Hello, Friends! Today I want to share with you how to work with a couple in the Gestalt approach. This does not mean that what I will describe next is the only possible and acceptable one, rather this method is the most characteristic of this approach. By couple I mean people who are in a relationship, primarily in a male-female relationship, and, for example , form a family. Or there may also be child-parent relationships, friendships, and other relationships. I wonder if anyone’s friends came to therapy to sort out their relationships? I would be grateful if you could share examples of such non-standard, so to speak, counseling! And so, first of all, when working with a couple, it is important for us to rely on our feelings, our emotions, our reactions, the bodily sensations that arise in us in response to certain manifestations of a person who came as part of a couple for a consultation, or certain methods of interaction between people in a couple. And he shares all this with them. For example, if we understand that a person is behaving insincerely with a partner, is being “obscure,” we can present this, voice it. Here you can talk about your experiences that arose in response to such manifestations of it, ask the client how he himself understands this behavior and whether this is really the way the psychologist perceives it. You can ask his counterpart how he perceives such manifestations. And so on. It is important to discuss everything that appears in interaction and that may turn out to be important and essential for contact within a couple in life. The main task of such work is not to maintain fantasies and speculation, but to try, if possible, to establish a confidential, sincere dialogue between people. Lack of clarity may prevent them from meeting, may not allow them to understand, understand certain issues, and may create additional conditions for maintaining tension. Of course, it is important to pay attention not only to “shortcomings,” but also to show if this is not noticed in a couple, those each other's characteristics, those manifestations that serve to establish sincere and trusting contact. And so that our thoughts, emotions, experiences truly reflect what is happening in the client's relationship, and are not just an echo of our own unprocessed problems, it is important to undergo personal therapy. I think it’s important to voice this point every time. For example, people can start arguing with each other, but for some reason we feel scared and intolerable if people communicate with each other like that. Here we can (due to the fact that this issue was not examined in therapy, we did not work with it) because of the fear of our people, we can stop, tell them that they can scare each other like that. But this fear can only be ours! And if we stop their interaction prematurely, we may not see something important in it. Successful therapy to you! Your critical comments on the article are welcome! Well, all your responses are welcome )