The maintenance of situations

He said: you make me feel bad now.  She said: I don’t make you feel anything, the feelings are all yours.

I asked: how are you both maintaining you feeling bad?

All therapies encourage us to assume responsibility for our choices and feelings.  Most, also encourage us to explore inside us and consider ways in which we can learn to tolerate the world better.

According to Gestalt therapy, this is a limited view.  While Gestalt encourages us to assume responsibility for our choices, it also encourages us to constantly consider ourselves in relation to our environment, that is, how we impact our environment (this includes other people) and how the environment impacts us and our experiences are a result of this dynamic. A feedback loop comes to mind.

This means, that our work is not only about changes within us but also changes in our environment – we are not passive recipients but active shapers and as such, our responsibility is not only to learn to tolerate but also change what we can.

Our environment is also our context and the situations which we are part of.  We inhabit a contextual world that may appear indifferent to our existence but in fact is very responsive to our actions.  All our experiences take place in relation to us, concepts such as far, near, high, low, big, small have little meaning without our perception of them.  Not only do we constantly interact with our environment, we are a function of it as well.  I respond to my environment or my context in ways that fit with how this environment has shaped me, this includes culture, beliefs, language, ethnicity and family to name a few.

And such are all our relationships.  While we may accept that other people don’t make us feel our feelings and that we are responsible for our actions, we need to also accept that our feelings are relational, that is, a response to other people and our environment in general.  If we feel angry, we respond to something, the same goes for sadness, happiness and fear.

One of Gestalt’s innovative contributions is the view that our feelings are secondary to our interactions, what I mean by that is that the quality of the relation we are in at any given moment will determine the quality of our feelings.  A supportive relationship will induce different feelings to a hostile environment.

The quality of our existence and experiences, therefore, is interdependent with the richness of our environment and an environment is rich if it contains nurturing elements that support satisfying experiences, furthermore, it is rich if we bring our own richness to it.

If we want richer and satisfying relationships we need to create richer and satisfying environments.  Such environments can only exist if all participants accept that no one’s feelings and responses arise in isolation but as part of an interaction.

As such, if you feel caught up in a relationship whose dynamic is unhealthy, the focus needs to shift from cause and effect to the maintenance of the situation – how both/all participants maintain the situation by asking what is attractive to us about the situation.

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