My Gestalt Therapy Approach: Ethics, Presence and Experience

Three pillars that guide the way I accompany people

Therapy, as I understand it, is neither a technical service nor an act of faith.
It is, above all, a meeting between people. A space where care, shared reality and awareness intertwine so that something new can emerge.

In my practice as a Gestalt therapist, there are several convictions that support every process I accompany. They do not function as slogans or truths to impose, but rather as a ground from which I try to work with clarity and respect.

Over time, these convictions have taken shape in three pillars that define my Gestalt therapy approach, shaping the way I am present in the therapeutic session.

Seeing difference without reducing it to a label

Many people arrive in Gestalt therapy carrying diagnoses, names or labels meant to explain their suffering. Sometimes these words bring relief; sometimes they weigh heavily.

In my way of working, the aim is neither to ignore them nor to argue against them, but not to turn them into identity.

To de-stigmatise psychological suffering does not mean denying what hurts or feels confusing. It means being able to look at it without adding fear, judgment or condemnation.

In therapy we explore questions such as:

what function a symptom may serve
what it might be trying to protect or express
how it relates to the person’s unique life story

This perspective belongs to the humanistic tradition of Gestalt therapy, where symptoms are not simply problems to eliminate but part of a person’s lived experience.

At the same time, this approach does not dissolve responsibility. Accompanying someone also means helping them recognise their way of being in the world and their capacity for choice, without remaining trapped in external explanations or in the position of being a victim of themselves.

Difference is neither pathologised nor idealised.

Only when we can acknowledge what is there — without denying it or disguising it — does the possibility of real change begin to open.

A living ethics grounded in shared reality

The therapeutic space needs a clear framework in order to be inhabitable.

For me, ethics in psychotherapy is not a list of good intentions but a daily practice expressed through boundaries, language and the way we are present with one another.

I take care that therapy does not become a place of indoctrination or activism — whether political, religious or even therapeutic.

This does not mean emotional neutrality or the absence of personal perspective. Rather, it means respecting the uniqueness of each person and their freedom of thought.

My work rests on a shared ground:

the body
language
shared reality
the boundaries of the therapeutic relationship

This common ground allows different beliefs, experiences and even contradictions to be expressed without any of them needing to impose themselves as absolute truth.

In Gestalt therapy, the therapeutic field is intersubjective.
It is not at the service of external causes or ideological agendas, but of the process that unfolds between you and me.

Maintaining this boundary is part of the care we offer.
Without a clear framework, there can be no real contact.

Listening to the body and embodied experience

In a culture that privileges intellectual explanations and discourse, trusting embodied experience is, for me, both a clinical and ethical choice.

The body is not merely a channel of expression.

It is where experience is organised, where what remains unspoken appears, and where truth often emerges before it can be put into words.

During sessions I pay attention to:

gesture
tone of voice
breathing
the rhythm with which something is spoken or avoided

This kind of listening belongs to Gestalt therapy centred on lived experience.

It is not about applying body techniques mechanically, but about refining presence and clinical listening.

About noticing when there is resonance and when something becomes misaligned.

About accompanying with a presence that neither invades nor withdraws.

This sensitivity forms part of what might be called an aesthetic of the therapeutic relationship: a way of being that respects the pace of the process and trusts that awareness, when it finds a safe space, unfolds by itself.

A practice in service of what is real

These three axes — a perspective that does not reduce, a clear ethical framework and trust in lived experience — shape a way of accompanying people that is oriented toward care, reality and respect for the complexity of human life.

I accompany people, not categories.

What matters most to me is what happens in the encounter, more than the labels someone may arrive with.

And if conflict, pain or transformation appear, let them arise within the relationship rather than from imposed ideas or doctrines.

Because in the end, what is most therapeutic is not being defined, but being truly heard with presence and without disguise.