![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
erratio Last term, when we covered Gestalt Therapy, it was the most impenetrable thing I've ever seen. It's one of the very few topics where the more I read, the less I felt like I understood what the heck it was about. And then the lecturer did an in-class demonstration and I went away going "what did I just watch?". A week later after thinking about it, I had a slightly better idea of what he'd been doing, but my view on Gestalt was still basically "????????".
In the time since then, I've worked my butt off in personal therapy. I don't know how much concrete progress I've made, but I have a much better idea of what the target is that I'm trying to hit and what kinds of things I need to work on in order to hit it. I mention this because we're covering the modalities again this term, but in greater depth, and this time when I did the Gestalt readings and paid attention to the lecturer it made sense. It's such a trippy feeling, that I wasn't explicitly doing anything related to it in the meantime and yet this time around it felt less like a load of weird impenetrable nonsense and more like a description of something that's inherently not very easy to describe (and also obscured further by a bunch of unnecessary jargon, but that's a different issue).
Concurrently with the lecture on Gestalt, my housemate has gone to a leadership/self-development retreat thing and has come back with a lot of... very similar ideas to Gestalt, really, where before he used to be overly focused on trying to be an advice dispenser. And I'm pretty sure he sounds impenetrably mystical now to a lot of people. His next step is trying to figure out how to communicate the same concepts in a way that doesn't alienate the SSC/LW-type crowd.
In the time since then, I've worked my butt off in personal therapy. I don't know how much concrete progress I've made, but I have a much better idea of what the target is that I'm trying to hit and what kinds of things I need to work on in order to hit it. I mention this because we're covering the modalities again this term, but in greater depth, and this time when I did the Gestalt readings and paid attention to the lecturer it made sense. It's such a trippy feeling, that I wasn't explicitly doing anything related to it in the meantime and yet this time around it felt less like a load of weird impenetrable nonsense and more like a description of something that's inherently not very easy to describe (and also obscured further by a bunch of unnecessary jargon, but that's a different issue).
Concurrently with the lecture on Gestalt, my housemate has gone to a leadership/self-development retreat thing and has come back with a lot of... very similar ideas to Gestalt, really, where before he used to be overly focused on trying to be an advice dispenser. And I'm pretty sure he sounds impenetrably mystical now to a lot of people. His next step is trying to figure out how to communicate the same concepts in a way that doesn't alienate the SSC/LW-type crowd.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-09 02:56 am (UTC)Gestalt is a branch (if, I gather, somewhat sui generis) of the Humanist tree.
As someone else of the Humanist lineage: impenatrably mystical is to Humanist psychotherapies what waste heat is to engineering: it's an unwanted by-product, but is inevitable due to fundamental laws of the universe. Also, it's weak evidence something you're doing is succeeding: lots of things get hot/mystical-sounding without working, but nothing much works without getting hot/mystical-sounding.
Honestly, in psychology, if you don't have to neologize heavily to describe whatever you've discovered, it's probably not a very interesting discovery.
ETA: I should mention: in Keirsey's book on Myers-Briggs type, Please Understand Me, the passage he used to (he argued) demonstrate that NF values of self-actualization sound unintelligible to people of other temperaments was... what, when I finally encountered it again, in my counseling fundamentals first semester course's main text, was a perfectly intelligible passage about how Rogerian psychotherapy works.
Well, intelligible to me.