A Gestalt Therapist’s Guide Through the Depressive Field

Book excerpt: This book is intended for psychotherapists working with depressed clients. In particular, it focuses on how working with depressed clients affects the therapists themselves, and elaborates on how therapists can care for themselves in such demanding work to prevent burnout, or process it meaningfully as part of their professional development. Based on the results of the author’s own long-term experience, qualitative research and theoretical concepts describing psychopathology from the humanistic-existential perspective of Gestalt therapy, this book describes a paradoxical way of working in which therapists transform their own experience in the presence of a depressed client. Using the example of working with depression, the book introduces how the field theory approach can be used in clinical practice. The book provides a conceptual framework, practical skills and case examples illustrating what a field theory approach brings new to the table. This will be a useful guide for psychotherapists and Gestalt therapists who regularly come into contact with depressive clients, as well as for therapists who are themselves experiencing professional exhaustion and are at risk of reaching burnout.