Doubling For Oneself

Gestalt!
Volume 4; Number 3 Autumn, 2000
Victor Daniels, Ph.D.

A WORD OF WELCOME AND AN INTRODUCTION

This is the first installment of a new “column” devoted to sharing and discussing aspects of practice used in the Gestalt process. It will present innovations that readers send in, some of my own, and new twists on old approaches. I expect it to be brief, presenting only one or at most two items each time. Future exciting episodes will omit the following introductory remarks that are needed here.

INTRODUCTION
In the Gestalt journals (although not at conferences), theory receives much attention, and method or technique little. This may be a reaction to early criticisms of Gestalt Therapy as “anti-intellectual,” which was a misunderstanding of Fritz Perls’ admonition to “Lose your mind and come to your senses” (echoing the Stoic philosopher Epictetus who almost two thousand years ago said, “The basic question is this: Are you in your senses or are you not?”)

We can think of Gestalt practice as a kind of three-legged stool. The legs are attitude, theory, and method. Claudio Naranjo speaks of the “primacy of attitude.” For most of us it goes without saying (and therefore receives little comment), that whether we are using a Gestalt approach, a Client-Centered approach, or any other, a nourishing attitude of genuinely endeavoring to help the client find his or her own directions, develop a sense of personal responsibility, and extend his or her awareness is essential. The best-trained counselor, therapist, or educator will be toxic if this attitude is lacking (such as in a look-how-skilled-and-clever-I-am stance).

The second leg of the stool is usable theory that provides guidance about what’s going on in the process and the client (and sometimes the practitioner), and what to do and not do.

And the third leg is the methods or techniques that describe how to do what we do. Rogerian psychology has methods. Cognitive behavioral psychology has methods. And Gestalt therapy has a rich supply of them. Fritz and Laura were always experimenting, and they encouraged their students to do the same. We have many of Fritz’ experiments immortalized in books and videos which have carried them around the world. We lack a similar forum whereby today’s practitioners in Cleveland and California, Austria and Argentina can easily exchange small discoveries that they find effective in their work. This is meant to be such a forum, while always remembering that method must coexist with attitude and theory.

BEHIND THE CHAIR: DOUBLING FOR ONESELF “Doubling” is a psychodramatic technique in which, as an enactment occurs, a member of the larger group may walk over, stand behind one of the actors in the psychodrama, and say what he or she imagines that person is really feeling or thinking but not saying, because of either conscious censorship or lack of awareness. The actor then either recognizes the value of the comment and expands on it: “Yeah, that’s right. And furthermore. . . . ” or finds it not useful and ignores it.

In a Gestalt dialogue, especially when the client is in the hot seat enacting an interaction with someone else in the empty chair, if she seems to have things to say but is blocking herself from articulating them, I may have her double for herself: “Please get up out of the chair and go around behind it.” If it feels appropriate, I may ask her to kneel down behind the chair, to symbolize the hidden aspect of what she’s about to say. “Now, from behind the chair you can say the things that you feel but that you would never actually tell your mother (father, partner, sibling, boss, or whoever is in the empty chair.) Oftener than not, from the “doubled” position behind the chair, a torrent of unsaid feelings pours fourth.

The same thing can be done from behind the empty chair. The client is sitting in the empty chair portraying stoic, tounge-tied Dad who would never talk about . . . . “Okay, now go behind the chair and be that place in Dad where he feels all these things toward you that he’s not saying, and let him speak.”

Four times out of five, it works. The key, of course, is in choosing the moments when it feels like it’s likely to work, and that comes with experience.

Obviously we’re working in the realm of imagination and projection when the client is doubling for the person in the empty chair. Yet if the relationship is significant, important unsaid messages have been conveyed in many different ways and the client tends to have a good sense of what they are.

After the doubling, we’ve moved from the inhibitions into the dialogue, and the work can progress in a straightforward manner.

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