One of Naranjo's key distinctions is between suppressive techniques and expressive techniques. The former include interventions aimed at suppressing habitual ways we deaden our responsiveness by enacting the same stereotyped patterns of thinking, feeling, sensing, and behaving again and again and again. You have probably had the experience of working with someone who is carrying on an empty-chair dialogue in a relationship with a present or past partner, alternately playing himself or herself and the partner, and after a few minutes the dialogue begins to sound like the same old record or tape or CD playing the same old tune over and over. Sometimes merely pointing this out is enough to jolt a client into spontaneous self-expression in the present. At other times, it may be useful to say, "I notice that my mind is drifting. I wonder whether some other issue is more central for you?"

Often, however, such comments are not enough, and that's where suppressive techniques come in. Indeed, points out Naranjo, in daily life, many of our activities "constitute an act of avoidance of the present." We carry them out in part to avoid the discomfort of painful feelings, and in part because they are well-learned habits (such as when I recently moved my personal items from one bathroom drawer to a different one and notice that I oflten still open the old drawer first.) Both kinds of avoidances can keep us from noticing a new and exciting event, or from fully appreciating someone we’ve just met. Naranjo classifies avoidances with which suppressive interventions may be appropriate into the following groups, among others:

• Aboutism. "Talking about" one's experience in waysthat interfere with direct experience itself.
• Shouldism. Naranjo gives special attention to the subcategory of
  evaluations and comparisons, at one point telling a client, "From now on add, 'This is not enough' to each of your statements.
• Manipulation. Perls sometimes labeled such tactics to bring attention
  to them: "You are playing deaf;” or “You are playing helpless."
• Questions (that are not real questions—i.e. that are actually statements in disguise or distracting dead-ends.
• Asking for Permission. Here the person avoids making a choice or acting on the basis of a personal preference, but palms the responsibility off on others.
• Demands. Insisting that others be a particular way, rather than accepting them as they are. (This can be an effective way to kill a relationship.)

Numerous Gestalt interventions are designed to jar people out of such patterns and into noticing what they are actually doing at a sensory, motor, feeling, or thinking level at this moment in the present, since spontaneous organismic self-regulation is possible only when we know what we are actually experiencing.

The simplest suppressive technique is simply forbidding something. "No 'why' questions about your behavior, please." The client is led out of a mental vortex of "figuring out" into direct present awareness. In a group context, when a remark like "I think the group feels . . . " surfaces, the facilitator gently says, "Each person speaks for himself or herself alone. No one may say what anyone else--or 'the group' is thinking or feeling."

Suppressive techniques often involve helping clients become sufficiently aware of some unhelpful pattern that they spontaneously stop doing it. This may be done through labeling a pattern, as in the "playing deaf" or "playing helpless" examples above. When someone "asks permission" in a disempowering way, Perls used to concentrate intently on his cigarette smoke. I become very interested in my tea bag, or occasionally even say, "I hear you asking me to tell you what to do."

Most often the most appropriate suppressive technique grows directly out of what a person is doing. An effective response becomes apparent in the moment .

"Expressive Techniques" get more play in the Gestalt literature.

Exaggeration may be the best known. Perls would notice a person make some small movement or sound and ask them to make it larger and more dramatic or the sound louder.

In repetition, the person is asked to repeat a word or phrase over and over, or do something again and again. Explicitation is Naranjo’s term for “translating into words a piece of nonverbal expression” like “Give words to your nodding,” or “If your tears could speak what would they say?”

An opposite of explicitation is turning a thought or feeling into movement, perhaps while still seated or perhaps getting up and walking around the room. One the person begins to, for example, walk gingerly as if on eggshells, she can be asked to exaggerate the movement, and then perhaps add a single word or phrase or sound to the movement and repeat it again and again while walking around. (Here three interventions are combined to increase their awareness-enhancing power.)

Naranjo provides informative descriptions of numerous cues and circumstances that suggest that some particular fragment of self-expression may be a valuable candidate for enactment. One of these is minimization: “I notice that you use many qualifiers: 'rather tired,' 'a little of this or that,' 'perhaps it might be. . . '" This can be disempowering. “I think that much of the artistry of the therapist,” he writes, “lies in his ability to indicate to the patient the key roles to explore through acting.”

He then ties together suppressive and expressive techniques by mentioning Reich’s and Perls’ emphasis on becoming aware of how we are blocking our spontaneous experience, so that we can choose to stop doing that.

From a behavioral perspective, expressive techniques often involve “substituting an incompatible response” for the patterned habit that interferes with being present and authentic. The suppressive technique makes possible the emergence of a more spontaneous alternative that interferes with performance of the troublesome old act at the same time.

Interventions that can combine suppressive and expressive functions in a single enactive maneuver are especially interesting.

Reversal is one of these. A person is asked to do the opposite of what he or she is doing (perhaps after first dramatizing the original action.) Someone who is walking like a robot in a circle in the center of the room, when invited to do the opposite, may break into a butterfly-like dance. Something new is expressed that prevents the old robotlike behavior from occurring at the same time.

Go-arounds are often simultaneously expressive and suppressive. A person who comes to a stuck place in an empty-chair dialogue may be given a line to say or to complete with each member of the group which involves both expressing something new and suppressing the feeling of being inhibited and “stuck.”When the go-around is finished, often the person has undergone a transformation such that he or she can move right through the previous “stuckness.” A go-around may also incorporate a reversal. Someone stuck in feeling extremely needy may be asked to do a go-around in which they are asked to finish the line, “I can give you . . . .”

Distraction from an avoidant or habitual pattern suppresses an old reaction by drawing attention and energy away from it and at the same time gives the client a new and different slant on the situation to experiment with or think about.

Shuttling is a suppressive/expressive technique that can both enhance awareness of a deadening old pattern and illuminate an alternative. For example, someone who feels hopeless is asked to "close your eyes and mentally go to a place where you find what's missing for you here."

Techniques of integration contribute to bringing together previously disparate sides of oneself, such as, for instance, when Topdog and Underdog begin to appreciate each other.

Then in psychological judo, Naranjo shows how expressive techniques are used to reduce deadening old habits by bringing them into the spotlight of awareness. With someone who is hiding behind a façade, for example, “the therapist. . . invites the patient not to be genuine, but to exaggerate his phoniness…” This discussion is reminiscent of Jay Haley’s approach to family therapy, in which the Identified Patient may be asked to do more rather than less of what troubles others in the family, so that the behavior becomes more visible and its function more apparent.

Almost every Gestalt practitioner or student, I imagine, could find something of value in Naranjo’s conceptualizations, in the nitty-gritty details of the work he presents, or in the first chapter and the last two, when he steps back and looks at Gestalt Therapy in a broader context.


This column is devoted to sharing and discussing aspects of intervention, with an emphasis on working technique, and sometimes theory, used in the Gestalt process. If you've developed a useful addition to Gestalt work that you'd like to share, or know of an old technique or idea that's not well known, please send it in and if it fits, we'll print it, giving you full credit for it, or co-authorship if appropriate.

e-mail: <victor.daniels@sonoma.edu>