Gestalt Therapy

I use a Gestalt therapy framework to help clients focus on the 'here and now,' bringing awareness to their present moment experience. Through this process, we explore the awareness continuum, noticing thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations as they arise. This approach fosters greater self-awareness and empowers clients to recognize patterns, deepen their understanding of themselves, and make more conscious choices in their lives.

Gestalt therapy focuses on the present moment. It emphasizes self-awareness, personal responsibility, and the therapeutic relationship. By exploring thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in the here and now, Gestalt therapy helps clients become more aware of unresolved issues and unexpressed emotions, facilitating growth and healing. We explore what feels alive for you in the present moment and use that aliveness as a launching pad for where you would like to go.

Gestalt Therapy is a psycho-dynamic, present-centered and relational approach to talk therapy. I believe that a person’s history colors how they experience the present, but that few are fully aware of this process in day-to-day life. We’ll work together to move from judgment to curiosity, so that we can notice what reactions are based on historical assumptions, or grounded in our actual, shared experience of one another in the here-and-now.

As a Gestalt therapist, I help individuals gain deeper self-awareness and personal growth. By focusing on the present moment and exploring your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, we can work together to overcome challenges and live more authentically. My approach emphasizes holistic healing, empowering you to take responsibility for your choices and create meaningful change.

This therapy uses a phenomenological approach that focuses on awareness in the ‘here and now’. Gestalt therapy is very present-central, without concentrating on the past or future, allowing personal growth through insight and clarity of an individual’s needs, goals, and values. This phenomenological approach explores a person’s subjective meaning of existence in the world through the awareness of their own movements amidst their personal life experiences.

I love Gestalt therapy because I do people that people are more than the sum of their parts. I like how it can help increase awareness of the present moment, and I use a lot of parts work to explore sides of the client that may be less frequently visible. I also use some Internal Family System ideas that are based on Gestalt parts work to help clients be in deeper relationship with themselves and their inner motivations.

With this approach, we will work together to focus on your experience in the present moment.

I focus on the here and now, understanding the past exists, but not allowing the to define your future.

Gestalt is my foundational theory that aligns with my views of human nature and counseling. I lean to the side of relational, nondirective gestalt therapy that utilizes dialogue and talk, rather than the popularized gestalt techniques. I am a gestalt nerd and love counseling gestalt therapists.

Working with the body and the different parts within yourself are very powerful and effective ways to gain deeper insight into what is going on with us.

Gestalt therapy focuses on the here and now. We explore what feels alive for you in the present moment and use that aliveness as a launching pad for where you would like to go. Body sensations, thoughts and feelings inform the process of discovering what choices you have as you move forward.

I have trained extensively with many of the pioneers of Gestalt Therapy.

Together we will work to understand how you holistically experience the present moment in your mind, body and emotional self. This work seeks to uncover and accept the fullness of who you are and what you need to find contentment, joy, and meaning in your life. We may explore your family system or notable events from youth if they are creating an interruption in your life now.

“Gestalt therapy is about helping people become aware of what they do and how they do it, and to encourage living in the present, to ‘be here now,’ and make better choices.” – Violet Oaklander. In Gestalt therapy, I use talk or play to help you or your child experience, explore, and process thoughts, feelings and sensations to bring greater awareness, self-understanding and empowerment. I am not an ‘expert’ but a partner on your journey, in the process with you every step of the way.

Gestalt is a type of parts work therapy, which means we see the human psyche as a combination of different parts that sometimes have quite different feelings and needs. Parts work can be incredibly helpful when we conceptualize inner conflict, and can help bring compassion to parts that hold challenging or outdated beliefs about ourselves, others or the world. I use Gestalt therapy to support my clients in growing awareness and understanding of our complexity as human beings.