Allowing Contact with our Experience and Behavior

This article introduces the concept of allowing contact with our experience and behavior. The term “contact” is a Gestalt psychology and therapy concept from psychotherapists Paul Goodman, Fritz Perls, and Laura Perls. It can be described as the way people understand and cope with their reality in an active way. This active process involves engaging with, interpreting, and organizing a whole sense of their experience in situations. From this whole sense of their experience, people base their behavior and action on their interpretation.

Contact is conceived of as mostly occurring in an automated way without conscious awareness. This means that we perceive a situation or experience, interpret it through our senses and in our mind and nervous system, and then act in response. Some of us may take a moment in real time to reflect on our perception and interpretation, and then consciously choose the best action.

In either scenario, whether we are acting on autopilot or with conscious awareness (and intention), we are likely to be acting based on our perceived needs. This is unique and subjective for everyone, based on their experience in a particular moment in time.

Apparently, there is a mixture in the pattern of peoples' behavior involved with contact because they rely on both habit or routine and creative or spontaneous expression. This varies because it depends on numerous factors including a person’s history, culture, values, conditioning, totality of experience, desires, needs, capacities, and perceptions in both the short or long term. Simply put, a person’s response is related to their goals and needs at the time.

Patterns may become excessively repetitious and rigid, or excessively spontaneous and chaotic. In this context, creativity with contact is a balanced blend and integration of habits from experience and spontaneous new responses. So, contact can be understood as a combination of experience and behavior.

A Gestalt approach to counselling therapy could involve relating and communicating an a way that shares understanding about a person’s contact (their experience and behavior). Ideally, it would be action-oriented and exploratory. It would be concerned with understanding the client’s process of perceiving, interpreting, valuing, identifying needs and goals, and how they make meaning of situations.

Sources

Wheeler, G., & Axelsson, L. (2015). Gestalt Therapy. Theories of Psychotherapy Series.