Why does a gestalt therapist often move the focus of attention away from the content of the problem and its details towards what is happening between therapist and client, asking questions instead:

Clients (and we ourselves, when we are in the client’s chair, are no exception) usually want to tell the therapist their story in every detail or to describe the problem fully: it seems to them that only then will the mosaic come together, the therapist will see the whole picture, understand, and tell them what to do.

But telling absolutely everything is useless and even harmful: time is lost, and there is none left for anything except telling and listening.

Sometimes the client’s need really is only to be heard without judgement.

Usually, though, the client wants some response, a reaction, an opinion — to which they also react in some way; yet there will be no time to look at these important things if the whole session is given over to a detailed account of the problem.

How the client handles their needs, how they make contact with the environment in order to meet them — all of this can be traced in the way they make contact with the therapist.

The relationship with the therapist is a small-scale model of how the client builds relationships with other people, and they usually reproduce their patterns not only in life but in therapy as well.

For example, a client comes to work on the issue of responsibility: they cannot define the limits of their own responsibility in close or business relationships, and take on more or less responsibility than they need to.

The very same issue will be reproduced in their relationship with the therapist: the client will try to place all responsibility for their progress in therapy on the therapist or, on the contrary, will fail to notice or acknowledge the therapist’s responsibility, and so on.

And if this issue is traced and resolved within the client–therapist relationship, the client will learn to resolve the issue of responsibility in their other relationships too.

So the mosaic of a problem is usually made up of patterns — repeating elements of an ornament.

And the fragment of the pattern that repeats is usually clearly visible over a short stretch of communication.