Egyéni ülés

The Freedom of the Blooming Self

 

“We are flowers. Within each of us is the seed of our potential. As we grow, we grow according to our possibilities.”

Fritz Perls

 

The quality or condition of the psyche is the support of the self blooming process. 

The quality of our everyday lives is represented day by day how we are able to exist in the freedom of blooming of the self.

It can change within a couple of days , weeks or months, based on our choices. And what choices we make depends on our level of awareness.

 

 

“Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once they grow up.” – Picasso

 

 

For somebody who is not a born artist The Freedom of the Blooming Self  can be living their life consciously, making conscious decisions, fully exploiting their inborn and learnt skills. Thus they can create a life which did not exist in the past and will not exist in the future. Individual.

Art is when something new was created that hasn’t existed before and nobody else could have created it.

Art is when the artist conveys something to somebody through his own interpretation and understanding. This is artistic expression.

In therapy we support self blooming process and there is no  guarantee that there will be a piece of art as a product at the end.

But who decides. It is an open question. Who can say the product bellow is an art piece or not?

“We cannot learn how to be creative – we just are creative. Whether we use our creativity to nourish, diminish or destroy our being-in-the-world is ultimately our choice.” – Dave Mann Gestalt Therapy: 100 Key Points and Techniques

 

Art can emerge not only through fine arts, graphic arts but also through moving, music, poems, etc.

 

The therapist might perceive his work as a form of art, since at the end of the client work process, or even at specific moments during the process, a different person is sitting opposite the therapist, a person who hasn’t existed before.

A whole, more aware human being became the one he is during the work with the therapist.

 

Gestalt fundamental principal:

We create our reality together. In this process  the therapeutic field and the inner psychological field become THE FIELD.

 

What does The Freedom of the Blooming Self mean in psychology, in psychological meaning?

It is Art itself. Art in therapy, Art Therapy itself is when we as therapists take psychological principles into account and accompany this process explicitly. This way we can spot and highlight traumas and blocks which exist in the client. These are the so called unfinished businesses which demand/require attention again and again and form a pattern. Something which we become aware of will be suitable to make a decision about. Until we don’t know it exists we cannot make a decision whether we let it be or not.

These patterns or these unfinished businesses can emerge like automatic habits, movements, reactions, instinctive emotions or improper communication in a situation. Where there is unfinished business there the energy is trapped.

 

What the work with drawings in therapy means:

We can speak about the self blooming through drawing when the client projects their inner content onto the canvas , onto the paper in this specific situation.

The sheet of  paper represents the client’s perceived and real environment, and what they project onto it is the content we have to work with in therapy.

 

As projection is an unconscious process the suppressed content, unfinished businesses and tensions will appear anyway through drawing and that’s why they become possible to look at. The clients themselves watch these from an external perspective and can decide what to do with them.

 

The sources

 

The method I work with is alloying Gestalt methodology and Psychology of Visual Expression is SSCA Seven Step Configuration Analysis Model.

                 Dr Zoltan Vass

 

The SSCA method gives a rich synthesis of the psychology and psycho-diagnostics of drawing and painting. The fundamental aspect is its holistic point of view, which avoids the isolated interpretation of parts, in preference to a systems thinking approach.

 

It’s called 7 steps configuration analysis which means a system based on the last more than 60 years drawing psychological experiment and researching. I will use “projective drawing” definition in the lecture.

                       Dr Istvan Hardi

 

Dynamic examination of drawing is a serial-comparative follow-up of drawings. To ask the client from time to time along by the therapeutic process by giving the very same instruction. By comparing the pictures, which were created at different times, the expert can  follow up the client’s states and progression.

 

How I apply theories and methods of SSCA, dynamic flow up and Gestalt

How I approach using the drawing experiments

 

The way I am working is combining a solution focus, cognitive and behaviour focus because in order to have a better and meaningful life we have to have a future focus. There is a risk in most people’s life they call up for doing, to strive for the outcome and they loose the current reality , especially they loose the emotional experience of where they are now and where their journey is taking them. So with the image of a more acceptable future we work in the here and now.

Because drawing is very much interaction based, at the same time I work with them as experiments. The forming map of drawings represents the client’s life in visual form, showing it as a system which does not only have components and interactions, but these can be even changed. Although the clients are unaware, during the work they make new decisions regarding their life while engraining them on paper and also in their inner self. After making the test real changes start in the clients’ life which are validated and long lasted by the sensation that they were the one who created the recognition and change.

What is very important is the decision what test I offer in what moment.  I use SSCA’s drawing tests like a work part  in therapy.

 

Gestalt and SSCA complement each other in therapy and very effective together. Gestalt therapist is trained to perceive all information at the very same time. I mean under information here: everything I can impact from the field, everything I know from both of our biographies, everything I know about the client’s physical and mental condition, and everything I can see as actual genesis.

 

In Gestalt we know that the expert is that person not us. We might have ideas, we might have reactions, we might have opinion but we don’t know what’s going on inside the other person. We can help them express more about themselves. In Gestalt we constantly look at the edge of I’m me so we can both see where the projection is.

 

As Gestaltist we sense most of the things at the same time on the field and there is always one thing which is more important than others, that is the figure. We, humans are on different levels of awareness, aware or unaware of what the sensations are: what we see, what we hear, what we feel. It’s all together a sensation.

 

The method is a very good training for people. To train how to express themselves. It can be a huge difference between how the client speaks about her sensations nowadays than he did at the beginning of the therapeutic relationship. Finally it can turn into being very sophisticated while at the beginning client was able to say it’s good, it’s bad, black and white. During these months and years client really can learn how to express him-or herself.

It can also be a calling for experiment if the client says no for drawing.

 

Because this method is very much based on individual sensation, we don’t use patterns and common signals. Like red means love, black means devil. In that way it’s very phenomenological like Gestalt is. The meaning comes from the client. We use tools to extend awareness. Drawing is an experiment itself, at the same time Gestalt methodology also can be used, after verbal exploration, added datas from the field and from anamnesis I offer Gestalt based experiments. One for example is the kinaesthetic movement.

Phenomenological and dialogical approach are the fundaments of both methodologies.