Photo by Horst ter Haar
Erhard Doubrawa has worked as a Gestalt therapist for many years. He is the founder and director of the Gestalt Therapy Institutes of Cologne and Kassel (Germany), where he is also active as a trainer. He publishes the German Gestalt Therapy Magazine “Gestaltkritik.” In addition he has edited a series of books about the theory and practice of Gestalt therapy. Own books (among others): “Einladung zur Gestalttherapie: Eine Einführung mit Beispielen” (Invitation to Gestalt Therapy: An Introduction with Examples) and “Lexikon der Gestalttherapie” (Dictionary of Gestalt Therapy) – both together with Stefan Blankertz.
In this book the author has collected stories, which he has often told in his therapeutic work – during individual therapy sessions with clients as well as in group trainings. These stories have already often contributed to helping people open themselves again and be deeply touched by others.
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— for further details see the last page of the book —
NEW EDITION
of the 2006 published book
Title of the original German edition:
“Die Seele berühren: Erzählte Gestalttherapie” (2002)
© Erhard Doubrawa 2002, 2006
© 2016 by gikPRESS, Zülpicher Str. 255, D-50937 Cologne
Cover painting by Georgia von Schlieffen
Editor of gikPRESS: Erhard Doubrawa
BoD – Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-3-7431-8483-1
In memory of my father, with gratitude
“Thank you for your new book. Your honesty and openness touched me very much. After I had begun reading, I could not put the book down. You have explained the flesh and blood of Gestalt therapy to me, not only the bare bones.”
Herbert Greif, Nideggen, Germany
“During an extremely difficult time for me your narratives have touched me to the depths of my soul. While I was reading I could already feel the hardness of my ‘diagnostic psycho-analytical view’ in my therapeutic work begin to dissolve and I was again able to approach my patients openly and uninhibitedly (with laughter and tears).”
Elke Geser-Schellkopf, Gestalt therapist, Bayreuth, Germany
“Dear Erhard, Thanks for your marvellous new book. It truly reached my depths. I could not stop reading it. I have just emerged from a time in my life in which I felt I had closed myself down. It was as if I had developed a protective shield, because so many situations around me had been occupying and moving me. Then your book arrived and I felt my heart opening up … my tears starting to flow … and that the protective shield was no longer needed!”
Carina Gadebusch, Remscheid, Germany
“Once again you have sent me a very beautiful book. One, which really is touching on many points, and which reveals so many alive facets of Gestalt therapeutic work as well as your Gestalt therapeutic work and you as a person. Here are a few examples,
This fits with what you describe later about becoming aware of the ‘sacredness’ of practicing therapy.”
Detlev Kranz, Gestalt therapist, Hamburg, Germany
“I really enjoyed reading your new book and have been very impressed by its aliveness. As I was reading, I often had the feeling that you were there explaining everything to me in person. In my opinion you could not have explained it better or made it more understandable for those who are not so particularly familiar with the special terminology of Gestalt therapy or this subject matter.”
Gabriele Önal, Tübingen, Germany
“I liked your book very much. I was often touched and close to tears. The story about your father has encouraged me once again to see my mother differently and to find new ways of coming into contact with her. I have already passed my copy of the book on and also have recommended it to other people – their resonance was totally similar to mine.”
Martina Feldmayer-Ott, Cologne, Germany
“A profound respect for humanity, openness, honesty, warmth, tenderness, tears and joy, are only a few of the words that spontaneously occur to me about this book. With his stories, Mr. Doubrawa has also touched my soul and opened my heart. I can recommend this book to everyone who wants to come in touch with their feelings and thus find healing for themselves. This book is a great help for both therapists and clients.”
Karin Soukup, psychotherapist
“An appropriate title – this book touched my soul and I felt spoken to and understood. Everything in the book is pure personal experience, sometimes with an astonishing openness. Mr. Doubrawa answers many of the questions and problems that often present themselves to future as well as currently practicing Gestalt therapists. I myself am in training to become a Gestalt therapist and can highly recommend this book.”
Francisca Benz, Oberkirch, Austria
About six years ago, my wife Anke and I visited our American colleague John Reis and his wife Linda. Together with their two children, a five year old daughter and an eight year old son, we were sitting on that Sunday morning at breakfast and were talking about this and that. Together we were enjoying the wonderful view from their living room window over the Pacific coastline, north of San Diego. The conversation was filled with an easiness, mostly due to the straightforward and cordial nature of our hosts.
Eventually Linda said that the previous week she had taken her daughter to the opera for the first time. Unfortunately I cannot remember any more which one. But what I do remember, touched me even at that time – and it touches me again now, whenever I think of it.
Linda loves music and she loves the opera. She waited patiently until her daughter was five years old. Only then did she take her to a live performance. She had the idea that her daughter would not be so bored or become too restless. What did happen however, she could never have imagined in her wildest dreams.
Her daughter sat beside her completely still for nearly two and a half hours and listened attentively. Spellbound she followed the events on stage. Afterwards she said to her mother, as she wiped tears out of her eyes with her hand and spread them all over her face, “Mummy, I don’t understand. It was sooo beautiful, but I still had to cry anyway.”
Linda took her little daughter in her arms and explained, “These aren’t tears of sadness. Sometimes you have to cry, when you experience something very, very beautiful, because it has touched you so much.”
I do not know a more beautiful and more comprehensible explanation of “being touched,” and certainly, not one which has touched me so deeply.
A rabbi, whose grandfather had been a disciple of the Baal Shem, was asked to tell a story. “A story,” he said, “must be told in such a way that it constitutes help in itself.” And he told: “My grandfather was lame. Once they asked him to tell a story about his teacher. And he related how the holy Baal Shem used to hop and dance while he prayed. My grandfather rose as he spoke, and he was so swept away by his story that he himself began to hop and dance to show how the master had done it. From that hour on he was cured of his lameness. That‘s the way to tell a story!”
Martin Buber
In this book, my intention is to present Gestalt therapy in such a way, dear readers, that you can experience it. What I mean by this is best explained by the introductory anecdote above, which I found in the preface to Martin Buber’s book “Tales of the Hasidim”.
The first time I read it was when I was a student of Catholic theology. At that time we were interested in the question of how experiences of faith could be conveyed to others. We discovered that this could only be done “narratively” – in other words by telling stories.
I am pleased that I have come back to a similar place now – more than 25 years later. Today I ask myself how Gestalt therapeutic experiences can be further passed on. Again I have discovered that this is only possible by telling stories. So I would like to begin now to relate from my Gestalt therapeutic experiences: from my experiences as a client, from my experiences in Gestalt therapeutic training, but above all from the experiences, which I was allowed to make as a Gestalt therapist and later as a teacher of Gestalt therapy.
I like to summarize the goal of Gestalt therapy as “opening oneself up again.” All too often we have had to close down. In order to protect ourselves and to survive, we have shielded ourselves with a polished, non-transparent outer layer. In such a way that encapsulated “inflammations” develop – the remains of earlier losses and wounds.
Gestalt therapy invites us to gently open up again so that what requires healing can be brought to the surface and finally completed. In this way we can open again to the interpersonal, to the other, to the “Thou”. And so finally meetings and contacts can happen again and relationships and deep connections be entered into.
So let yourself be carried along as I relate “my” stories. Stories, which touch the soul:
These are stories, which I have often told in my therapeutic practice – to individual clients, in therapy groups and also in trainings. They have already often contributed to making it possible for people to open themselves up again and to be deeply touched by others.
Let your soul run freely as you read. Only it knows the way. Trust it. And (please!) do not try to understand “everything” at once. The first step is always the experience. Understanding is only the second, just as important in its own way, but still just the step that follows.
The place, which I would like to reach with my stories, is your soul. Listen to them, go with them, sympathise with them and give yourself space. Then later in the next step you can safely relate with your mind to your experience. From time to time there will be some explanations and I will add some comments “from my card index box”, but above all as you read I would like to try to give you a direct experience of how Gestalt therapy “works”.
You will surely notice in this book how often I mention that the clients cry, that the group participants have tears in their eyes and that exactly the same is happening to me as the therapist. Does Gestalt therapy absolutely have to deal with crying? It does not have to. But it often does. That is because crying simply happens, when we give up our frozenness, and start to move and flow again.
When we experience “existential moments”, it is seen that crying is a part of them – a kind of meeting takes place, the spirit of which the Jewish religious philosopher (and indirectly an important intellectual father of Gestalt therapy), Martin Buber called “I-Thou moments”, moments of meeting, in which we know we are being spoken to in our being.
The term “existential moment” comes from the American psychotherapist Len Bergantino. What he calls those life endowing moments of real life, which are not simply a question of survival. Bergantino describes this “existential moment” as a meeting from being to being, as the temporary transcending of roles, as a healing touch, which releases deep emotions – not only in the client, but also in the therapist. Often it is accompanied by tears and also not infrequently by the way with an almost “existential” shame, which shows, how close we are to our being, our centre, our soul.
Len Bergantino points out in this connection that these “existential moments” are a part of “a spiritual dimension”. The humanistic psychologist Abraham A. Maslow said something similar, when he was dealing with what he called “particularly healthy” people. These people, who often do not see themselves as religious, know about the experience of spiritual moments, ending separation: “peak experiences” – moments of connection and belonging, moments of healing, of totality.
Please note: All the names and the biographical information have been changed to protect the clients. My own therapists and teachers, my colleagues and friends whom I mention in gratitude, naturally keep their real names.
Also in this book, I use masculine gender pronouns to refer to both men and women, only to make it easier to read.
Gestalt therapy, or simply just “Gestalt”, is an attitude towards life which has practical consequences. It concerns you and me and our experience in the here and now. Growth rather more is the correct word here than therapy. Growth is to become more spontaneous, more alive and happier. Gestalt tries to put welladjusted people, who are discontented with their lot, back on their own feet again.
Bruno Paul de Roeck
Gestalt therapy is named after Gestalt psychology, which deals with how we establish reality through our perception. Gestalt psychology is based on a holistic approach that we organize and structure our perception in such a way that it is meaningful to us. Gestalt therapy concerns itself with the problems of the perception and places importance on the ability to perceive and its improvement. Problems of the perception can occur for example, if our current perception is superimposed by earlier experiences. In such cases then, what is actually there is no longer perceived, but rather, what we hope for, or what we fear. The experiences of the past or what was “learned” is projected onto the present.
Two simple examples of such projections are:
The first principles, which were later incorporated into Gestalt therapy, were developed in the 1930s and 1940s by two German psychoanalysts living in exile in South Africa during the time of National Socialism – Laura and Fritz Perls. They gave up the psychoanalyst’s “safe” place behind the couch and sat in front of the client. This act symbolized that they rejected the power over the client (which the therapist in psychoanalysis acquires from the unquestioned need for interpretation) and that they wanted to meet their clients as equals. At the end of the 1940s they settled in New York, where they met the American writer, social philosopher and political activist Paul Goodman. Together with him they further developed their approach and gave it the name “Gestalt therapy”.
Gestalt therapy became better known at the end of the 1960s – through its closeness to the “Human Potential Movement”, the psychological, spiritual, political breakout movement of young Americans of the time. Fritz Perls lived and taught in the centre of this movement in Esalen, Big Sur on the marvellous California west coast, about 200 km south of San Francisco.
Gestalt therapy heals by honouring the client. The client comes to the therapist, because he thinks he can no longer cope with a life problem on his own. Carefully the therapist lets him experience that in reality he is in possession of extraordinary powers, which make his survival possible. By recognizing and honouring these powers the client comes into contact with his ability to find solutions for his problems himself. This contact makes it possible for him to perceive his fellow men and his environment in such a way that he feels the support, which he can draw from it.
Often today’s problems are the result of earlier problem-solving attempts. At that time they were meaningful. But today they are, if anything, limiting. In the same way as a pair of children’s shoes are. A year ago they fitted like a glove. And now today they are much too small.
So, “honouring” means to feel the power of – in other words, to honour – exactly what is there in this behaviour, which the client sees as a “problem”. With this attitude of honouring the client comes into contact with his own ability to find problem solutions for himself.
Gestalt therapy is especially concerned with the therapeutic attitude with which Gestalt therapists can support their clients to bring them back to their own “organic self-regulation”. By this it is meant that everyone has the existing ability to perceive ones own needs and introduce the necessary steps to fulfil these needs.
When this need satisfaction is working properly we do not need to give any further attention to the organismic self-regulation, we only do that when it is not working. Unfortunately that happens relatively often. Because in our culture we have not learned to pay attention to our actual needs, but rather to ignore them. And when we do do something, all too often we do not orient ourselves towards what we ourselves want, but rather towards what others from the outside approach us with.
With a certain melancholy, I occasionally watch children playing. When they are playing, they simply follow their interest, their curiosity and their pleasure. Enthusiastically they then show adults, what they have found out. If the adults then praise them – “you really did do that well!” – the deformation begins. It is not the enthusiasm which is shared and thus encouraged. But rather the praise of the result replaces the pleasure of the process. The child then begins doing things – to investigate, to learn – because it earns him praise. This is how the child begins to be controlled from the outside.
Gestalt therapy wants to encourage clients to return to self “controlling”, thus taking over the steering themselves again in order to make it possible to experience themselves as their own master.
This self-regulation can only be restored if the therapist regards his client on his way there already as mature. In pedagogy, we talk about the paradox of “giving an advance payment on maturity”. I find this term very fitting also for what Stefan Blankertz calls a “therapeutic paradox”. The therapist also treats even those clients as mature, who have not yet taken firm possession of their own maturity.
Viewed in this way, I, as a Gestalt therapist, am not the source of knowledge and wisdom. It is not I who knows the solutions and have just to bring my clients closer to them. No, my clients must look for and find their own solutions themselves. I can only offer my support to them – the therapist is after all only the “stirrup holder”: The clients can only mount and ride the horse themselves. I have the confidence (and have had the previous experience!), that my clients will quickly take possession again of what was until now their buried maturity, once the “self-directed” search for solutions has begun. The Gestalt therapist will use a multitude of methods in a way that fits with the personality of the client and his own personality – therapeutic conversations, awareness exercises, work with internal dialogues, role plays, dialogues with absent people, body-oriented interventions and may use creative expression materials such as clay, paper and paints etc..
In Germany, Gestalt therapy is not paid for by the health insurance companies. However that says nothing about the effectiveness of this psychotherapeutic approach. So Gestalt therapy immediately after its emergence found a fixed place in areas where people understand a lot about whether a method is effective or not – namely in organizational development, in management training and in vocational coaching.
Existential moments may range from those that are touching or moving and influential in a positive manner, to those that are of such impact that they turn people’s lives around. In such moments both patient and therapist possess mutual respect for each other while maintaining a mystical feeling that feels spiritual in nature as a result of such an enriched contact.
Although there is much that is complexity in an existential moment, there is also a naïve simplicity that gives the existential moment its beauty. These have been moments that made me begin to realize there was something different, special and healing in them.
Len Bergantino
It was only during the last workshop in the first year of my own Gestalt therapy training that I “really” arrived at how to work as a client. I had come in touch with a deep despair in myself. I do not actually know how it happened; anyhow “it” happened when we were doing a workshop with a female guest trainer. All of a sudden I was feeling my deepest despair. I had had to cry. I remembered my childhood in Sweden, how I had felt ashamed to be a “German Nazi child”. Because the Swedish children were not allowed to play with me, the “Nazi child”, I usually had had to play alone. Ronni, who I loved more than anything, nevertheless played with me. One time his mother found this out and came shrieking towards us. Ronni pushed me under a bush, in order to hide me from his mother. Of course, she had already seen me a long time before. She punished him on the spot with many hard blows in front of the bush under which I was keeping myself hidden. I saw him. I heard him cry out – first loudly and later just quietly whimpering. Nevertheless Ronni and I kept on meeting, but secretly …
As I was relating all this to my training group, I was crying hard. In doing so, I lost all sense of time. I was shaken, when I realised at the end of the work that it had lasted more than one and a half hours. Today I cannot remember anything more about the subject, except for my pain and my despair. After this work I was so exhausted that the other participants in the workshop wrapped me up in blankets and brought me hot tea to drink. But at the same time I also felt unburdened, and everything around me seemed brighter.
After this experience I decided to start with my own individual therapy. So my trainer at that time, Willy Berns, sent me to Manfred Ley. With him I tried to reconnect to my experience of that weekend workshop which at first did not want to happen. For at least six months I was unable to bring the word “despair” to mind. However, when it came back into my consciousness again it was also accompanied by a deep sadness. A time full of tears began for me. At the beginning, that was still quite alright for me. But with time I began to feel ashamed of my crying.
I was ashamed of my tears, which often began “to pour” during this time – not only in therapy but also in my daily life … And so once again I went to Manfred Ley. Until then I had said nothing about being ashamed of my crying. And on top of it, I was ashamed of that too. I sat down next to him on the couch and still didn’t mention anything, but was thinking only of my shame. All at once he began to tell a story about himself.
Completely unexpectedly he reported that he had had to start crying hard last Saturday. It was like being struck with lightning. He had been watching his two sons playing and he was so deeply touched by them that tears had started to come to his eyes. Both his small sons were frightened, and had come to him and comforted him. And then, he continued telling me, he had assured them that it was totally alright for him to cry. They did not need to be worried about it. That really calmed them down, and they then simply continued to play. He continued watching them and continued crying. They had played and every now and then they had taken an affectionate look towards him. His account ended there and, at the same time, my shame about my own tears.
A warmth spread over me, a trust in my individual therapist. During the time that followed I began to open myself up to him, to share my inner world shamelessly, or at least, with less shame. And I let my soul be touched by him.