Jim Simkin contrasted the guru and the therapist. The guru got those he worked with to love him, whereas the therapist loved those he worked with. He meant that the therapist made clear, direct, honest contact based on caring and respect for the autonomy, self-support, awareness capacity of the patient.

Dialogic Engagement — Reality Is Relating The dialogic view of reality is that all reality is relating. Living is meeting. Awareness is relational — it is orientation at the boundary between the person and the rest of the organismic environment field. Contact is also obviously relational: it is what happens between person and environment. Our sense

What Is the Paradoxical Theory of Change? The more you try to be who you are not, the more you stay the same. Growth, including assimilation of love and help from others, requires self-support. Trying to be who one is not is not self-supporting.

The method to deal with stuck patients without pushing and aiming is: dialogue, awareness and experimentation. This requires patience. It requires that the therapist have the attitude that there is “enough room” for the patient in the world the way the patient is, and it requires faith in organismic growth.

In groups this becomes more complicated. For the therapist has the responsibility of observing, acknowledging, respecting the needs of all individuals and the group as a whole. The individual who needs to move slowly may elicit pushing from the rest of a frustrated group. Group pushing can be even worse than therapist pushing. In this situation the

There is only the I of the I-it and the I-thou. Thou, what happens at the true meeting of persons as persons. In such meetings each person is treated as a separate other; each person is treated as an end in him or herself. A person in dialogue fully knows and confirms that the other is a separate and equally special consciousness. In the I-it

The heart of Gestalt therapy is in the paradoxical theory of change. In that approach resistance is recognized and acknowledged. Resistance is named and understood. It is not understood as something undesirable, just understood. Awareness work in this model integrates the poles of impulses and resistance. But resistance is not broken down or jumped

Gestalt therapy is freedom to do therapy with spontaneity, liveliness and creativity. But it also entails responsibility. Responsibility to know what you are doing. The responsibility to name what you are doing and share it so the effects can be studied. Responsibility to know what works, to care about best options. Responsibility to improve

There is another reason for the fact that the therapist’s pushing does not result in real movement. One of the ways of not coming into contact with the intrusion of the pushy therapist is to introject. The patient may outwardly conform or rebel, but in either case is likely to swallow whole that which the therapist is advocating: “If I were a