From an article by Mikhail Kryakhtunov in the collection

“Gestalt and Psychodrama: A Connection Between Generations”.

The collection can be purchased on the MIGIP website!

Who is a therapist?

What tasks does he solve?

How does one arrive at dialogue, presence, a sense of resonance?

In Mikhail Kryakhtunov’s view, the therapist’s capacity to remain in silence is very important.

What does this mean?

“Inner” silence – when a person can be an observer and senses what is happening, what they see and hear, without sinking into deliberation and conversation with themselves.

Switching off from one’s own questions, situations, anxieties, worries, tasks, interests.

Accepting any response of one’s own to what is happening in the surrounding world – the ability to hear one’s own reply precisely to this event at the contact boundary,

a calm attitude towards silence – giving place and time for the environment to show itself.

A picture of the therapist’s work:

The therapist is a being who perceives and responds to what the client shows.

This helps in obtaining a “natural response of the environment”, that is, the kind of reaction a person would receive in any similar situation.

The therapist is the ground for the client’s figure.

In order to perceive anything, the therapist needs to notice it and find a place for it, rather than notice it and discard it. For this the therapist must be occupied with the client, not with themselves. That is, the therapist’s attention is directed at what is happening.

The therapist reacts to the client – responds, goes with them or follows after them.

Rather than organising, initiating, stimulating, prompting or otherwise “moving” the client. It is the client who begins the therapeutic work, and the therapist joins them. What is required of the therapist is a calm attitude to stillness and to silence on the client’s part.

Silence gives birth to sound.

To understand one’s impression of contact with a client, one needs to “dwell in oneself”, to feel what is being born in me at this moment in relation to this person. The same words and actions of a person give rise to a different response at different times.

A disturbance of contact – a lack of silence.

Every disturbance of contact is a consequence of there having been too little space, time and means for a person to hear themselves and the response of the surrounding world. The meaning of therapeutic work here lies in creating, together with the client, conditions in which they will be able to hear themselves.

The slower you go, the further you will get.

The deepest and most decisive changes in a person occur not at the moment of active deed, but before it, in silence. By silence I mean a calm and quiet place and time in which the whole person, having heard the whole of themselves, resolves upon something. Without this, changes are accidental and temporary in nature, since they do not reflect the deep aspirations of the whole person.