Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
Psychology for Dummies (84 page)
I want to start out this section with a little philosophical conundrum. Do you remember the “beaming” transporter in the television show
Star Trek?
As of now, you’re a crewmember on the starship
Enterprise.
You’re on an extremely dangerous mission to the planet Rumalian, and things start to get really out of control, so you radio Scotty to beam you back to the ship immediately. Ol’ Scotty beams you up, and you’re scheduled for mission debriefing with Captain Kirk. But first, you have get medical clearance from Bones, the ship’s doctor. You go to the infirmary for your examination.
During the course of Bones’s examination, you hear him say “Uh oh!” He tells you that, during the computerized mind-mapping scan, he’s discovered that part of your brain is missing. He explains that the beaming process has been known to fail in reconfiguring some body parts, and sometimes things get lost.
“How often does this happen Doc?” you ask.
“The chances are one in a million. Don’t worry though; it’s not a very important part of your brain. You won’t even miss it,” Bones replies.
At that moment Dr. Spock enters the infirmary.
“Hold on a minute Bones. Don’t tell her that it doesn’t matter. She’ll never be the same person again.” Spock says.
“Of course she will,” Bones replies. “I’ve got prosthetic brain section 45 ready to install. She’ll never know it was gone.”
“Yes she will,” Spock adds. “Have you ever heard of the concept that the whole is more than the sum of its parts? Even if you replace that missing brain part, she’ll never be the same person because the original person that she was had been more than the sum of a bunch of body parts.”
At this point, you’re thoroughly freaked out. Is Spock right? Who are “you” with that missing part? Will you still be “you” when Bones replaces the part? Will the new “you” with the new parts be the same “you” as the old “you” with the old parts?
It seems that Dr. Spock has been reading some Gestalt psychology.
Gestalt psychologists
believe that the human mind organizes the world into meaningful wholes, called
Gestalts,
and that the organized whole is essentially different than the sum of its parts.
I was a late-night snacker. It never failed — every night around 10:00, I got a craving for something. Sometimes it was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and sometimes it was a frozen burrito. Then, I heard something one day that really blew me away. I heard that a lot of people mistake dehydration for hunger. So, the next time I felt that late-night craving for food, I drank a bottle of water instead. It worked! I wasn’t “hungry” anymore. What’s the moral of this story? There isn’t one; I just thought I’d tell you about my late-night eating binges. Actually, that’s not true. There is a moral to this story — I was out of touch with what my body needed, and I mistook one need for another. How could I mistake hunger for dehydration?
Gestalt therapy, founded by Fritz Perls, although not specifically concerned with my PB&J problem, focuses on patients being out of touch with their needs as a living organism. Each of us is a living, breathing, eating, and pooping organism that exists in an environment. We are self-regulating organisms. We inherently know what our needs are, and when we’re free of obstacles, we satisfactorily meet those needs naturally.
Our biological needs lie at the core of all our behaviors, and as Fritz Perls emphasized, we are biological entities. Perls called these biological needs
end-goals
— our basic needs for food, water, sex, shelter, and the ability to breathe. Everything else that we do and all the other needs we satisfy are connected to serving these basic needs. These needs are the means to the end of biological existence. When a need arises out of deficiency, we feel an urge or drive to restore our natural balance, our wholeness. This need dominates our consciousness until it is met.
So far, it seems that Gestalt therapy is concerned with organization, and by that I don’t mean that Fritz Perls was a neat freak. The Gestalt point is quite simple: We organize our lives, behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and activities around our needs. Our end-goal needs and those means by which we try to meet them lie at the center of our personal organization.
I’m a bunch of parts organized around a need (basic needs and secondary needs). To the Gestalt psychologists concerned with human perception, when something is central in our perceptual field, it is called
figural.
It becomes a well-defined “figure” set against a less clear and ill-defined background called the
ground.
At any particular point, I have a need that is figural, set against a ground. My life is organized around what is figural to me. Perls and the Gestalt therapists called the figure and ground together, including all the various parts of the person and the environment, the
field
.
In order to try and understand how this figure-ground concept works, try the following exercise. In Chapter 5, I discuss how perceptual wholes consist of figural percepts set against a backdrop or background. Sometimes, we focus on the figure, and sometimes we focus on the ground. Try it. Hold a pen or pencil about 10 inches from your face. Focus on it. Then focus on the things behind the pen. Shift back and forth to get the idea of figure and ground. The same concept applies in a metaphorical sense to our needs. Some needs are in focus, and others are not.
The field is separated into figure and ground based on the need that most demands satisfaction (figure) and those needs that are already satisfied (ground). In a process called the
cycles of experience,
a need stays figural until it’s satisfied, and then it fades into the background, permitting the next-most pressing need to emerge. According to Clarkson and Mackewn, the cycle looks something like this:
1. Fore contact:
An organism (that’s you and me) becomes aware of a need.
2. Contacting:
Resources are mobilized and utilized to meet the need, as the organism takes action to overcome anything standing in its way.
3. Final contact:
The organism becomes fully invested in the process of need fulfillment. Any non-figural needs fade into the ground, and the organism’s current, most-pressing need sharpens and brightens in its field.
4. Post-contact:
Satisfaction is achieved, and the figure fades.
Gestalt therapists are big on being aware. Perls defined
awareness
as being in touch with the whole field, which includes both what is figural and what is ground. Gestalt therapists call being aware of the whole field, being in
contact
— the process of continual interaction and adjustment between an organism and its environment. We grow and mature through contact.
Perls often used eating as an example. Eating is a process of feeling hungry, searching for food, taking in the nourishment, and growing from its benefit. As we connect and maintain contact with the world, including ourselves, we take in what is nourishing and reject things that are poisonous or toxic. Contact is not an indiscriminate process. All food needs to be broken down, chewed, and digested in order to be useful, and we can’t go stuffing our mouths with everything we see. So stop eyeballing that Oleander bush — it’s not edible, no matter how figural your need to chomp on its pretty pink flowers is.
Perls seemed to have great respect for the self-regulating capacity in all of us. He expected his patients to strive toward integration and maturity, avoiding unnecessary dependence on others. He expected and respected each individual’s independence and autonomy. His famous Gestalt mantra says it well:
I do my thing, and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I.
If by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.
Gestalt therapists don’t typically use traditional diagnoses and categories of psychopathology, which doesn’t mean they think that nothing is wrong with the patients seeking help. With all of these parts, needs, figures, and grounds floating around, it may be easy to see how someone’s life could get messed up.
Some of the problems Gestalt therapists identify in a typical patient follow:
When we stop growing and maturing, and we cease to function as effective need-meeting organisms, we have a
growth disorder.
The normal process of figure-ground formation is disrupted, and instead of real satisfaction, all we have is a bunch of unresolved needs.
When a need isn’t met, it stays figural and is referred to as
unfinished business.
The gestalts for each of these different needs all push for completion. Everything we do, say, feel, think, and so on becomes interpreted with respect to this piece or these pieces of unfinished business. It’s like the old saying: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, when all I’ve got is unfinished business, everything looks like a business opportunity.
Here’s an example: I recently interviewed for a new job. The people I interviewed with told me that they would either send me a letter or call me within two weeks of the interview. I couldn’t get the “call me or mail me” thought out of my head. I incessantly went to the mailbox and answered the phone thinking it was the potential employer! My need to get the job was organizing my experience. As I write this, it’s still unfinished business; they still haven’t contacted me.
We have two strategies to try to deal with this unmet need:
forgetting about or suppressing the need.
Perls believed that suppressing an unmet need exacts a toll on our vital life energy. It can sap us of our strength. We become un-centered and unaware of the field through the process of suppression.
Another way of dealing with unmet needs is to
create substitute or replacement needs.
This process may serve to satisfy some part of us, but it never really quite does the job. We find ourselves stuck in a
fixed-gestalt,
where no figures fade and no new ones emerge.
We’re never quite satisfied by either suppression or replacement. Our unfinished business always comes back to haunt us. Reminds me of the Rolling Stones’s song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”
We reach an
impasse,
or a block in our growth, the natural cycle of experience is disrupted and contact is interrupted. We’re stuck with compromised solutions to unfinished business.
Perls and the Gestaltists proposed five different layers of being stuck. That’s five different ways that are growth stops as we live an out-of-touch, inauthentic life. When we’re at this stuck point, we’ve adopted a compromised and ineffective approach to meeting our organismic needs. We’re out-of-touch with our truest cycle of experience. Here are the layers:
•
Phony layer:
This is the level of functioning in which we construct an unreal self in order to engage with the world. We adopt roles and identities that are not reflective of our truest needs. We strive to fulfill a concept of who think we are, not who we actually are.
•
Phobic layer:
Here, we’re afraid of who we really are, underneath the phony layer. We fear that if we show who we really are, everyone will run away in horror. No one could possibly love the real me!
•
Impasse layer:
This is the point where we get stuck. We start giving up on getting our needs met because we think that we’re incapable of going on or providing our own solutions. Often, a fear of independence is involved.
•
Implosive layer:
This is an experience of detachment from various parts of our self that we’ve disowned or denied. It’s as if we’re frozen with fear of moving on with life. We’re almost paralyzed.
•
Explosive layer:
This is a release of all that imploded and pent up energy. Some patients describe this as a feeling of having a weight lifted off their backs. They feel energized, and there’s a huge gain in energy.
Each of us has a variety of defense mechanisms that disrupts contact. Remember that contact is the utilization and mobilization of resources to meet a need and being in touch with the entire field. We use these defense mechanisms to survive, even though we survive in a compromised position. These are called
boundary disturbances:
•
Introjection:
This is a process of taking information in from the environment without assimilating it into our personalities. It’s like swallowing food whole without chewing it up first. You get a belly-full of indigestible goop. If nothing is digested, its nourishment can’t be extracted. This can happen when we feel overpowered or overwhelmed by our environment. If I’ve introjected my domineering father’s opinion that I’ll never amount to anything, I’ll grow up believing this.
•
Projection:
Have you ever felt guilty about something? Of course you have. Did you ever accuse someone else of doing the thing that you knew you were guilty of? If so, you were guilty on two counts — guilty of doing whatever it is that you did and guilty of projection. Projection is more than blaming. It’s the process in which we attribute something about ourselves to someone else. Sometimes, projection occurs when we think, feel, or experience something that is “unacceptable” to us or to the people who are important to us. Projection allows us to avoid responsibility. “I didn’t do it, I swear. You did!”
•
Confluence:
If we fail to make a distinction between our own contact boundary and someone else’s contact boundary, we can avoid contact all together. Contact results from friction. If there’s no “you” and “me,” then there’s no friction and thus no contact. We’re mixed up, not knowing where I begin and you end and vice versa. This kind of sounds like a smooth process, and it is. Gestalt therapists are not big on smooth relationships because they believe that peoples’ needs aren’t optimally met under these conditions.
•
Retroflection:
The retroflection proclamation: “Do unto yourself what you want to do to others.” This is a process of turning outward- going feelings, thoughts, and behaviors back toward oneself. Instead of being angry with my parents, for example, I may start to be angry with myself. Retroflection also describes the process of doing to yourself what you want others to do to or for you. Remember Stewart from the movie
Stewart Saves His Family?
He would sit in front of a mirror and give himself positive affirmations. “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like you!” If nobody else will love you, love yourself!
•
Desensitization:
We numb ourselves to the world around us through the desensitization process. Remember the Pink Floyd song, “Comfortably Numb”?
•
Egotism:
This is when we’re paralyzed by extreme self-analysis. We attempt to control the chaos of our worlds by being perfect and making all the “right” decisions. Analysis is paralysis in this case.
Hopefully you haven’t become hopeless after hearing about all those impasses and defense mechanisms. If you have, that’s alright. Gestalt therapists have their own unique approach to therapy that addresses being stuck and out of contact.