Structuring Background by Letting Go of
Clinging and Avoidance

Jungkyu Kim , Ph.D.

Sungshin Women's University

Jungkyu Kim is a gestalt therapist living in Seoul, Korea and has been a professor in clinical psychology at Sungshin Women's University since 1988, where he teaches clinical psychology, abnormal psychology, gestalt therapy, group therapy, and art therapy. He is the former President of the Korean Clinical Psychology Association and current President of the Korean Gestalt Therapy Association. He trained at the Fritz Perls Institute in Germany, with Erving and Miriam Polster in San Diego, and with Gary Yontef and Lynne Jacobs in Los Angeles.

Editorial | Gaffney | Kim | Robine | Greenberg | Philippson | Articles of Interest

Gestalt!
Volume 11; Number 1
Winter, 2011
Published by
The Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy

Edited by

Charles Bowman, MS

Dan Bloom, J.D.; LCSW

Philip Brownell, M.Div.; Psy.D.

The Emergent Self: An Existential-Gestalt Approach
by
Peter Philippson

This book tracks an understanding of self, philosophically, from research evidence and its implications for psychotherapy. The author includes the theory, the clinical implications of the theory, links to the philosophical outlook inherent in the theory, and finally a more extended case example.

Philipsson takes the view that the continuing self is partly an illusion, partly a construct, and that we in fact have to work to stay the same in the face of all the different possibilities the world offers us. He believes that we do this for two reasons. First, continuity allows deeper contact: friendships, loving relationships with partners and families. Second, the predictable is less anxiety-producing, and that we avoid this existential anxiety by acting in a stereotyped way and avoiding some of the depths of contact. He argues that this dual nature of continuing self, in one context deepening contact and in another context avoiding contact, has an important place in the understanding of psychotherapy.

Peter Philippson is a UKCP Registered Gestalt psychotherapist and trainer, a Teaching and Supervising Member of the Gestalt Psychotherapy & Training Institute UK, a founder member of Manchester Gestalt Centre, and Full Member of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy.

Abstract

I always have been much interested to know how it works to translate an idea, a concept, or an experience into another language. What if people speaking the other language don't have the same thought, experience or background? Are we destined to be confined within the prisons of our own experiences and languages? The problem exists not only between people using different languages, but also among the people who speak the same language, because even siblings within a family cannot always have the same experiences as background. (Soon to be published in the first issue of the Korean Journal of Gestalt Therapy.)

I always have been much interested to know how it works to translate an idea, a concept, or an experience into another language. What if people speaking the other language don't have the same thought, experience or background? Are we destined to be confined within the prisons of our own experiences and languages? The problem exists not only between people using different languages, but also among the people who speak the same language, because even siblings within a family cannot always have the same experiences as background.

I remember very vividly the moment the scales went off my eyes when I attended a course on the language philosophy of F. Nietzsche, offered by professor Simon in the Summer semester 1993 at the University of Bonn Germany. According to Nietzsche, Simon said, learning a new vocabulary always is built on the words we know already. This becomes very apparent as we look up a new word in a dictionary, where new words are explained by words we already know. The same principle is at work when we come to learn a new idea, knowledge, or a religion. It is evident that we would not be able to learn a "new" idea, if we were not equipped with "old" ideas or experiences that are in some way connected to the so called "new" one. Thus, we can learn or teach an idea from or to another person, because everyone has already some "old" ideas or experiences which are related to the "new" one.
But the question I raised is still not quite answered, because the "old" ideas or experiences that one person has could be different from those other people might have. Actually according to Nietzsche there is no such thing as "absolute" truth or reality, because every person's will and way of understanding the world is different from an other. This does not mean that we cannot understand "new" ideas or another person's experience. This only means that we cannot claim that we understood another person's idea or another person per se absolutely. We can understand an idea or another person's experience by utilizing our own knowledge or past experiences that are related to them. Even though this understanding cannot be perfect, it opens a door to new ideas or to another person's experiences. This view of Nietzsche was later picked up by his student E. Husserl and further developed into phenomenology, which served as background of gestalt therapy.

There is another important aspect that must be taken into account, i.e. the needs and interest of a person, if we want to investigate what happens when a person tries to understand a new idea or another person's experience, because people will differently reconstruct an idea or an other person's experience depending on what needs or interests they have in such a situation. Furthermore, the original idea or other person's experience can also be affected by the response of this person in the process of interaction, which means understanding is always a co-creation of the understander and the "understandee" resulting in a new reality.

Understanding of an idea or an experience can never be fixed for sure, as it always varies and changes over time; there can be innumerous people involved in this process and the needs and interests of these people may result in different understandings. Indeed, they influence the idea or the experience itself. Consequently, we can say that the understander and the understandee stay in inseparable relation, which corresponds to field theory that plays a crucial role in gestalt therapy. So, my understanding of Buddhism and gestalt therapy must be different from someone in a different culture and the same with my strategy to make use of Buddhism in understanding better, and if possible stretching further the boundary of gestalt therapy theory and practice.

Before I go further and expose my ideas about understanding gestalt therapy from Buddhistic perspectives, I want to introduce shortly my personal background in terms of encountering Buddhism so that you can better understand my figure.

I was born in a traditional Confucian family in Korea and was raised up according to a Confucian value system, where humanity, morality, propriety, wisdom and fidelity were highly regarded. I was like many other Koreans exposed from early childhood to Buddhism, because my mother was a Buddhist and used to visit Buddhist temple to worship Buddha so that He might give our family happiness and prosperity. Some people might be surprised hearing this, because their experience with Buddhism, including Mindfulness meditation, doesn't include worshiping Buddha. My mother also practiced Confucianism, because she respected and kept all the Confucian rituals very sincerely, which applies to most Korean Buddhists. I think this was possible not only because both Confucianism and Buddhism are very tolerant, but also because of the fact I explained above. Namely, we cannot but learn or receive a new idea or a new religion on the basis of the existing one. This actually happened in China around 200 B.C. when it first encountered Buddhism and tried to understand it on the basis of Taoism and Confucianism, which was repeated in Korea later as well. Buddhism was transformed and took various new forms as it came from India to China and Korea, one of which is Zen-Buddhism, which is quite different from Mindfulness meditation. Chinese and Koreans developed different forms of Buddhism respectively on the basis of their different social and cultural backgrounds and political interests, about which I can't go more deeply here, because it will go beyond the scope of this paper.

My first temple stay took place when I was 13 years old as I decided to study there for 2 months during a winter vacation. The temple was located half way up a mountain surrounded by woods and rocks. There were three people living there besides me–a monk and a married couple helping the monk to take care of things necessary to keep the temple in order. The monk, an old woman, paid homage to and worshiped Buddha every morning and evening by burning incense and singing Buddhistic chanting. I would take part in the ceremony and observed what she did. I didn't like the smell of incense very much and paintings of various Bodhisattva either, because they looked somehow strange to me. But I did like the woman's chanting voice and the pious atmosphere around it.

What I liked most was walking alone the way up the hill to the temple, because it felt as if I was cultivating a sense of morale in the pursuit of truth (tao) in terms of Buddhism as well as of Confucianism. My mother would visit me carrying a rice sack on her head (which was meant as the expense for my temple stay) all the way up the mountain. She would then say to me with a caring smile on her face, "Find the way (tao)!" I felt touched by hearing her words, because I felt her love toward me in them. I pledged myself to find the tao for the sake of my mother who loved me so much. The Buddhism, Confucianism and parent's love was inseparable to me as was the case for many of the Koreans at that time.

Buddhism is for me no more only being mindful of breathing than gestalt therapy is mere an awareness training. Buddhism is for me rather a world view in which various philosophical and religious ideas are melt such as those from Confucianism, Taoism and Korean folk belief, through which I see and meet new ideas and experiences. Although Buddhism can color them on one hand, it can help me on the other hand to direct my attention to certain areas that are valuable in the "new" ideas or experiences. This is how I approach gestalt therapy to understand it from a Buddhistic perspective. Namely, I try to understand gestalt therapy from the framework of Buddhism, where I set forth to find those elements in gestalt therapy that I know of and I value in Buddhism.

The most pregnant teaching of Buddhism for me that also applies to gestalt therapy theory and practice is No-thingness (?) or Emptiness (?). There is nothing in the world, according to Buddhism, we can hold onto, because everything is empty. But we all have an innate concept of "thingness" and cling to it. So we want to possess money, house, car, friends, lover, husband and wife, sons and daughters, positions, knowledge, fame, and even relationships, while on the other hand we try to avoid or get rid of fear, anxiety, anger, shame, hatred, and bad memories.

We try to hold onto things that we believe will give us pleasure and satisfaction. But we are all doomed to fail and be frustrated in that attempt, thus never being satisfied, because there is nothing in the world that persists forever. The moment we believe we have it, it slips off our hands and disappears. We feel discouraged and sad, which drives us more to strive for possessions, because we are thirsty. The more we try to possess the things, the more frustrated and thirsty we become. There is nothing in the world that we could call a real substance. Everything is in its true nature empty.

Emptiness is, however, not the same as nil or naught. On the contrary, emptiness means being or existence. It is emptiness that allows everything to be, to exist, to be alive, finally to live. In other words, without being empty nothing can really exist or live. Emptiness is actually the foundation that enables every existence to come into being, which reminds us of the concept "fertile void" that Fritz Perls mentioned (Perls, 1969; Rubenfeld, 2000). Perls distinguished the fertile void from the sterile void, which is characteristic for neurosis. Fertile void can be met when we stop anticipating, engaging in memories, fantasizing, and doing "fitting games" in order to face the now. Then we can experience a reality in now as it emerges from the fertile void or emptiness (Naranjo, 1993. p.52).

The idea of fertile void which originated from Wilson Van Dusen and then was adopted by Fritz Perls (Rubenfeld, 2000), is quite compatible with the Buddhistic idea of emptiness. Emptiness itself is not a thing, therefore it is no-thing. So we can say emptiness is no-thingness. Since emptiness is no-thing it can become everything. It transforms itself every moment to become another existence. It can no more be separated from the existence that evolves from it than the background from the figure that emerges out of it.

Emptiness is the mother of all creatures, because it enables everything to arise out of it. Emptiness is the earth which embraces everything to come back into its bosom to be recreated into a new life. The same relationship is found in the gestalt concept of figure and ground. Ground is the mother, the earth that brings forth new figure into figure-ground constellation and receives the figure back into its heart that has completed its cycle and is ready to be reborn with new energy by returning to its womb.

According to Buddhism it is our clinging that causes us pains and sufferings. Clinging is an attitude that denies the empty nature of all things and holding onto thingness of the world. We want to have unchangeable substance that lasts forever. We want to secure our body, people, and environment in safety, for which we need science and knowledge. We want to eliminate any uncertainty in predicting our future to the extent that even the realm of our inner mind is not exceptional in this regard.
So many psychological symptoms such as anxiety, fear, obsession and depression are only fully understood when the motivation behind our attempts to succeed in defending any possible misfortune in our fantasized future events is seen through. We want to "understand", predict, and then control the world as we wish it to be. It is interesting to know that the German word for understanding is "Begreifen", which means holding or grasping, and the noun form of which is "Begriff", which is equivalent to English word "concept". We can see here that we use language, in other words concepts, to secure, to grasp, to hold onto the world as we wish it to be. We want to have things and try to achieve that by using concepts in science, religion, in philosophy, and in everyday life as well. Every thought, every act, every intention of us is geared to having or securing the thing, which Nietzsche(1922) called "the will to power(Der Wille zur Macht)." We use concepts to achieve power, in other words to have control over the things, which we believe are utmost valuable.

Buddhism is very radical at this point declaring that there is no salvation possible in our pursuit of clinging onto things. It says clearly we have to let it go to really become free and be alive. We have to let go our clinging at every level. That is, in thinking, feeling, acting, breathing as well as in relationship. We have to let go both our clinging to the past and future, and then come into being and live in the present.

What does gestalt therapy say about this? I find the same attitude in gestalt therapy. Clinging is equivalent to the gestalt therapy concept of interruption or contact boundary disturbances. It is interruption that impedes organismic flow of energy during awareness-contact cycles. It is interruption of the process of figure-ground alternations that causes psychological disturbances. New figures cannot emerge from the background, when we either cling to unfinished businesses or to figures that are too attractive to let go. The unfinished businesses that we hold onto because we can't face and dissolve them become fixed gestalten and cannot recede into the background. The figures that we hold onto because they are too attractive also arrest our focal attention and impede the alternation of figure-ground constellation causing psychological disturbances. This happens, because we think the figure is so valuable and want to have it forever. We don't want to lose it, again holding onto things.

We always try either to hold onto unfinished businesses or to a figure that was attractive, say our past, or to avoid the void, say our future, by our effort to predict and thereby to control them, which is made possible by making them things. We reify our past and future by using our concepts, which are being invented for that purpose, and fail to meet the presence and live in the present.

The implication and indication in terms of healing the pains and sufferings both for clients and therapists derived from gestalt therapy as well as Buddhism is to lose your mind and come to your senses (Perls, 1951), to which I want to supplement a phrase "in the context of I and Thou relationship."

What does this mean in the practice of psychotherapy? It means for clients that they discard the bad habit of trying to understand themselves through thinking, analyzing, and conceptualizing, and then use their senses, pay attention to what is happening right now in or around themselves, stay open to what is there in here and now so that they can make better contact with themselves as well as others and the environment. Their vision and experiences have been blurred and blocked by their holding onto past and future, which was supported by the use of conceptual thinking.

How can they achieve this new methodology of discarding an "analyzing mind" and adopting "coming to senses in the context of I and Thou relationship?" Of course they can't do that easily without the help of a therapist. Gestalt therapists guide and support this hard task by becoming aware of what is happening in the client, what the client is doing, what the client is not doing (avoiding) and letting the client be aware of them. How can therapists do that? They have to be trained or helped to be aware of their processes before they embark on the task of helping clients. This must be clear to anyone who is introduced to gestalt therapy to some extent. However, psychotherapeutic practice requires far more detailed knowledge and understanding of what happens than just the dictum: Be aware of the here and now, and open to the experiences.

The most important thing here for us, the gestalt therapists, to know is the distinction between content and process. Content refers to the meaning of what is being said, whereas process to the act or phenomenon that takes place as it is being said. Content is thus always abstraction that is based on conceptual thinking, which is helpful in understanding and grasping an unknown thing but is not real as such. Process is what is really happening. Process is not fixed. It is always changing into another state. It arises, comes into being, and goes away.

We can give a name to various processes, but they are different from conceptual understanding in that the person giving names to such processes knows that they are only names and insufficient. More important is the fact that he/she knows the processes are changing from moment to moment and the names he/she gave are valid only for that moment. The names can be likened to fingers pointing at the moon as is often told in Buddhism.

Like I described earlier, our clients resort to an analyzing mind when they feel insecure, express a content-oriented approach for the purpose of fixing, controlling, and securing the things, which causes contact boundary disturbances. The more unsafe they feel, the harder they try to hold onto things and the stronger they become content oriented. They try to fix the things by analyzing, predicting, and securing. This tendency is both for client and therapist very strong, because it belongs to the human nature according to Buddhism, and it is really easy in a therapy to get entangled in the blind game of grappling with contents and going astray, from which there is no way out as long as one is stuck in contents.

Gestalt therapists are cautioned not to fight against the contents clients are incessantly bringing in rather than to find the processes going on and give feedback to them either in form of acceptance, empathy, reflection, exploration or even interpretation, because a process is something real that both the therapist and client can see and experience.

If a therapist tries to fight and change the content, it cannot be successful because of its very nature. That is, the content of clients' statements consists of various concepts that are put together to establish certain "logical" thesis. But any attempt of a therapist to prove or disapprove the truth of such a statement is doomed to fail, because according to I. Kant (1968) our reason knows to find an opposite thesis to the thesis. On top of that the nature of concept is geared to fixing things, as elaborated in detail in the above, and thus resists changing.

For example, a client says that "I am a worthless person!" or "My boss is such an ass!" If a therapist would try to disapprove either of the above statement with no matter how many evidences possible against the thesis, the client will be wise enough to come up with another opposite evidence for her thesis. We cannot simply declare that she committed a thinking error as cognitive behavior therapists would say. I am not saying here that CBT misses the target nor their argument is wrong. What I am saying is the fact that it is not possible to verify or falsify the content of the client's thinking. Then, what is the process going on within the client or between the therapist and the client when she says the above? We cannot know it prior to exploring and seeing what is going on within the client or between the two in the context of I-Thou relationship of therapist and client.

The therapist might have to ask the client what it means when she talks about "worthless." In what sense is she evaluating herself as worthless? Can she give an example of it, possibly embedded in a storytelling so that the background of the figure statement becomes known? A closer exploration might reveal the conflict structure between the top dog and the underdog. Namely, this client might be found to have introjected an extremely high standard from his family that only those who win the first prize deserve a recognition. It is her top dog that says to herself that she is worthless and criticizes her boss as "such an ass" as well. This being said, then the task of the therapist is to let the client be aware of this process of hers. That is, the therapist helps her to discover she is identifying herself with the top dog when she says the above statements.

The client then might be able to realize that she feels depressed not because she is worthless (content), but because she chooses to take sides with the top dog (process). As a client learns to distinguish between a content and a process, she also understands that she can choose a response to whatever situation she finds herself in. So, she is not any more a passive victim of her fate, which she imagined in the past as something negative (content). Nothing is fixed (content) any more to her, and she is being aware of what is going on or what she is doing with her mind, perception, behavior or interaction with the therapist.

She feels empowered to take responsibility in her decision, action, and interaction knowing that nothing persists forever or everything is empty. She doesn't have so strong need to hold onto a thing or a concept, because she now knows that she is an initiator, not a victim of her fate.

To help a client discover and understand the fact described above a therapist himself must be clear enough about the distinction between a concept and a process and be able to see his own processes so that they don't impede in finding out those of the client. If he hits upon his own unfinished businesses or preconceptions during an interaction with the client, he must be able to put them aside (bracketing) for a moment so that he can clearly see the client's processes that arise out of interactions between him and the client.

The client's understanding and experiencing of the process, the nature of all being, enables her to let go her clinging to things. Letting go (???) means here seeing and experiencing the present in the I-Thou relationship, which is in the flux of changing and can be defined phenomenologically and field theoretically (Yontef, 1993). Letting go means discarding defenses, preconceptions, and distortions of all kind which are called in Gestalt therapy "contact boundary disturbances" on both sides of the therapist and the client to plunge into the stream of reality, the process.

Both the therapist and the client then are aware of the processes taking place between them and within themselves, which of course intertwine and interact with each other. They are both aware of all the forces that are present in the field, of which they themselves are an important part. They can now open to and stay with sadness, anger, fear, shame, guilt, loneliness as well as joy and pleasure to accept them as they know that they are all empty and will not last forever. They acquire the capability to see and accept the process.

Most psychological problems are based on fear, and the fear comes from a false belief that there are things that never change and pains that would last forever. We suffer, because we strive for things that are not changing and would give us pleasure forever on one hand, and try to avoid pains that are reified and regarded as unchanging substance either on the other hand. Letting go means letting go of both the holding onto the things and avoidance of the pains, both of which are considered to be unchangeable, which is possible by understanding and experiencing the processes. Process orientation is an attitude that demystifies the concept of substance which originates from philosophical idealism, which both Buddhism and Gestalt therapy radically oppose.

Process orientation is acceptance and awareness of rather than clinging to or avoidance from what is in the here and now between I-Thou relationship which is embedded in organism/environment field, which is in the constant flux of changing in its totality.

Conclusion

The major hindrances to restructuring one’s ground are clinging and avoidance, both of which are based on the belief that there are things that are eternal and never changing. Therefore, it is prerequisite to such a job that one understands the no-thingness or emptiness of the nature of all things or all phenomena, for which the distinction between content and process is crucial. The concept of content represents the naive philosophical idealism, upon which most of our everyday life is based, whereas that of process is a stance that both Buddhism and gestalt therapy take up.

We need contents to secure and make our future predictable, but they paradoxically threaten and jeopardize the fundament of our existence, which is not predictable in its nature. By surrendering to and trusting the process–unknown becoming–we can secure and guarantee the nature of our being to develop and flourish. We can support such process by being aware of and accepting the processes that unfold incessantly in front of and within us, and between us meaning people, animal, nature, and objects, which all are integral parts of the whole.

Buddhism can help us gestalt therapists to see clearly the no-thingness or emptiness of all the phenomena, and furthermore it provides us with a concrete methodology with which we can train ourselves to get off the clinging and avoiding. Gestalt therapy with its well equipped theory and practice can fill in those gaps that are found in Buddhism. For example, phenomenology, dialogic relationship, field theoretical perspective, and experiment can help clients explore more deeply into the processes in work within, between, and as a whole. I have attempted to explore the possibility of dialogue between Buddhism and gestalt therapy from my perspective, which has been influenced both by my cultural background and western culture in which I trained through my study opportunity in Germany and the United States.

References

Kant, I. (1968). Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hrsg. V. W. Weischedel), Frankfurt, TB, Suhrkamp.
Nietzsche, F. W. (1922). Also sprach Zarathustra. Leipzig : Alfred Kroner.
Rubenfeld, I. (2000). Gestalt Therapy and the Bodymind: An Overview of the Rubenfeld Synergy Method. In: Nevis. E. C. Gestalt Therapy. Perspectives and Applications. Cambridge, MA: Gestalt Press.
Naranjo, C. (1993). Gestalt Therapy. The Attitude And Practice Of An Atheoretical Experientialism. Nevada CA: Gateways / IDHHB Publishing.
Perls, F. S. (1969). Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. Moab, UT: Real People Press.
Perls, F. S. (1976). The Gestalt Approach & Eyewitness to Therapy. New York: Bantam Books.
Van Dusen, W. (1972). The natural depth in man. New York: Harper and Row.
Yontef, G. M. (1993). Awareness, Dialogue and Process: Essays on Gestalt Therapy. New York: Gestalt Journal Press