Gestalt and Behavior Therapy

Gestalt Therapy

 

  

• Who?  Fritz Perls & Laura Perls
•    Husband and Wife Team
•    He focused on awareness and was the main developer
•    She concentrated on contact and support
• Together they created the theoretical foundations of Gestalt Therapy                 

• Goals of Approach          
•    Help the client strive for wholeness 
•    Integregation of thinking, feeling and behaving
•   Assist clients to help gain awareness of moment to moment    experiences
•    Help them to see that earlier influences are related to present difficulties
• 
     Accept all aspects of themselves          
•    Deal with unfinished business 
 

• Key Concepts
•           Contact with self and others
• Contact Boundaries
• Awareness, personal choice, responsibility
• Grounded in the here and now
• Avoidance
• Energy
• Unfinished business
• holism
• figure formation process

                                                                            

• Techniques
• experiments that intensify experiencing and integragate conflicting feelings
• therapist and client design experiments to develope I/thou dialogue
• work with dreams to help client re-live the dream as if it were happening now
• Guided fantasy to visual an experience client shares and ask how they feel in that moment
• Exaggerate movements of person such as a wife acts like she's mimicing her husbands conversation and then ask client to move like they would. Helps intensify clients feelings

Links: www.ehow.com/list_6907094_gestalt-counseling-techniques.html



Behavior Therapy



 

• Who? B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)
•  Skinner was called the Father of  Behavioral approach to Psychology
•  Emphasis on effects of environment on behavior
•  He said humans do not have free choice
•  He also stated that environment can be directly changed and observed but it is harder to see into the minds and motives of behaviors.
• Albert Bandura - Social cognitive theory...how we function as self organization, proactive self, reflective self. Forces that motivate behavior
• Arnold Lazarus - contributed to develpment of behavior therapy

• Goals
• Eliminate maladaptive behaviors                     
• learn more effective behaviors
• Find out how to change problamatic behavior
• Get client to help actively participate in development of treatment goals and how well these goals are being met

• Key Concepts
• product and producer of the environment
• Focus on overt behavior
• Present behavior is given attention
• Based on principles of learning theory
• Normal behavior - learned through reinforcment and imitation
• Abnormal behavior - result of faulty learning

• Techniques
• Reinforcement, shaping, modeling, systematic desensitization
• Relaxation methods
• Flooding
• Eye movement and desensitization reprocessing
• Cognitive restructuring
• Assertion

Links: depts.washington.edu/brtc/links/dbt

            www.behaviorlinks.org/therapyprograms.html