What is Gestalt?

Gestalt Psychotherapy focuses on awareness, presence and the here and now, or otherwise said: being with current and enduring iteration of the situation of your life and your relationship to the world. Gestalt can be described as embodied, phenomenological, relational, existential, creative and humanistic.

What is Gestalt?

Gestalt Psychotherapy focuses on awareness, presence and the here and now, or otherwise said: being with current and enduring iteration of the situation of your life and your relationship to the world. Gestalt can be described as embodied, phenomenological, relational, existential, creative and humanistic.

Here's what those words mean to me, and how they may show up in our work together.

Embodied

A somatic focus to bring your sensation, movement, and whole lived experience into session. Gestalt is experiential.

→ As you tell me this story, what action does your body want to make? Push, pull away, dodge...

→ Sitting with you in this story, I feel a small, ember of fire in my low belly. What's it like for you?

Relational

We are here, now, together. You won't find me with a notepad on a chair behind you. I will be there and be real, with you.

→ Do we feel close, or far apart in this moment?

→ How do you imagine I will react with this story you are afraid to tell? Who do I remind you of?

Existential

An exploration of Self and Selfing. Who am I? who am I with others? How do I create myself in how I "do" myself?

→ What's a short statement you can create about yourself from what you've just told me?

→ What's it like to say this part about yourself out loud with me?

Creative

Being known is an ongoing experiment. We can use Gestalt Experiments, art supplies, sound, movement and imagination to relay the unexplainable.

→ If your story were a book, what kind of book would you be? How does that book look, move, feel, smell, etc?

→ Draw this story for me instead of telling me. Help me can understand without words.

Phenomenological

The ways in which we perceive and experience the subjectivity of our existence: sensation, metaphor, images, gesture, etc.

→ Help me understand the relationship in this story. Is there an image or scene that you can imagine it to look like?

→ What's the space like between us as you tell me? What is between us, and how can you describe it?

Humantistic

A client-centred and non-judgemental approach that includes all parts of self, to facilitate enough support to let what desires to emerge, emerge.

→ I'm wondering if it's hard to stay here. What did I miss, or how could I have responded better?

→ As we reiterate this moment with a found support, what new options do you have here?

In this role I am constantly
awed by the different subjective experiences of others, and what life means for them as they move through the world.

© 2026 Samantha Richter

Committed to inclusion and respect for all people across gender, race, ethnicity, and identity.