Needs and Desires: How to Hear Yourself and Stay Alive
Today I want to talk about something that accompanies us from birth to our final breath: needs. How they work, why they are so often confused with desires, and why getting what we “want” does not always bring satisfaction. Perhaps understanding this...
Lecture Notes from the KIGIP Gestalt Conference
Guilt during wartime is, first and foremost, aggression directed towards oneself. This feeling is rooted in a whole range of psychological factors: grief for those who have suffered, a sense of solidarity, and empathy. Unfortunately, however, it can leave us depleted, leading...
A Gestalt Therapist’s Work: Personality or Skills?
This question comes up often in training, in supervision, and simply in professional conversations. And most often we arrive at the same conclusion — the personality. Not because skills are unimportant. But because it is precisely the therapist’s personality that is the...
Sending a Wish Out into the Universe: The Paradoxical Theory of Change
The paradoxical theory of change sounds simple, but it in fact has a depth you do not notice straight away. Its central idea is that change happens not when we try to become someone else or to alter ourselves, but when we...
The Therapist’s Role: How to Enter Resonance and Why Silence Matters So Much
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...
A Short Guide to Building a Codependent Relationship
As we know, codependent relationships are strong and long-lasting. There is, however, little in them of: happiness mutual respect freedom interest creativity life in general If you ignore all that, it is perfectly possible to live this way. But if these values...
Depression — the Price of Progress?
In recent years a wave of depression and anxiety disorders has swept the world — and especially those countries used to thinking of themselves as prosperous. Technologies that simplify daily life, accessible medicine, everyday comfort — seemingly, everything is there. Yet paradoxically,...
The Secret of a Gestalt Therapist’s Work
What is the most important and most essential thing that can be said about the methodology of a gestalt therapist’s work? Something that conveys to students the essence of what they will be studying over several years. All the knowledge a student...
What Is on the Minds of Children of Service Members
THE LOSS OF ORDINARY LIFE When dad goes into service, all the child’s routines and the familiar order of life change. Dad used to take them to nursery, play football and read a bedtime story. Now it is mum, another relative, or...
10 Features of Working with Children in the Gestalt Approach
Working with children in the Gestalt approach has its own unique features that set it apart from working with adults. Here are 10 key points worth the attention of every therapist: 1. Play as the main tool: Children express their emotions and...