that enhances their physical health, their brain development, their learning. If you’ve ever been with a really good teacher, you know that in part because you feel a lot smarter because you’re connecting with someone who’s stimulating your brain to work better. If you’re with a bad teacher, you feel dumber, and you get pissed off and angry. And there are not a lot of good teachers out there so you’ve got to cleave to the good ones.

But also there’s a different chemistry between different people. Someone who’s a good teacher for one person may not be a good one for another. Same thing with therapists. Every therapeutic relationship creates a new organism—a dyadic field— and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. The chemistry part we often don’t have any control over.

SR: Going back to the brain and neuroscience, where do you think we are in right now in the field and where are we headed?

LC: Well, we’re all over the place in brain science, but there is a great deal of focus right now on genetics. In other words, looking at the relationship between experience and interactions and how the molecular level of the brain gets constructed and changes over time in relation to the others and the environment. I think that the translation of parenting and relationships in psychotherapy into actual protein synthesis and brain building is an incredibly complicated but very important paradigm shift that is going to be playing out probably over the next century at least as we uncover those things.Another shift in neuroscience is getting past the phrenology of looking at individual brain regions related to specific tasks and starting to look at these new technologies that measure brain connectivity. In other words, how do different areas connect to regulate each other and synergize? The next step will be figuring out how two or more brains interact and stimulate each other.

I don’t know where the technology to research that is going to come from but I think it’s on the horizon. We’ve got to get beyond thinking about brains as individual organs and think about how they weave into relational matrices so we can understand human connection and have a scientific view for the types of things that Buddhists and Hindu meditators and Tibetan scholars have been thinking about for the last several thousand years or so.

Why Does Neuroscience Matter?

SR: How would you explain to an existential psychotherapist why these advances in technology and in brain science are at all important to what they do?

LC: I don’t know if they are important to what they do. I don’t think neuroscience is more important than Buddhism—it’s basically just another narrative.

SR: Interesting.

LC: It’s just another way of looking at things. Think about when you’re at a museum looking at an exhibit and you’re walking around it trying to experience it and appreciate it from a number of different angles.That’s pretty much what reality is. We walk around it and we have these different ways of thinking about it and explaining it that are partially satisfying and partially unsatisfying. Buddhism is incredibly satisfying a lot of the time and very unsatisfying some of the time. So when you get bored with one way of looking, you want to look at something in a different way. For me it’s interesting to combine and integrate different perspectives but I don’t think that you have to subjugate one to the other.

In the 1950s Carl Rogers was talking about how to create a healing relationship. Fast forward 65 years and now neuroscience is discovering pretty much what Rogers was talking about. Am I better off talking about it from that perspective than listening to Carl Rogers? I don’t know. But it makes me appreciate what Rogers says even more and in a deeper way when I can see it from this scientific perspective.

SR: That makes sense.

LC: If Buddha were alive, he’d say, “Of course,” right? “There’s 5,000 research studies you did, but all you needed to do was read the Sutra and you would have figured it out.”But I think it’s interesting to just keep learning about life from as many points of view as possible. When have your read enough novels?

Each novel you read is a new way of capturing the universe, and they’re entertaining and stimulating and make you feel human. I feel the same way about the sciences, which is why I love reading E.O. Wilson’s work on ants, because I learn a lot about humans by reading about ants. So many things we do are very ant-like. Plus, ants are interesting.

Nobody Has the Answer

SR: Ants are very interesting. That’s a great way to look at it and I completely agree. Moving away from neuroscience for a moment, I’m curious about how your clinical work has changed over the years.

LC: It’s changed constantly. When I started as a student of pastoral counseling at the Harvard Divinity School, Carl Rogers was one of my teachers, so my first real training was Rogerian. The reason I got interested in counseling in the first place was reading Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy. Then when I ended up at UCLA I realized you have to learn cognitive behavioral therapy whether you like it or not. So I was trained in that. I did a couple of years at a family therapy institute in Westwood in L.A. My supervisors were psychodynamic and my therapist at the time was a Jungian, and then I had a couple of other therapists who were psychodynamic and Gestalt.I was working with people who had been severely traumatized as kids, so I got interested in neuroscience through a study of memory, trying to figure out what the heck was going with the memories of people who’d suffered severe trauma.

Since then, my heart is more in the object relations world, I think mostly because it matches my personality and the type of relationships I like to create with people. But I’ve woven in neuroscience, attachment theory, a bit of EMDR, some meditation and self-awareness exercises. It’s a hodgepodge of all the different things that I’ve learned, but I don’t really feel like I’ve got a hammer and everybody who comes in is a nail. It’s more like I’ve got a toolbox of 30 or 40 years of things that I’ve been collecting and I try to figure out how to match as best I can to the needs and the interests of the client.

SR: Is there a certain population or certain pathologies that you’ve been working with more lately or that you’re more interested in?

LC: Not really. My practice is pretty general and I like to keep it that way. I don’t really like to see the same problem over and over again. I always think of psychotherapy as kind of like a collaborative research project. People come in and we work together to figure out what’s going on—how did it arise? Is there any hope of making it better? I really like having problems I haven’t dealt with before.

SR: What do you wish you’d known as a beginning clinician?

LC: When I started, I was looking for an answer and I wanted to know who had the answer. So

I tried to become a disciple of one person or another person. It took me quite a while to realize nobody has the answer. Everybody has a little piece of it.

And what I’ve got to do is just learn the best I can and then sacrifice and move on. This is a very ancient Rig Veda philosophy—every day you wake up, you sacrifice the day before, you move on, you create a new reality.

Had I understood this, I would have spent a lot less time worrying about finding the truth and being acceptable to whatever godhead I happened to run into at the moment. I think idolatry is the problem. Idolatry and objectification.

SR: It’s hard to avoid being exposed to that as a student. At least in my experience, in every new class you’re exposed to something people think is the answer, the best way to look at things.

LC: In my experience, the degree to which someone is enthusiastic and adamant about having “the answer” usually reflects the degree of insecurity they have and their lack of ability to tolerate their own ignorance. If we’ve learned anything, especially when it comes to diversity, it’s that we have to embrace our ignorance and be curious as opposed to leading with certainty.Jacob Bronowski was a physicist who died about 20 years ago, but he did this wonderful documentary about visiting Auschwitz, where his whole family was slaughtered. He waded into the mud behind the crematory and grabbed a handful of mud, realizing that his ancestors were part of this soil, and said, “This is what happens when we’re certain.”

Certainty leads to ideological beliefs that supersede humanity. At a less dramatic level, we get so enamored with our philosophies and our therapeutic beliefs that we miss our clients because we’re so convinced that we’ve got to convince them we’re right about the things we believe should be true.

SR: So last question here; where do you think the field as a whole is going?

LC: Well, I don’t think mental distress is going anywhere. I think that more and more people are going to be having psychological problems as society and civilization become increasingly crazy. No matter how many therapists the schools pump out, the world is creating plenty of suffering, so there will always be a need for therapy.And though there will always be therapists trying to create revolutionary new therapies with great acronyms, I think that the tried and true methods will remain strong and stay strong because they’re tapping into fundamental constructs in human experience—the need to connect with other people, to be able to leverage our thinking to modify our brains, to ask questions about ultimate meaning and existence.

Where the field is going to have to upgrade its sophistication and quality is in the areas of like pharmacology, epigenetics, psychoneuroimmunology, diet. All of the actual mechanisms that create and sustain our brains will have to become part of the dialogue about how we help people sustain and maintain health. This might just be my Eastern philosophy bias, but we’ll probably be moving in the direction of more holistic, integrated thinking and treatment—not just combining East and West, but integrating scientific discoveries into our case conceptualizations and treatments.

Finally, I hope that psychology becomes more integrated with education. I have a book series that I’m editing for W.W. Norton which is on the social neuroscience of education, and we’re pushing to have psychologists, neurologists, neuroscientists and educators communicate more so that the things we’re learning can be integrated into each field.

SR: Well that seems like a great place to end. Thank you so much for taking the time to share a bit about your work and your life with the readers of psychotherapy.net.

LC: It was a pleasure, thank you.

Interrupting the Conversation: Gestalt Therapy Here and Now

Posted on November 7, 2011February 26, 2026 by Psychotherapy.net Team

It’s well established in the clinical literature that the therapeutic relationship is of key importance; attending to client-therapist contact is a useful lens for any therapeutic practice, whatever the orientation. But how this knowledge is played out in the course of our work can be unclear. It is easy to get caught up in our clients’ ever-urgent presenting problems and try to “fix” whatever is wrong.

Part of the power of Gestalt therapy is that its focus is not on problem solving or on getting people to think differently. Rather, Gestalt calls us to attend closely to the here and now of the relationship, creating an encounter in which the client can develop awareness of the therapeutic encounter—what is happening to him between us in the moment.

Jim: A Case Study

Jim came into therapy because he was feeling “stuck” in his life. When he strode into my office for the first time, grabbed my hand, and pumped it a few times. He seemed like he was in a hurry to catch a bus. But despite his energetic demeanor and polished appearance, Jim was deeply unhappy. Forty-one years old and divorced, Jim had two children from his previous marriage. He felt that he was in a dead-end job in finance. He was also unhappy with his ability to have deep, enduring positive relationships with women and peers.

In the first two minutes of our initial session, as I went briefly over what I do and how I do it, Jim interrupted me. “That’s really good,” he said, “but here is what I want to talk to you about.”

“Jim, let me just finish,” I replied, and continued what I was saying.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah—I’ve got it.” Jim then barreled forward in great, great detail – overwhelming detail – explaining his concerns.

As he wrapped up his first monologue, I attempted to interject some thoughts about what he was saying; I particularly wanted to explore his relationships with women. As I asked my questions, he rolled right over me and continued to explain what it was that he thought I needed to know – completely oblivious to the idea that I was trying to explore what he had just said. I began to feel frustrated.

After a while, I said to him, “Jim, are you aware that every time I want to say something to you, you cut me off?”

But rather than respond to what I said, he raced on with his story about a terrible first date he’d recently been on. He explained that he had regaled his date with wild tales of his life. All the while he delivered his story, he did not look at me.

A few minutes later, I stopped him again and said, “Jim, I want you to notice as we talk what happens. I just want you to pay attention to what’s going on between us as we are talking. Not just what you’re saying to me, not just the ideas, but what’s happening between us.”

He answered me with a jerk of his head. “Okay, okay. Well, you did say that I don’t give you a chance.” He went on to tell me in greater detail the content of some of these stories with which he had entertained this beautiful young woman. “I can’t figure out,” he said, “how she couldn’t want to go out with me again!”

Now, in response to my repeated attempts to respond to him, Jim had raised his voice, was speaking even more quickly, and was leaning into me, gesticulating forcefully, as he explained to me in intricate detail how, after being so entertaining on this date, he couldn’t possibly have failed to get this woman’s attention.

Several minutes later, as I was preparing to say something, he raised his hands high, looked right at me, and said, “I know, I know. I need to let you talk.” But immediately he dropped his eyes and started up again. Clearly, he had noticed what I was doing but then had plunged forward into another rush of content.

This time I cut in firmly.

“You don’t ‘have’ to let me talk,” I said. “I’m just trying to help you notice what happens between us as I try to have this conversation. It’s very hard to get a word in edgewise.”

He stopped for a minute. Then, in a lower voice tinged at the end with an edge of sadness, he said, “You know, some of the women I’ve dated have complained to me about that.”

“Really?” I said wryly, with a slight amount of mock curiosity.

“They say I’m so enthusiastic that I never ask them about themselves.”

“What do you think it’s like to be in a relationship with somebody who does that, Jim?”

He paused again. “Ahh…Probably not great.”

“Probably not.”

“You know,” he said, “what you’re saying reminds me of the way it was at my dinner table. Everybody talked non-stop, especially my father and my brothers. It was hard to get a word in edgewise. We all fought for the mike, trying to get someone to listen to us.”

“Well, it’s obvious from the way you are now that it’s something you are still doing,” I replied.

“You’re right.” His face grew sad. “Do you think that has anything to do with my problem developing close relationships?”

“Of course I do. You’ve already told me that people have pointed this out, but clearly their pointing it out hasn’t had much of an impact on you.”

He shook his head sheepishly and looked down. “You’re right,” he repeated. After this, he began to look at me with a little bit of interest, with more respect and curiosity. He became a little more interested in what I had to say, as well as to notice his own voice. From a Gestalt perspective, he started becoming more aware of how he was interacting in the session. This, in turn, heightened his awareness of his internal experience as well as the impact of his behavior on me.

As the session continued, Jim began to be more aware not just of what he was saying, but how he was saying it. By the end, he was noticing how often he interrupted me. He seemed sadder, and his bullet-train monologue had slowed down. As I looked in his eyes, I could see a slight clouding and the beginning of a sorrowful look, as opposed to his earlier wild, intense expression. As he started to calm down, he paid more attention to me, and in the process, his sadness began to well up inside of him.

At the end of the session, he asked, “Is there something I can do?”

“I just want you to pay attention the best you can, between now and the next time we meet, to see if you can notice when you feel like interrupting anyone—before you do it.”

“This was really helpful,” he said, leaving.

The Here and Now: A Historical Perspective

Unlike other forms of psychotherapy, what was important to me with Jim in this first session was not understanding his history or his concerns in detail. Rather, from the very beginning of the session, I was paying attention to how we were together. What was important to me was the nature of contact, how we engaged each other. In this case, what I focused on was the experience of Jim not being able to listen to me, his talking a mile a minute, his inability to respond, and the fact that he was semi-disengaged from me and what I was saying.

So, from the very beginning of the session, I focused on raising his awareness, helping him to begin to notice how he was saying what he was saying as well as the quality of our engagement. Throughout the first session, I did not concentrate on gathering details of his life, trying to teach him how to combat the thoughts in his head, or trying to establish a relationship by getting to know him. I was primarily interested in helping him to experience the process of how we are together.

The Gestalt approach originated in the late ’40s with a group of New York intellectuals objected to psychoanalysis, which they saw as severely limited because it focused on pathology, as opposed to potential. These intellectuals—Laura and Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, and Ralph Hefferline, among others—responded to this lack by creating a more open, engaged, enlivened psychotherapeutic experience, one focused on liberation and growth, which allowed the human personality to transcend the limitations of the defenses.

Gestalt took people off the couch and put them into a face-to-face encounter with the therapist. Rather than intellectual analysis, Gestalt’s primary vehicles were awareness and contact. In focusing on the “here and now” encounter, Gestalt made a left turn from psychoanalysis and brought the idea of the experience of the client into the therapy process, as well as the presence of the therapist into the encounter. It’s a relationship, and the therapeutic process emerges out of the relationship.

In its early days, Gestalt was closely connected to the work of Fritz Perls, who rightly or wrongly, was perceived as narcissistic and at times insensitive. Because of his aggressive approach, Gestalt got an unsafe, brutal, almost encounter-group-like reputation. But Perls was also incredibly bright and able to develop great insight into clients’ processes. In the years since its origins, Gestalt has emerged as a philosophy and methodological approach that is used by psychotherapists all over the world. While it is still true to the basic foundational principles outlined by its founders, Gestalt has evolved into a model that truly allows clients to experience themselves and use their resources to create fundamental change in themselves.

Moving Forward

In the Gestalt process, as the client makes contact and begins to experience himself in relationship to the other, his self becomes more visible to him and to his therapist. As Jim became more aware of what was going on inside of him, his self began to emerge in the moment. He began to be able to access his internal world in a different way than he had before, and he began to be more aware of the impact of his behavior on others.

As the therapy progressed, he began to feel and express sadness about his low quality of life; and as he experienced his feelings more, his engagement with me improved. Rather than talking at me, he made eye contact and talked to me about his sadness and loneliness, and his inability to be successful in the way he wanted to be with women and with peers.

One of the things that he discovered in our encounters was that as he began to interrupt less and focus more on what I had to say, he became more anxious and unsure of himself. He realized talking so much was an effort to relieve his anxiety—he was scared to slow down and engage people in a more intimate way. Clearly, Jim began to encounter on a deeper level the core issues that were troubling him about his current existence.

Staying in the Present While Working With the Past

One of the myths that have floated around the therapy world for many years is that Gestalt is only about the present. Somehow the here-and-now focus of the Gestalt approach created an impression that the past was never dealt with in Gestalt therapy. What is different about Gestalt is not whether the past is dealt with, but how it is dealt with.

As I worked with Jim through our relationship in the moment, his past began to emerge in a historical way. At one stage, when I pointed out to him that he never responded to what I said, but rather told me whatever came to mind in reaction to my words, some childhood memories emerged forcefully. As a child, he told me, his parents had always been telling him what to do, talking at him, and very seldom listening to him or taking what he said and making that the focus of the conversation. In other words, as I pointed out in our sessions what was happening in the present, Jim’s past began to emerge organically.

In another moment in the therapy when Jim tuned into a feeling of sadness at his current lack of relationships, he began to talk about how difficult it was that his family was isolated. They didn’t have very many family friends, and didn’t spend much time together as a unit. As a result, Jim did not have a lot of practice at engaged relationship building.

In this way, the past is slowly unwound and filtered into the present. Early childhood issues emerge in the moment and are dealt with in the moment, rather than being called up intellectually by taking a history.

When the past does emerge in Gestalt therapy, we frequently bring it back into the present. For instance, when Jim brought up his mother, I often asked him to imagine her in the room and to say something to her, so that he was able to experience vividly his feelings about the past, in the present. As a result, he was more able to encounter and engage the impact of the past on his behavior today.

Jim’s Turning Point

Jim slowly became able to notice his own tendency to coopt conversations with his own thoughts rather than respond to what others were saying. He recognized that this was keeping him from deepening his relationships. As Jim’s therapy continued, he began not only to listen, but for the first time also to respond to those around him.

At this point in the therapy process, he met a woman named Sarah. The interesting part for Jim was that he met her on a flight home from a business trip. While he was sitting next to her on the plane, he had what he called his “little Norman bird” on his shoulder, who told him he needed to listen to what she had to say, draw her out, and try to understand her perspective, instead of regaling her as he always did with vignettes from his life.

He spent time talking to Sarah and really used his newfound skills. They got into what he called “a wonderful conversation.” They had so much fun on the plane that Sarah gave him her number. He asked her out and she accepted. They began to date.

It was important for Jim to handle the dating process a completely new way. Rather than focusing on trying to interest her in himself and thereby driving her away, he actually reversed the process and listened; and as he spent time getting to know her, she became increasingly interested in learning about him.

In addition to his budding relationship with Sarah, Jim began to do a better job in his work environment. He had always been semi-successful professionally, but as he became more engagement savvy and able to build relationships with people, his rapport with his employees began to flourish. Previously, those who reported to him at work had seen him only as a windbag and taskmaster. As he began to change, his employee satisfaction scores rose and he even got promoted, solely because his employees began to experience him as a more effective manager and leader.

Jim’s Ability to Live a Fuller Life: The Goal of Gestalt

As Jim engaged more fully in life by actively listening and responding to what was happening around him, life in turn rewarded him. This is one of the most powerful parts of psychotherapy, and of Gestalt therapy specifically. Jim received more attention from women as they began to feel like he was interested in them. Jim’s colleagues noticed his new responsiveness and relative ease at engagement. All of these changes emerged as a result of struggling in the encounter.

Of course, my work with Jim was much richer and more multifaceted than it has been presented here, but focusing on this particular issue illustrates what happens in the Gestalt therapy process and how the world can begin to seem different to our clients. He heard more. He was more aware. He took more personal responsibility. He really heard what people said and it had more of an impact on him, he was able to be touched by others. He got more positive feedback and support from the world as his self evolved.

This, then, is the heart of Gestalt therapy: to help our clients expand and meet their potential for fuller, more rewarding lives, while always starting in the moment, wherever they happen to be. For Gestalt therapists, strengthening the therapeutic relationship by attending to contact in the here and now of the session is not merely an end in itself; rather, it is by attending to the quality of connection in that moment that the client learns how to be present, both with his own internal experience and in relationship with the therapist. This awareness itself is the catalyst for change, opening new doors of possibility to both the past and the future.

Violet Oaklander on Gestalt Therapy with Children

Posted on November 7, 2011February 26, 2026 by rezendevknowfully.com

An Unorthodox Notion

Rafal Mietkiewicz: Violet, what makes me curious is that you are trained as a Gestalt therapist and people connect you with Gestalt therapy, but Gestalt therapy was mainly considered, at least here in Europe, to work primarily with adults. How did you find your way to do Gestalt therapy with the kids?

Violet Oaklander: I was already working with emotionally disturbed children in the schools when I got interested in Gestalt therapy. One of my children became very ill and died. I was very depressed. My friend was going to Esalen Institute to be in a group for a week with Jim Simkin, so I went with him, and I was so impressed with what happened to me. It made such a difference for me that when I came back, I started training in the Los Angeles Gestalt Therapy Institute, and while I was training, I thought, “How could I apply this to children?”It seemed very organic to me. Fritz Perls talked about the body and senses and all of that. I found that it fit my work with children and child development. And of course, over the years, I started using a lot of creative media, like drawing and clay and puppets and music, because that’s the only way it would interest children. But behind that, the basis of my work was Gestalt therapy theory and philosophy. And I developed it more and more as time went by. That’s how it got started.

RM: That’s what you wrote in your book—that children already know, but they are wearing special glasses, so you just take the glasses off?

VO: Yeah. I have many stories working with kids. I’m trying to think of when I first started. When I first began, I was working in the schools with maybe a group of 12 children. And they were older—maybe 12 and 13 years old, all boys. These were kids that didn’t make good contact; they didn’t connect very well with other children.I started doing things that were sort of different. I would have them finger paint. I’d line up the desks so it was like a table, and they’d stand around the table finger painting. At first, they didn’t want to do it. “It’s for babies.” But while they were finger painting, they would talk to each other, make really good contact. And of course it was important to establish boundaries—what they could not do and what they could do. So that was very clear.

Another thing I started doing was bringing in wood, and they would build things. These were children who weren’t allowed to hold a hammer or a saw because they were very disturbed children—it was dangerous. But I saw other classes had wood and got to build things, so I got that. And they had rules: they couldn’t swing the saw or the hammer, or else they had to sit down that day.

I wouldn’t let them build guns, but they could build boxes and birdhouses, and they would work together because they had to share the tools. You would not believe they were emotionally disturbed children. They were making such good contact and really enjoying this. I did many things like that.

RM: You look like you really enjoy your work.

VO: Oh, yeah. I even had the old empty chair. I had two chairs in the front of the room, and when a kid would get really upset and angry, I would have him sit in the chair and talk to the empty chair.And the child that he was angry at might be in the room there, but he would be talking to the empty chair. And then I’d have him switch and say, “Well, what do you think he would say back to you?” and it was so amazing because he would realize that he was projecting. They didn’t know that word—they didn’t have that insight. But they could see that they were projecting their own stuff on the other boy.

It would be so amazing. They would come into the room and say, “I need the chairs.” They would talk to a teacher who had yelled at them outside. They would talk to that teacher, and then they would begin to see that the reason the teacher yelled at them is because they did something they weren’t supposed to do. They knew this, but when they sat in the empty chair, they’d say, “Well, I yelled at you because you hit this other boy!” And then I’d say, “Now, what do you say to that?” They’d say, “Yeah, I guess I did. I did do that, yeah.” It was just little things like that that I began to do, to experiment with some of the techniques.

After I left teaching and I was in private practice, I thought a lot about what I was doing, and I started developing a therapeutic process that was based on Gestalt therapy, beginning with the “I-thou” relationship, and looking at how the child made contact, and then building his sense of self and helping him to express his emotion.

RM: It seems like you combine a bunch of techniques and approaches in your work—like expressive art therapy or child group therapy.

VO: Yeah. We do a lot of sensory work. I mentioned finger painting—anything they can touch. Clay is incredibly sensory and evocative. If it seems like they need to do some movement, we do that. Sometimes we play creative dramatics—charades—because to show something, you have to really be in touch with your body. We might start with fingers: “What am I doing? Now, you do something.” And they think of something and they have to use fingers to act it out.And then maybe we do a sport—they have to show with their body what sport they’re playing, and I have to guess. It might be obvious, but they enjoy doing that anyway—maybe catching a ball or hitting with a bat or tennis racquet. They have to get in touch with their body to do that.

The projective work with drawings and the clay is also very important, because this is how they can project what’s inside of them and then own it. One example is a boy who had a lot of anger but he kept it inside. He presented himself as just very nice and sweet, and nothing was wrong with his life. It was only after I asked him to make something, anything—I usually say, “Close your eyes and just make something, and then you can finish it with your eyes open”—he made a whale, and told a whole story about how the whale had a family—a mother and a father and sister.

What I always do after they tell the story is try to bring it back, so I said, “Well, does that fit for you? Do you have a family like that?” He said, “No, my father lives far away because he and my mother don’t live together. I never see him.” “Well, how do you feel about that?” And then we started talking about his father, which he would never have mentioned, and all this feeling came up. It’s very powerful.

The First Session

RM: How do you approach the first session with a child?

VO: I always meet, if possible, with the parents and the child the first session, because I want the child to hear whatever the parents tell me. I don’t want the parents to tell me things and have the child not know what they told me.Even if the parents are saying bad things about the child, the child needs to hear what I hear from the parents.

Usually in the first session, I have a checklist, and very often I would put it on a clipboard. First I would say, “Why are you here?” and all that. Then I would ask the child these questions. “Do you have a good appetite? Do you have bad dreams?” A whole list of questions.

Sometimes the parent would chime in, but mostly it’s to the child. It was a way of really making a connection with the child. Of course, if they were very, very young, four years old, maybe I’d still ask these questions, but not everything—and use language they could understand.

That’s always pretty much the first session. But if there are no parents involved—because I saw many kids who were in foster homes or group homes—the first session is an important one to establish some kind of connection or relationship. Sometimes I’d ask the child to draw a picture on that first session. I’d ask them to draw a house-tree-person. But I wouldn’t interpret it. It’s not for interpretation. It was to say to them when they were done, “Well, this picture tells me that you keep a lot of things to yourself. Does that fit for you?”—because maybe they wouldn’t draw many windows. And they usually would say “yes.” Or, “This picture tells me that you have a lot of anger inside of you. Does that fit for you?” If they’d say, “No, I’m not angry,” I’d say, “Oh, okay. I just need to check out what I think it tells me,” and we would have that kind of a session.

I did that once with a very resistant 16-year-old girl who at first said she wouldn’t speak to me. And when we finished, she wanted her sister and her mother to come in and do that drawing. So it’s a way of connecting.

But we don’t always do that. If it’s a child who is very frightened—I had a girl, for instance, who was very severely sexually abused for many years, and it finally came out when she was about 11, and she was removed from the home. So she was in a foster home, but the foster mother was very devoted to her and came in, too.

But she was very, very frightened and didn’t want to talk to me. So in the beginning we would take a coloring book, and we’d both color in the book. And we wouldn’t really talk about anything. I’d say to her, “Should I use red for this bird? What do you think?” and just begin to connect with her that way. Pretty soon I was asking her, “Well, what do you think the bird would say if it could talk?”—that kind of thing.

Pay Attention

RM: It’s my guess that you don’t really diagnose kids in clinical terms.

VO: No. I mean, sometimes I would have to for an insurance company. But it’s a matter of seeing where they’re at, where they’re blocked. I had one boy who walked very stiffly all the time. He was 11 years old. And I thought, “Maybe we need to do something to help him loosen up before we even talk about his feelings”—that kind of diagnosis.

RM: So, you don’t find clinical diagnosis useful in therapy?

VO: Not very much, no.

RM: You trust in what you see and what you feel about the kid.

VO: What I see, yeah.If, for example, the child has a lot of difficulty making a relationship with me, that’s what we have to focus on, because I can’t do anything unless we have that relationship. Sometimes children have been very hurt and damaged so early, they have trouble making a relationship. So we have to figure out how we could do that.

I used to see a lot of adolescents who were arrested by the police because they had committed a crime. I was involved in a program where they would send these children to counseling. It was a special program they were trying. So this one girl came in. She had to come—she had no choice. She was 14. She wouldn’t look at me, she wouldn’t talk to me. She just sat there. Naturally when a child does that, it makes you have to come forward more. Well, it didn’t work. So I thought, “Maybe I cannot see this girl. Maybe I have to refer her to another person.”

I went out into the waiting room the next time she came, and she was reading a magazine. I sat down next to her and I said, “What are you reading?” She flashed the cover at me. I said, “I didn’t see it,” so she held it up.

RM: And that was the beginning of contact.

VO: Yeah. Already we were making contact. And it was a music magazine about different groups. I said, “I don’t know anything about that. Could we look at it together?” So we went into my office and looked at the magazine, and she was telling me about the different groups. It was mostly heavy metal. And she was all excited, telling me about the groups and which ones she liked.We tried to find the music on the radio because I said, “I don’t know what it sounds like.” We couldn’t find it, so she said she would bring in a tape. The next week, she brought it in and we listened together. Some of the songs were so amazing—all these feelings and anger. So we just started working with that. And we had a relationship.

But we need to do that—start with where they are. Pay attention. I wasn’t paying attention in the beginning. It was only when I thought, “What am I going to do?”

RM: So apparently the child therapist must be very in touch with his own senses. I guess it’s more important than clinical knowledge.

VO: I think you’re right. You have to know things, but that’s most important—to be in touch with yourself. It’s not easy to be a child therapist. An adult comes in and says, “This is what I want to work on,” or, “This is what’s happening.” When a child comes in, she doesn’t have a sense of what she needs to do. And you have to talk to parents, and you have to talk to teachers, and that kind of thing, too. So it’s different.

RM: Do you do something particular to help bring each session to an end—to help bring the child back to “regular life?”

VO: I think the job of the therapist is to help the child express what’s going on inside. But I notice that most children will only express what they have the strength to, and then they get resistant or they close down. They take care of themselves better than adults that way.But if they do open up a lot, we have to pay attention to what I call “grounding” them. I have a policy that children have to help me clean up whatever we’ve used. So we start cleaning up and then I’ll say, “Well, that was hard. Maybe we’ll talk some more about it next time, but where are you going now?” or “What are you having for dinner?” or “What did you have for dinner?” We talk about regular things to help them come back to ground.

RM: I know that Gestalt therapists hate “shoulds,” but using a paradox, are there any “shoulds” that a good child therapist should obey?

VO: Nothing comes immediately to mind, other than things I’ve already said. But speaking of “shoulds,” it’s worth noting that children have a lot of “shoulds.” People don’t realize that, but children are very hard on themselves. They’re split—there’s a part of them that’s very critical of themselves and then a part of them that, of course, rebels against that. Sometimes we help them understand that, especially if they are adolescents.

RM: Do you touch or hug your clients?

VO: Sometimes, but I’ll always ask them. I might say, “Can I give you a hug?” I don’t just do it. I have to ask them. Or I might put my hand on their shoulder. I can tell if they pull away that that’s not a good thing to do. Or sometimes we shake hands. We do a little bit—not a lot.

Working with Parents

RM: Do you often talk to parents?

VO: Oh, yes. This girl that I just mentioned, she lived in a foster home, and they didn’t care about her, so they weren’t interested. They just did what they had to do. But yes, parents come in. Every three or four weeks they have to come in with the child. Sometimes we just have a family session and I don’t see the child individually. It depends. You have to just decide which is the best way to go.

RM: We have agreed that it’s important for therapists to be in touch with their own feelings. What other qualities should one have to be a good child therapist?

VO:

You have to understand child development so you have a sense of if the child is not at the level she needs to be at. You have to understand the process. You have to be in touch with yourself. You need to know when your own buttons are being pressed—in psychoanalytic vocabulary, they call it transference. You have to understand when you have some countertransference, and to deal with that and work with that.

RM: In your Child Therapy Case Consultation video, a therapist is presenting a case of a child who is acting aggressively. You state at one point that kids can’t change their behavior with awareness. Is this why you often use art or have kids smash clay or other activities, versus just talk therapy?

VO: Yeah. What I mean is children don’t say, “This is what I’m doing to keep me from being happy or satisfied.” Even adults have trouble being aware of what they do to keep themselves stuck. So, with children, these drawings and clay are powerful projections. And it’s the way they can articulate what’s going on with them, without bypassing the intellect, but coming out from a deeper place. And at some point, they will own it. They will say, “Oh, yes, that fits for me.”When children feel stronger about themselves and they express what’s blocking, their behaviors change without having to force it or say anything. I mean, what makes children do what they do? All the behaviors that bring them into therapy are really ways of not being able to express what they need to express—of not being heard or not feeling good inside themselves.

RM: How do you measure progress in your work with children?

VO: It’s important to help the parents see the small changes, and not to expect complete reversal. And, of course, we have to work with the parents, too. Often the parents have a lot of difficulty with their own anger, and we have to work to help them understand how to express these feelings without hurting people around them. We can often do that in family sessions—help them to express what they’re feeling and what they’re wanting and what their sadness is about.One of the things I’ll say to parents is that I don’t fix kids. But what I do is I help them feel better about themselves. I help them express some of their deeper feelings that they’re keeping inside, and help them feel a little happier in life. We do many things to make this happen. And that’s what you have to look for. So when a parent comes in a month later and I say, “How are things going at home?” and the father says, “I think he’s a little happier,” then I know that this father has got it, and he’s seeing some progress here.

I am thinking of this was a boy of maybe 14 who was stealing, and the father wanted to send him to a military school because he couldn’t control him. There was a lot of reason the boy was like that, but that doesn’t help to understand the reason. It’s good to understand the reason why he’s like that, to help him change and be different.

So that’s how I look at progress. When they’re doing better out in life, they’re going to school and have some friends, and doing some of the things they have to do at home, and doing their schoolwork, then you’re seeing progress. They may not be altogether different, but they’re functioning in life.

The other thing that’s important is that it has to be at their level. Children can’t work everything out. They have different development levels. So the girl who was very severely sexually abused, we did a lot of work about that. But when she was 13, she had to come back into therapy for more work—things came up. They reach plateaus. They have to go out and be in life, and then maybe more things come up.

Becoming a Child Therapist

RM: Does it happen often that, when therapists work with a kid, the therapists’ trauma from childhood appears?

VO: Absolutely. That’s something one has to really know about—be in therapy, have a therapist. I have several people who come to me for supervision who are very experienced therapists, and that’s the reason they come. I think it’s really good for a child therapist to have somebody to talk to and consult with because it’s very difficult sometimes. You can’t always see what’s going on.

RM: How long does it take to be fully trained as a child therapist?

VO: Oh, gosh. For many years, I did a two-week training. People would come from all over the world. And sometimes they would get it in those two weeks, and other times they didn’t, so I don’t know. Two weeks is not enough, but it was the most that people could give of their time. Sometimes they’d come back two or three times to the training, but those were people who actually got it the most, because they were so committed to learning more.I can’t define a time. They have to have the experience of working with children first, I suppose, and understand about children. You have to have patience when you work with children. If one thing happens in a session—if they say, “I’m like that lion. I get so angry, just like that lion,” or whatever—if they say one thing, sometimes that’s it for a session. You have to be patient.

RM: What are the most frequent mistakes that therapists make when they work with kids?

VO: Usually what happens is therapists get stuck. They don’t know where to go next or what to do next.

RM: But why do they get stuck?

VO: Maybe they’re just not able to stand back and look. Sometimes, in a supervision or consultation, I’ll give a suggestion, and they’ll say, “Oh, of course, why didn’t I think of that? Of course, I know that.” They get too close to it and worry about doing the right thing. They’re afraid to make mistakes, really. I always tell them, “No matter what you do, you can’t really go wrong.”

RM: If you were to give the best advice to the young therapists about working with children, what would be this advice be?

VO: I might say if you’re working with children, you have to like children!

If you’re working with children, you have to like children!

What Keeps Me Going

RM: My last question is personal. How do you manage to keep so vital?

VO: You know, I’m 84.

RM: You don’t look it.

VO: I don’t know. I am who I am, I guess. I’m still working some. I have this foundation (The Violet Solomon Oaklander Foundation), and we’re having a conference this weekend at a retreat center, and I’m going to do a keynote. So every now and then I still do something like that, or conduct a supervision. That’s what keeps me going. I do a little writing. I read a lot.I lived in Santa Barbara, California, for 21 years. And my son, who lives in Los Angeles, decided I was getting too old to live there by myself. So he tore down his garage and he had a little cottage built, and that’s where I live now, in this little cottage behind their house.

I miss Santa Barbara. I had a lot of friends. I’d be more vital if I was back in Santa Barbara. But I am getting older, and I had a little heart attack this year—little. I’m okay. But I was in the hospital a few days. So it’s good that I’m near my son and my daughter-in-law.

RM: It is obvious for me that you, at 84, have still have so much to give to the others.

VO: Thank you very much for those nice words. I will, as long as I can.That’s what keeps me vital: just doing as much as I can, as long as I can. I just have to learn to take it easy.

Erving Polster on Gestalt Therapy

Posted on August 19, 2010February 11, 2026 by rezendevknowfully.com

The Interview

Victor Yalom: We could get started by asking how you got involved in this business of psychotherapy, many years ago.

Erving Polster: Oh, I don't know where to begin on that.

Randall C. Wyatt: What first sparked your interest in psychology itself?

Erving Polster: I started college as journalism major. I had no thought of psychology but several things led me there. In high school I was a doorman in a movie theater in a very tough neighborhood in Cleveland. I came from a very lower middle class neighborhood, but there was no crime, and it was scandalous to do anything against the law. These kids at the theater were juvenile delinquents, yet they were terrific kids; I just really enjoyed them, and they enjoyed me, and we had a good time together. I got this sense of how different people actually are from what we might think they are. Later, I took a course in juvenile delinquency in the sociology department as a sophomore and really liked it. I realize now that the course in juvenile delinquency tapped into that same quality of how people may be different than they appear. I switched my major from journalism to sociology. I took a course in personality theory with Calvin Hall and he just flipped me over with his ideas, particularly his views of psychoanalysis, and the incredible power of the inner experience. I then went to graduate school in Hall's psychology department… so that's how I got into psychology.

RW: What then stirred your interest in Gestalt, what drew you in?

EP: In graduate school, I was psychoanalytically oriented as was the department and Calvin Hall. As a matter of fact I wrote my dissertation on ego functioning in dreams, which was previously said to be only for super-ego and id. I got involved with a workshop with parolees in New York, and it was really eye-opening about what you can do in therapy without being the distant intellectualizer pedantic. It showed me how to get down to the basics, to the raw experience that people have. And it also introduced being open in a group. These groups were very early in the game, I'm talking about 1953, and it was long before the encounter movement was in full swing in the sixties. It was a very eye-opening group experience, hearing people's internal experience, which was unheard-of in those days, except in very intimate situations.

RW: What was your initial reaction to that?

EP: Oh, I was spellbound by the possibilities of human experience. And it happened very quickly too, because the leader was very skilled in knowing where to go. There was one patient that I'd worked with before I got involved in Gestalt therapy. He was still working with me and our worked had changed, so I asked him, "What seems different in being here?" And he said "It's not so lonely anymore." And that was really a very eye-opening feeling as well, about the importance of the connectedness between the therapist and the patient, which was then quite rare.

In fact, I think when I started doing psychotherapy, I sat behind a desk. Coming out from behind that desk was a big change, metaphorically and literally.

VY: Was there some loneliness for you though in abandoning the bastion of psychoanalysis, and doing this on your own?

EP: It wasn't lonely because I was joined with a group of people. I loved being with those people and so, no, quite the contrary, it expanded my community, rather than subtracting from it.

Learning from Fritz Perls

RW: So, looking back, what contributions did you pull from Perls? What nuggets still stick with you?

EP: One thing I got from Perls is the power of simple continuity; if we stay with somebody step-by-step, and heighten their awareness so that there is an accumulation of vitality, that leads toward very strong and revealing experiences. That process is not required for depth, but depth comes through sequentially, rather than through proof and interpretation. Not that I think that one should never interpret, but I was impressed with how much leverage that continuity and heightening of experience had on the work.

RW: What are some memories and impressions of Perls as a person?

EP: Well, he was a very unique person. I was not accustomed to a person so full of uniqueness: how a person can be really clearly differentiated from others and still have some connectedness, some offering, some contribution.

Perls was a very brilliant demonstrator of therapy. There was a strange sense of daring and safety joined together. Perls was radar; he just knew where to go.

Perls was a very brilliant demonstrator of therapy. There was a strange sense of daring and safety joined together. Perls was radar; he just knew where to go. And he had a presence which was very supportive. There was a sense that, if you went where he wanted to go you would never be in trouble. He could be supportive, kind, and resonant, as well as opinionated and impatient. Perls was a "my-way-or-the-highway" kind of guy.

RW: It must have been quite different coming from traditional analytic training. Did he work with you in a group or individually?

EP: Well, when I rolled in, I had never seen anything like this. Many people in the group had been to Moreno's Psychodrama workshops. But it seemed valid and not out of tune with the people and where they were ready to go. So I felt very excited, but with a certain fear inside. It was very illuminating to experience within myself and see what was happening within others. In the beginning I thought "Hey, what's so new about this; this isn't all that different from psychoanalysis," but the more I could see it, the more I could differentiate it. It just "grew me up" as a professional, and expanded my sense of what could happen in people's minds.

VY: Do you have any specific memories of working with Perls that still stand out for you?

EP:

Well, I remember that I reached way inside myself, and wound up in a deep cry, and not just tears, but crying. And it's like the whole world was in there, and suddenly I felt his hand holding my hand, and it was Fritz. It's a very touching thing to feel this kind of sense of appreciation of what I had been through, and not keeping his distance. It was a very mind-changing realization of people's need to connect, getting a feeling of interactive connection.

RW: So these experiences you had in the group with Perls and with others, I mean I’m not exaggerating, it transformed your work and you personally?

EP: Yes it did transform me. And I love psychoanalysis, don't misunderstand me. I was really taken with the theory; it just opened me up tremendously.

The Contact Boundary in Therapy

VY: You talk a lot about making contact, and you delved into that in your writing as well. Can you say more about the centrality of contact in Gestalt therapy?

EP: Well, there are a number of central principles, but that's as central a principle as any from my standpoint. For me it's the one that was the grounding through all the rest.

VY: Why is it so important to your work, and so important to you?

EP: I'm not exactly sure why it became so important to me. I just gravitate more to that concept than to others that are also very important to me-like awareness, experiments, and helping people to act their directionalism, to really behave in ways, rather than just knowing about something. But you are right that it is key to my work.

VY: Help us get a sense, or a picture of what contact boundary means?

EP: Well, contact boundary is said-by Gestalt therapy in particular in those days-to be almost like an organ of personality. Psychology deals with the interaction between self and other. Psychology is where the two meet, where the person and the universe meet, where the person and otherness meet. Contact boundary is where the person and world meet. The concept of "boundary" says that at the meeting point there is no distinguishing between self and others.

If you look at the real estate space between two properties… that boundary line does not belong to either side, yet it belongs to both, but it is such a narrow boundary, nobody cares about owning the boundary; the boundary merely delineates what is on each side of it. With human beings, the boundaries are a little looser, but it's still a matter of the rhythm between individuality and relationship.

RW: How does that contact boundary work between people?

EP: The contact boundary means there are two individuals on each side of the boundary; they're individualized, but they unite.

It is at that point of union that you get the fundamental of existence that is to be nourished by relationships. So it's built into the nature of people to have that point of meeting: the illumination of what life is about. So the quality of the contact is very important, because contact itself is inevitable. But you can have a lot of variations in the quality of the contact. That is going to be a survival factor in anybody's life: to relate to the universe through others.

RW: How does that contact play out, then, in the therapy? And what does it mean in therapy?

EP: Oh that's such a broad thing. Let me, I'll tell you the first thing that comes to my mind… which may not be representative at all. One client really, really liked me, and admired my way of thinking and things like that, but I said to him one day, "How does it happen that you admire me so much yet nothing that I ever say to you is right." He was a little stunned by that comment, yet the fact was that his contact with me was a very narrow contact; he couldn't accept anything I would say even though his evaluation of my "rightness," if he had to evaluate it, would be "good." But for a specific engagement he could not allow that "rightness" to exist. So that's a deficiency in the quality of the contact.

VY: So you’re always paying a lot of attention with clients to what the nature of the contact is.

EP: A lot of attention. But one doesn't have to pay attention to everything. I mean, it would be very self-conscious to do that. But in key moments you say, "Look now, somehow or another you say you are accepting what I'm saying, but there's nothing in you that makes me feel that you're feeling it, that you know about it. Rather it seems to be passing right through." So, we could examine what is present or lacking in the contact. That's not the best example at all, but my mind is blocking on giving you a good example. Maybe I will think of one later….

VY: So what about you draws you so much to the immediate contact?

EP: I don't know, I can tell you that I grew up very shy, very silent. I always had friends, but I wasn't the life of the friendship, and I wasn't the instigator. I was more of the reactive person. I'm still a silent person somewhere inside but I've gone beyond it. I can talk for hours if I have to lecture which still surprises me. My mother was a very loving woman and our family was very close. I saw people around me were in very good contact with each other even though I myself was very silent. And I must say that silence is not necessarily poor contact because I think people always thought of me as a good listener. I can remember my mother and my sister talking to me at great length while I listened to them. Somehow, they wanted to talk to me. I just listened. I didn't have that much to offer, but somehow they wanted to talk to me. So I don't know the answer to your question.

VY: You obviously…you really like the contact.

EP: Oh, I love it… I love it!

RW: You also talk about the concept of, I think you use the phrase “Healing through meeting.”

EP: Well, that's a Buberian concept. I've never used the word "healing" in particular, not that I'm against it!

RW: You’re not against healing, that’s a definite.

EP: No, no! (laughter) Buber used to talk about "healing through meeting." But yeah, the idea is to restore full function. The basic thing people have to do is to integrate with the world they're in. There's no way to be isolated and still live well.

What were you guys doing in the sixties?

VY: Let’s get back to the zeitgeist of the sixties and seventies that was kind of a formative time in your professional career. I’m sure there was a lot going on there.

EP: Yes, there was. I suppose you're asking, what was going on?

RW: What the heck was going on? I mean it was…

EP: What were you guys doing over there?!

RW: …it was rather revolutionary.

EP:

Yes, it was. It was a natural extension of the power of psychoanalysis, but put in a non-pathology setting, and among people who were joined together rather than only in a private relationship. So the encounter group movement threw the whole aura of psychotherapy into the public at large, and a certain portion of the public became interested and very aroused by it. Sometimes with great expansion of mind there came harm because of premature changes in life that couldn't be assimilated easily: people being too impulsive about their careers, their marriages, their relationships. I think there were some people for whom it didn't work well, but I think for most people that I've known about, it worked very well in terms of freeing their minds to see beyond the ordinary privacy arrangements people have about living. Their internal experiences became more acceptable by being acceptable to others.

RW: Was there was some sense that you were changing the world?

EP: There was some sense to that, but you would have to be megalomaniacal to believe that.

VY: Did you have that sense?

EP:

No, I didn't have that interest in changing the world. I was aware of the changes that were very big. I think I've probably thought about it in terms of "could we live better in this world?" I didn't think of it in terms of political change which you usually think of when you talk about changing the world. I thought about it as a developmental difference, an evolutionary thing, in terms of what people could accept within themselves. I thought people might become kinder to each other, have more creativity, enjoy sexuality more fully. I felt there was a better way to be in the world.

VY: In 1978 you wrote in Gestalt Therapy Integrated, “The times are right for change. The magnetic force of immediate experience is hard to beat.”

EP: That was 1973.

VY: Ok. So if times were ripe for change, looking back from this vantage point, did anything change?

EP:

Oh, yes. I think a lot changed. But unfortunately I don't see a shift in some of the fundamentals, with crime still very much a problem, terrible wars, violence between people. Yet we do have a lot of changes.

I think fathers became better with their children, more available and open. I think women are more assertive, more "self-actualizing", more happy sexually. When I see women run on the beach nowadays, they run with full grace and force, and freely. And that was never true before; women's physical abilities were largely dismissed. There are a lot of changes: a lot more awareness of what's going on in the world, a lot less taking for granted. Even though in the general population we still have a tremendous amount of conformity, being led by the nose, not really examining the situations in terms of more than the symbols they represent, not getting down to the real causes. So when you ask is there any change, yeah, there is change, but a lot of things haven't improved; some have gotten worse.

I think every generation has its own view of its own problems. If you think you passed an old one, there's a new one, and we're challenged to stay up-to-date with what matters.

RW: So many changes happened in the sixties, all around the world. The changes which swept across our culture, like openness, freedom, authenticity-but then taking responsibility for that authenticity and freedom is another matter.

EP:

That was a big problem in the sixties. People didn't understand about responsibilities.

There was a certain anarchistic quality to it, as if "If I can do it, it must be okay." Well it's not!

There was a certain anarchistic quality to it, as if "If I can do it, it must be okay." Well it's not! There are lots of things that people do naturally and with full backing of their personalities that are exactly wrong for somebody else, and in the long run, wrong for themselves because they don't take account of the consequences.

RW: Do you think Gestalt therapy and Gestalt practices sometimes led to that kind of impulsivity: that whatever you feel is right, so just do it?

EP:

I think we had a hand in it. And I'm sad that that's true. But I think what a beautiful theory, there is much room for compassion and community, things most of us would want in a society. It very often got out of hand because it is very hard to coordinate freedom with taking account of the other. There's a basic paradox, like when I talked about the contact boundary before; the sense of union and the sense of separation. How do you coordinate those? It's hard to do simultaneously. If you are going to be free, where is there room in your mind to take account of the other? Well, there is room, but it's not easy to do it. It's very easy for people, whenever faced with paradox, to choose one side of the paradox over the other, so they become totally free and not care about anybody else, or else become conformist and lose their own direction.

Insight and Awareness

VY: Lets back up a bit and try to find out a little bit more about what Gestalt therapy is, or what it is today to you. You gave us some indication of the difference between Gestalt and psychoanalysis back in the fifties. Is there some way you can give us a summary of what distinguishes Gestalt therapy?

EP: When you have a broad theory, different people will take different things out of it, so you get a lot of variety. We have that in psychoanalysis too. The way I see Gestalt therapy is that it is a system that deals with contact, and therefore with how to join with others, how to coordinate with them, how to form community. And it deals with awareness, which unearths what people's needs and possibilities are. It nourishes their activity. Awareness is not only a confirming experience; it is also an inspirational experience, in terms of leading people into their behavior. I don't think of Gestalt therapy as programmatic as many people took it in the beginning-for example, that people in Gestalt therapy group members were not allowed to ask "Why?"

RW: Right. What? How? but not Why? Why is that?

EP: Yeah, no Why? They did that because Fritz Perls was aware of the intellectualization, of de-personalizing relationships. And the word why is one of the instruments of intellectualization. You ask why? and it leads you to intellectual answers. It doesn't have to, but it often does. Why? is a perfectly natural question to ask. Every child would ask Why? and Why not?-I mean, it's just stupid to exclude Why from one's repertoire.

Early on, Perls was against interpretation. But to explain things is a perfectly human thing to do. Why would you exclude that? You don't want to rely on it. Psychoanalysis went the other way, they did it too much. They didn't deal with the basics of experience as Gestalt therapy did. So for example, psychoanalysis was interested in insights; Gestalt therapy was interested in awareness. Now an insight, to me, is one form of awareness, but awareness goes beyond insights.

VY: How so?

EP: Well, like we're aware of talking to each other now, but that's not an insight, it's an awareness. I'm aware of moving my hands now. I'm aware of the words I'm saying. I'm aware of your smile. I'm aware of how you changed your smile. But I wouldn't call those insights. They're going on all the time. Insights go on occasionally, and are valuable, but not something to base a whole system on.

Punctuating Client Experience in Therapy

RW: In your therapy videos, I notice that you tend to punctuate client insights and awareness, at times dramatically. What is your thinking about that? Is that your natural style or a technique?

EP: Well, probably it's my own natural style, but it has a theoretical base in the sense that the registration of experience matters in terms of the experiencing having an impact. What you register matters in terms of how you relate to the world, and how you see yourself. There are some people where you don't have to say a word, and you know they're registering what is happening. So I wouldn't always punctuate, but there are certain times when I think punctuation is an amplification of what happens, so they really feel what is happening, and it is part of themselves, rather than a casual thing that went on.

RW: You wrote a book entitled Every Personâ€™s Life Is Worth a Novel that makes the point of helping people fully appreciate the drama and experiences in their own lives.

EP: That's right: to recognize what is interesting in their lives, and not to take on somebody else's standards for what is worthwhile. So that's the idea of every person's life being worth a novel. Novelists base their work on what all of us actually are; they're not making it out of whole cloth. They're recognizing the nature of people's lives, and we ourselves tend to attribute to them the skill that would make our lives interesting. But the fundamentals are within us. And when we can recognize that we are living our life, that's very crucial for self-appreciation to come to fruition, because if we don't feel that value, then all the rest just dissipates. That's not an all-or-none matter of course for most people.

VY: I think you have a skill in conveying to people this kind of enthusiasm and interest in their own creativity and strength without being Pollyannaish.

EP: I don't feel like a Pollyanna. I'm particularly enthusiastic when I'm permitted that luxury of paying attention to what they're saying, and see that they're open to my paying attention. That's what they come for. Some people would not be open to my focused attention, so in another situation a person might wish I would get off their back. There are a lot of things I would say in a therapy setting that I wouldn't say to somebody at a dinner table. It reminds me of the time I did some work in a coffee house a long time ago at a church function. The guy who ran it said, "Here, just do whatever you do." He introduced me as a psychologist, and people gathered around. Some stayed for awhile, and others left, and some more would come; we had very interesting conversations. The main difference is that I would call their attention to what they were doing, which you would not do normally. It's too interruptive; it's not a good way to live. But the therapist has that invitation to pay attention to what's going on, rather than just living through it.

RW: At times, I imagine you might…

EP:

Let's suppose I said to you, "Randy, what are you aware of now as you're about to ask me these questions?" You'll say "Back off, I just want to ask you a question." That's perfectly how people live; it's the right way to live. But the therapist has the special permission to make up for the losses that come from those everyday things, so you can recover some of the awareness of what is not being expressed and make it a part of yourself. Excuse me for interrupting you.

RW: Well, I will tell you anyways. I was thinking that I wanted to know what happens when you are enthusiastic, when you say “Fantastic!” to clients, or when you punctuate their experience and help a client register something… and their response to that is to brush it away, they don’t take it in: how do you attend to that?

EP: Well, I don't expect people to fall into line right away (laughs). I don't make that kind of demand of them. If they want to pass it off, they pass it off.

RW: You will come back to it.

EP: Yeah. Look, I could imagine saying to somebody later on, "Every time I praise you, you seem to go dim in your face. You don't like my praise?" And maybe they'll tell me, or maybe they wouldn't, but it has to be well-timed. You would have to do it with the right person at the right time.

Beyond Technique-Driven Therapy

RW: You’re called a Gestalt psychologist, a Gestalt therapist, yet in many of the interventions in your psychotherapy video you come across as very different than what most people think of as Gestalt work. When you’re doing therapy, it doesn’t seem so cloaked in formal Gestalt technique, role playing, dream work, empty chair, and so on.

EP: To me, those formal techniques are scaffolds. They're very important in building the building. When the building is built, you take away the scaffolds. I think theories are a way of orienting yourself to what you do, and they help in directing you. But I could see somebody doing a psychoanalytic session, and explaining it in Gestalt terms or vice-versa. Yet, you would certainly distinguish between a Gestalt and a psychoanalytic session. So for me, my orientation is to the principles of Gestalt therapy. That guides my mind, so if I do something which is similar to what somebody else would do, that's no problem to me, because the theory doesn't decree the repertoire. No, that's wrong, the theory gives you a repertoire. It doesn't tell you what to choose out of the repertoire. So if I know that a part of my repertoire is to have a dialogue between two parts of the person's self, that's a part of my repertoire. Now I pick that out of the bag when it feels right for whom I'm working with. If I'm doing a dream, I may want somebody to play some part of the dream, or I might just say, "What does this dream remind you of in your everyday life?" Or, "Is there any more you want to say about the dream, or do you like the dream?" I wouldn't necessarily go through that rigmarole about playing out the parts.

RW: In the room with the client you seem to be tuned into the immediacy between you and the client. That seems to be much of the guiding force, as opposed to a series of techniques.

EP: Yeah, it is for me. But there will be other Gestalt therapists who'll be very distant in their actual relationship with the client, but they are very tuned into the awareness of that person — "What are you aware of now? What do you want now?" they can do very well, but it's a different way of operating.

Wise Words for Therapists

RW: Let’s shift to another track, which is that you consult with a lot of therapists. What do you see lacking in therapists’ work when you train them? What do you push them on? What do you seem to be returning to again and again to help them become better therapists?

EP: I see a lot of therapists falling back on the stereotypes of what a psychotherapist does. They are unwilling to say what they know, unwilling to develop their own way of doing things, their own style-to be idiomatic, in other words.

VY: What do you mean by idiomatic?

EP: Idiomatic meaning only that person can do it. That's an exaggeration, because after all, we do have much in common with each other. But still you get a feeling like "Alvin is the one doing that; that's the way he does it" versus a generic therapist.

VY: Therapists really sticking their neck out in showing themselves.

EP: Well, that wouldn't be necessarily sticking your neck out. Some things come naturally, but don't fit their image of what a therapist should be doing. Like Miriam, my wife. She taught a course where she asked the therapy students to list a set of characteristics of themselves that are characteristics of them as therapists. And they would usually give a very straight list, very technical, empathy, and so on. Then she would ask for another set of more personal characteristics. And they responded with things like "fresh and lively" or "enterprising in new things." And when they saw that list, it became apparent that the best part of themselves were kept out of the therapy.

How can you get by in any field if you hold out the best parts of your self? Do we have that much good going on that we can hold out our best parts and still do well?

How can you get by in any field if you hold out the best parts of your self? Do we have that much good going on that we can hold out our best parts and still do well? So the question is how to incorporate the best parts of your personal style into the technical knowledge; because there is technical knowledge. At times of course, one needs to hold back parts of one's personality which could be over-stimulating, or dominating, or too intrusive, for example. There are all kinds of problems in therapy which anyone's natural self has to take into account or make use of depending on the situation and people involved.

RW: It’s not just a matter of learning the techniques of therapy. It’s personal too.

EP: Yes, that's the work. I mean, that's what we have to learn: how to do that. It's a matter of how you learn the technique and bring your personhood in. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who has a cousin who's a well-known concert violinist. Her cousin was performing that night and was practicing all day long. My friend asked her, "Why do you do that all day long?" and the musician responded, "The reason I do that is because I want it to be part of my reflexes, so when I'm on stage I have room left over for my emotions."

And I found over the years that what improves my therapy a lot is trusting my reflexes, not trusting them cavalierly, but trusting them through habits, through experiences. I began to trust what I would have to say, and I didn't have to think, "Is this right?" all the time. But it has to be built into your system so that you have room left over for your idiomatic qualities.

Religion, Psychotherapy and Community

RW: Let’s talk about your new writings on life-focused communities, spirituality and everyday life. You have stated that psychoanalysis and other traditional therapies left out everyday life in their therapeutic work. Can you speak to that?

EP: Freud developed psychoanalysis as a physician. He dealt with pathology; that was his game, rightly so. But he happened to build principles in a way that dealt with how people's minds work. He also had guidance for them through the therapeutic process that was generally related to the pathology. He basically invented another religion. What it lacks for as a religion is the sense of community, the lifetime commitment. But how do you take it beyond pathology? There are a lot of ways to do it, but my contention is that what I would see as an extrapolation, a rightful extrapolation, would be to have large segments of people meeting for a lifetime. Not that everybody has to come all the time, but much like churches and temples, there would be that process that is fundamental in orienting them about life, and then guiding them through it.

RW: Well, how do you do it? What makes it different or similar to traditional communities?

EP: Yes, how do you do it? We have very different methods than the familiar religions do. First of all, you don't have to believe in God. You could if you wanted to, but it won't be based on God-orientation. It would be based on what God probably represents to most people, which is an indivisible union with otherness, the ubiquitous other, that also has guiding impact on the community in a way that can have some of that force. I mean the poetry of God is really quite magnificent. I don't know whether we can ever duplicate anything at that level. But the community — if it can be hallowed, if we could see the sacred aspects of psychotherapy — would be a step toward a very orienting and guiding system. There are things psychotherapists do which I call "in the sacred realm." because they are limited to what happens in psychotherapy, and they're dear to people. And religion does the same thing; it has sacred things, but our sacred things are different from theirs. So I proposed a number of qualities which represent part of the sacred experience, and showed how religion does it, and how psychotherapy does it. I just finished my new book on this which I'm sending off to my agent on Monday.

RW: When you were just speaking there about your recent work, you really came alive… (Polster’s laughter fills the room) …much more than talking about the zeitgeist. Did you notice that?

EP: Okay… no, I didn't notice.

RW: This whole concept of spiritualityâ€”which all the big theorists have either avoided or dismissed: Freud, Ellis, Skinner, and so on, you are trying to… (Polster’s laughter fills the room) …much more than talking about the zeitgeist. Did you notice that?

EP: I don't think "spirituality." That's the term I don't use.

RW: What would you use?

EP: Religion. "Spirituality" has a lot of airy-fairy qualities to the term, and I never know what people are talking about. I like to know what I'm talking about. "Religion" I know is a community of people that is oriented and guided in their lives in very concrete ways and with very concrete beliefs, that can be defined. Spirituality – I don't know what that means. When I talk about some things, spirituality would probably be included, but I don't use the word. I'm talking about the natural quality that we seek in life of indivisibility from otherness, and I'm sure some neurological findings would support that experience. So would meditations, and deep relationships, sexuality, that sense of indivisibility, but I don't think of that as spiritual; I think of it as indivisibility. The term spiritual is too broadly-used for me to know how to use it.

RW: What is the most satisfying, the most meaningful part of your career and your therapeutic work? What keeps you going?

EP: Well, so many things: engagement, absorption, and a way of making new things happen over and over again. Also, there is the sense of impact, the sense of being important to other people, mattering to them. I'm very absorbed with writing and love doing workshops. I become just so totally absorbed by it that I just go and go.

RW: I’m sure we could go on and on right now, but you have a flight to catch.

EP: That's right!

VY: So thanks for taking the time.

EP:

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