Learning Goals – Short Courses

Being With What Is: Living Gestalt’s Paradoxical Theory of Change

3-Part Online Class Series for Psychotherapists

Session One:

  1. Discuss the relationship between awareness and change in gestalt therapy and Buddhist psychology
  2. Describe the relationship between the awareness process, the paradoxical theory of change, and the phenomenological method
  3. Discuss the relationship between the Buddhist concept of the 5 aggregates and the Gestalt concept of self as a system of contacts in a given moment.

Session Two:

  1. List some difficulties clinicians may encounter in applying the phenomenological method to psychotherapy practice and discuss what a clinician might do to address these difficulties.
  2. Explain perception as receptive versus constructive, and how these relate.
  3. Discuss how the “Basement Story” can serve as map toward increased complexity, acceptance, and change when navigating intense affect including trauma and shame

Session Three:

  1. Describe Organismic Self Regulation and its relationship to the Paradoxical Theory of Change and Enduring Relational Themes.
  2. Use the “Rule of Six” to support working with traumatized states of mind
  3. Explain how we can reconcile the practice of the Paradoxical Theory of Change with more directive interventions.

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Faculty

Armin Baier
L.C.S.W., J.D.

Ren Barnebey
M.F.T.

Christine Campbell
M.F.T., A.T.R.

Lynne Jacobs
Ph.D.

Michelle Seely
M.F.T.

Gary Yontef
Ph.D., A.B.P.P.

Pacific Gestalt Institute

1800 Fairburn Ave
Suite 103
Los Angeles, CA 90025
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