by Ellen Butterfield Relational Gestalt is a very “user friendly” kind of contemporary therapy – one that treats where you are, without assuming that you are “sick,” and that the therapist is “well.” Your experience, as you tell it to a therapist, is no less true, or “right” or “well” than the experience of the therapist. Humans perceive things in the world differently, each according to our own mental-filtering process – what you experience is different, and as valid, as what someone else experiences, even if you’re both in the same place at the same time. Gestalt therapists believe that everything in one’s environment – events, objects, people – affects that person, and, that everything in that environment affects everything else. In other words, we don’t live in a vacuum, and everything affects how we perceive the world. A Gestalt therapist “dialogues” with you. As a professional, she expresses feelings, shares … Read More >

by Ellen Butterfield Emotionally Focused Therapy, or EFT, is a “shared alliance,”- that is, the therapist and the couple are working together, the therapist is on the side of the couple, not either partner. The couple are the experts on what’s going on in their relationship, and the therapist helps the partners come to a better awareness of different aspects of how they relate, and of the arguing cycle that that can create. The focus in EFT is on each partner’s immediate experience and of their experience of their partner’s responses. This experience is not questioned or denied; it is drawn out, expanded, understood. There is no labeling either partner as irrational or either partner’s reality as untrue. The therapist is intent on heightening or bringing to awareness each partner’s deeper feelings, with the understanding that real contact (between therapist and patient, and between partners) can bring relief, release from shame, … Read More >