Gestalt!, vol 8; no 1 - Dimensions of Dialogue in Gestalt Therapy

Introduction.
In their broadest form, dialogues are older than humankind. Animals communicate and respond to each others' communications, sometimes in ways that open up new avenues of discovery. In humans, nonverbal dialogues doubtless preceded language, as people responded to each others' gestures, whether in the form of threats, loving gestures, or invitations to discovery.
Martin Buber distinguished between genuine dialogues in which people hear and respond to each other, and apparent dialogues in which people talk at each other with no real hearing or comprehension. He called these I-thou and I-it relationships (1958).
I think it is useful to refer to the I-it relationship as an exchange of monologues rather than as true dialogue. Or one person may be committed to a monologue and remain impervious to the other's messages and meanings (Laing, 1969) while the other responds from a stance of dialogue, and may or may not realize that none is really taking place. "If I am trying to convince another to see things my way, that is NOT dialogue and the "between" is diminished and disconfirming," writes Rogerian-oriented psychologist Charles Merrill (2002)" However disguised, my attempt to impose my monologue on you is essentially rhetoric rather than an exchange of subjective realities. "A dialogue assumes," Robert Hutchins once noted, "different points of view" (2003).
Whether we are examining a personal process or a political or educational one, points out Brazilian educator, Paolo Freire, often enough one party to a monologue is the oppressor and the other is the oppressed (1972). In true education, he maintains, both parties are changed, rather than the more powerful person or party imposing a view or mode of behavior on the less powerful one.
Whether in daily life, counseling, or psychotherapy, observes Merrill, "When a person enters into a dialogue process there is no judgment or blame attached to the outcome. The outcome could go in more than one direction and in the relational interchange meaning is discovered between the two person. when I have experienced dialogue I have been surprised with the range of feelings and thoughts that emerge from the process. I have also been surprised by the outcome and had to give up pushing for a certain outcome that I may have wanted. I am not speaking of compromise here... In a dialogue there is no loser or winner, but two persons' who see the other in a new light and themselves as well. I see dialogue as a more open satisfying way to be together" (2002).
In the Gestalt working process, the meaning of "dialogue" shares certain qualities with dialogues in other methods and settings, and also includes unique meanings not found elsewhere.
A dialogue in a Gestalt context may exist along each of several dimensions. One involves person, place, and time; that is, whom the dialogue is with, where, and when. All these may be real or imagined (as in a dream). Another dimension is how the dialogue occurs. In a therapeutic, counseling, consulting, or coaching context, we can refer to this as the character of the working modality.
The Subject of a Dialogue: Person, Place, and Time.
In Gestalt work, one kind of dialogue occurs with another person in your present life, often someone with whom you're having a problem. This is a "life-situation," or "existential situation" dialogue. In family therapy or Gestalt couples counseling, the other person is present. In individual work, the other is often brought into the working session in imagination, and a dialogue with the internalized, imagined other occurs, often using the "empty chair"--that is, imagining that the other is sitting in an empty chair facing the client.
A second kind of dialogue is one re-enacted in the present, with someone or something from your past that is unfinished and intruding into your present in a way that keeps you from being fully present now. The past figure may be terrifying, like an assailant or a rapist or a parental figure who beats you with the buckle end of a belt. Or he or she may be quiet and understated but very clear about how you must and must not be--or how you "are" and "are not"--(and you'd better not disagree!) Or the past figure may even be impersonal or unknown, like the driver of another vehicle in a traumatic accident that killed both that driver and someone dear to you. All these are, in a sense, dialogues between the present and the past.
A third kind of imaginal dialogue is with figures from your dreams or imagination. Whereas Jung emphasized, "Stay in the dream," (Jung, 1974) Perls (1973) and most Gestalt practitioners readily "shuttle" back and forth between dream events and a present existential dilemma, following the energy of the moment. Likewise they may shuttle back and forth between a past traumatic experience and a present difficulty.
A fourth kind of dialogue is an internal one (sometimes it may even be a trialogue) between divided parts of yourself, one that wants this and the other that doesn't, or a part of yourself you know well and a part that's almost a stranger.
And of course there is the fifth kind of dialogue which occurs between the client and the facilitator, which may take any of several forms, depending on the facilitator's preferred way of working, sometimes referred to by Kurt Lewin's term, the "relational field." (Wheeler, 1998; Phillipson 2001).
The Working Modality: How Does The Dialogue Take Place?
Some practitioners, notes Erving Polster (1987), particularly those trained in the Gestalt therapy tradition during the earlier phase of its development, engage clients in a considerable amount of back-and forth conversation, usually with more attention to helping the client become aware of what he or she is experiencing in the moment than in other therapeutic orientations. Others, like Perls in his later years, tend to keep the client within an enactive dialogue between sides of the self or between the self and an internalized significant past or present other, using the empty chair. Still others, like Erv and Miriam Polster, blend these two approaches, alternating between intrapersonal dialogue and direct conversation. Polster terms this a "loose sequentiality" approach in contrast with Perls' "tight sequentiality" approach of keeping the person in the intrapersonal dialogue whenever possible.
These by no means exhaust the possibilities. There is a spectrum of possible "props for dialogues with internalized others." Since many children have a hard time relating to the "empty chair," Gestalt therapists who work with children, like Violet Oaklander (1988) and Ruth Lampert (2003) have the children they work with draw pictures and have dialogues between figures they've drawn, or between themselves and the picture. Sometimes they have them work with clay and engage in dialogue with the created figure. They also use a sand tray, with the toy figures of people and animals engaging in dialogues, the child providing their voices. I have found that all these modalities work with adults as well, as shown, for example, in Janie Rhyne's The Gestalt Art Experience (1973). You can even have someone dialogue with a photograph or photographs, a Tarot card, or other picture.
Psychodramatic enactment of dialogues (that is, using others to play roles in someone's personal drama) is something I use only occasionally, but at times it proves invaluable. In a dialogue that mixed unfinished anger toward childhood playground bullies with holding-in those unexpressed emotions and feeling powerless to respond, Vince remained compliant and unresponsive in the face of taunts from the internalized bullies in the empty chair. I asked him to choose several males from the group to stand in for the bullies. They came up and started taunting and shoving him--just as on the playground. Getting pushed from one side of the room to the other was enough to shake out his held-in rage and "let them have it." From that day on he abandoned the "immobilized victim" position that he had maintained in the face of physical and verbal bullying ever since childhood and adopted a stronger, more assertive stance toward people who tried to intimidate him.
For homework or self-therapy, a person can carry out a dialogue in writing. This is done best as a freewriting, giving each part of the dialogue a name or initial, and then writing as rapidly as possible, moving back and forth between the dialoguing parts without stopping to think. The speed often allows reflections to bubble up from the unconscious. This is a particularly useful tool for conflicts about decisionmaking. "Which boyfriend. . . ?" "Which job . . " etc.
Whatever the person, place, and time dimensions of the situation to be worked through, and whatever the working modality, parts of the self that were somehow confused and chaotic tend to get "separated" and clarified. One confusing dilemma becomes transformed into two or more distinct and different voices, so that the person can identify each of them and hear what each has to say--perhaps even clearly and in great detail. And if the facilitator is skilled at directing attention toward toward body movements and sensations, or at using an enactive dialogue rather than a merely verbal one, the person discovers, how the contrasting feelings and voices are manifested in sensations, movements, and muscular tensions as well. As Wilhelm Reich noted (1949) everything a person does, both individually and interpersonally, has sensory and somatic components as well as cognitive, affective, and active (or inhibitory) dimensions. The personal Gestalt includes them all, and an enactive dialogue can be a remarkably effective means of unlocking and revealing all these parts of a given complex, pattern, or stance toward the world.
The opposite of acting out something that has been expressed on the verbal level is using Naranjo's term, "explicitation," or giving words to an active or somatic response. One of Perls' favorite lines, when he saw a person crying, was "give your tears a voice." Similarly, Phillipson found that a powerful dialogue with one client emerged after the client described the father's "cold angry eyes." Phillipson asked her to let his eyes speak, and then, in a reversal, asked her to look back at him with similar eyes and tell what lay beneath them (2001, p. 160).
A dialogue may involve cathartic release, it may involve a gradual or sudden increase in ability to hear and see the other. If it is truly Gestalt work, it always involves some measure of increased awareness of one's own process.
Toward the end of a working session, "tightening" the dialogue by asking the person to "speak just one line from each chair--move back and forth at your own discretion," may lead to a taut, lean dialogue in which all pretense drops away and the person comes to a very clear, sharp identification of just how the situation is.
Discerning the Relevant Dialogue.
When Devon spoke in the group, it was in such a muffled voice that I had to cup my hand behind my ear to hear him. As he got up from his seat and shuffled over to sit next to me, his gaze was fixed on the floor just ahead of him.
"I want to deal with my with my parents," he said after he sat down.
"Who especially?"
"My dad," I guess. "Things are okay with Mom. Dad and I don't really talk."
"What do you want to tell him?"
As he began to speak, Devon's eyes remained on the floor, and he continued to slump forward in his chair and speak in a barely audible voice. I asked him to change chairs and enact his father's posture, gestures, and tone of voice, anticipating some kind of inaccessible hard or cold figure. To my surprise, as he "became" his father, his shoulders loosened, he looked around the room, and seemed more accessible than before. I asked him to stand up, move a little, and continue the conversation. As he did, it appeared that his father made better contact with others than he himself did.
Discarding the overbearing-father hypothesis and finding nothing in his present life-situation to account for the downcast, withdrawn stance, I asked him to exaggerate his own voice and posture in order to become more fully aware of them. Then I suggested that he scan back through his past for his earliest memory in which his voice and body felt much as they did now. He mentioned a teacher he'd had for several years in a flat voice and then went on to memories of several difficult playground encounters. I asked him to go back to the teacher. The teacher spoke in a hard, loud voice. Devon appeared to be a favorite scapegoat. When I suggested that the teacher use the line, "You never do anything right," he embellished on it tenfold. The internalized teacher was an overpowering topdog.
To my surprise, when I asked Devon to become himself again and tell the teacher how he felt, his voice became almost as strong as the teacher's. "I'm doing the best I can!" he replied, with resentment and emphasis. Using repetition and exaggeration, I encouraged him to say it again, more loudly, pacing him by speaking just a little louder than he had previously spoken. After half a dozen repetitions he was screaming the words."I'M DOING THE BEST I CAN!"It appeared that the internalized teacher was a major monkey on his back, or "topdog," in Perls' terms, and he had taken a major step toward throwing him off.
Then I asked Devon to stand and walk like his father, describing what he felt in his body. He described loose shoulders, easy arm movement, and greater visual contact with others. He remarked that he might try making contact with his father from that stance.
We could probably have spent hours among dialogues with various other figures from his past and made no significant progress. Finding one where intense emotional energy was constellated--the teacher--was crucial.
In other cases, recognizing where the energy of contact is missing may be as important as recognizing where it is present. Either in work with a couple or with one person engaged in an imaginal dialogue with his or her partner, it may soon start to feel like the dialogue is a pair of old tapes, CDs, or phonograph records being played over and over and over again--an exchange of stale, unchanging monologues. Then, discovering how each contributes to that lack of contact and refuses to hear the other may be productive.
Dialogues With The Practitioner.
In recent years, considerable writing has appeared about the dialogue between the client and the facilitator. Such dialogue, points out Phillipson, may be nonverbal as well as verbal: "Maintaining the dialogue does not mean that I need to do a lot of speaking, to answer the client's questions, or to say much about myself. I can uphold my side of the dialogue by my attention and interest, the expression in my eyes, or my adjustment of distance between me and the client, rather than by finding a verbal response every time." (2001, p. 149-50)
Mirroring (also called mimicry) can be a powerful element in nonverbal dialogue. It serves as an expressive technique, to use Naranjo's (1993) useful term, asking the person to perceive more of his or her own creation as mirrored by the other. "Here's what I see you doing" is demonstrated rather than stated. "Here's what I hear you saying" may be mirrored back in a tone of voice rather than in so many words. Perls was expert at this form of feedback, and so is Robert K. Hall, who sometimes mimics the other person's self-presentation in such an illusion-shattering manner, such that the person can no longer avoid perceiving what he or she is doing (1971).
The shattering of illusions that keep a person from moving forward toward more realistic forms of self-suppor or contact with others can also occur in empty chair work. To someone who keeps hoping an unavailable parent will come to the rescue, Hall might say, "Call for help."
Client: "Please help me!" RKH: "Call again." Client: "Please, please help me." RKH: "Again." C: (In an anguished voice) "For God's sake, help me just a little bit." RKH: "Okay, change chairs." Parent: [No response. Utter, total silence.] RKH: (After an interval): "Change back."
As if struck by a bolt of lightening, the person suddenly truly realizes that no help is coming from that source. The body language may change dramatically, from imploring-and-tense to resigned-yet-relaxed. "So. She's completely unavailable. I have to do it for myself."
The dialogue is changed to fit the person and situation. For another, it might be, "Ask for what you want." "Please. . . ." "I'm busy. I don't have time." Etc.
Finally, an enactment can embody a dialogue with more power than words alone. I have occasional asked someone with a begging, whining manner to get down and grovel on their hands and knees in front of the person to whom they're giving away their power. Such an enactment can lead to such a powerful recognition of the position they're portraying, combined with disgust at it, that they snap right out of it.
In daily life, I am sometimes a big-time talker. In Gestalt work I like to be as concise as I can, using just a few words to convey my meanings. A common mistake when students are beginning to facilitate or co-facilitate is to talk too much. This tends to confuse and inhibit the client. Fewer words are usually better.
Occasionally, however, the empty chair doesn't work. The person is just too self-conscious. At such times I like to follow the Polsters' lead and converse almost "casually" with the person, with attentiveness to points where she might usefully become aware of some habit or dynamic (1982). When it feels appropriate, I may even lapse into telling a story from my own experience that helps reframe the situation, much as Militon Erikson used to do.
Within the relational field of the Gestalt situation, of course, sometimes there is the classic transference in which a person responds toward me as if I were someone else from his or her life. Like Perls, when possible I prefer to direct that dialogue toward the empty chair, perhaps even placing me in that chair. When that's not possible, I try to clearly respond in ways that are different from his or her projection. If the person looks to me to provide answers, I may look away at the ceiling or floor. (This is, of course, very different from the psychoanalytic approach of using the transference as a central element in the working process.)
With a little luck, from all this the person may learn to respond to others in her life as they reveal themselves to be in the present.
References

Buber, Martin. (1958) I and thou, 2nd ed. New York: Scribners.
Freire, Paolo, (1972) Pedagogy of the oppressed. Hammondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin
Hall, Robert K. (1971) Observed facilitation in weekly therapy group, Mill Valley.
Hutchens, Robert. (2003) found on: "http://www.quotationspage.com/
Jung, Carl. (1974) Dreams. R.F.C. Hull, translator. Princeton University Press.
Lampert, Ruth. (2003) A child's eye view: gestalt therapy with children, adolescents, and their families. Highland, N.Y.: Gestalt Journal Press
Merrill, Charles. "Persons In Dialogue: The Buber And Rogers Meeting." Presentation at the Western Psychological Association Meeting, Vancouver, Canada, 2002.
Naranjo, Claudio. (1993) Gestalt therapy: the attitude and practice of an atheorietical experientialism. Nevada City: Gateways/IDHHB Publishing.
Oaklander, Violet. (1988) Windows to our children. Highland, N.Y.: Gestalt Journal Press
Perls, Fritz. (1973) The gestalt approach & eyewitness to therapy. Science & Behavior Books
Phillipson, Peter . Self in relation. (2001) Highland, N.Y.: Gestalt Journal Press.
Polster, Miriam (1982, or sometime thereabouts) In a training group at the San Diego Gestalt Institute.
Polster, Erving. (1987) Every person's life is worth a novel. New York: Norton.
Reich, Wilhelm. (1949) Character analysis, 3rd ed. (tr. by Theodore P. Wolfe). New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux/Noonday.
Rhyne, Janie. (1973) The gestalt art experience. Belmont: Brooks Cole/Wadsworth.
Wheeler, Gordon. (1998) Gestalt reconsidered: a new approach to contact and resistance. Cleveland: Gestalt Institute of Cleveland Press.


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