3.1 Embodied & Emotive: Awareness and bodily self-resonance
In Gestalt therapy, ever since Perls, Hefferline and Goodman (1951/2019), ‘awareness’ has not meant reflecting on oneself, but rather the alert, bodily anchored attention to the present experience at the boundary of contact. The difference is fundamental: self-observation steps back from the experience and views it from a distance. Awareness remains within the experience and perceives what is happening right now (Joyce & Sills, 2014, cited in Skottun & Krüger, 2022, p. 102). Fogarty et al. describe awareness not as mere insight or introspection, but as an exploration of experience, as embodied and feeling beings who find meaning in their environment and their relationships with others. This awareness encompasses both physical-sensory experiences and cognitive and emotional perception (Fogarty et al., 2016, p. 35). Yontef, too, defines awareness as simultaneously cognitive, sensory and affective, and distinguishes it from a mere insight: one is only truly aware if one not only knows, but also feels and reacts within the experience (Yontef, 1993; in the same vein, Laura Perls, 1992, cited in Skottun & Krüger, 2022, p. 102: awareness as the interplay of all sensory and motor functions).
In this context, ‘awareness’ always refers simultaneously to three zones: the outer zone (perception of the environment), the inner zone (physical self-awareness: posture, muscle tension, breathing, heartbeat) and the middle zone (thinking, imagining, remembering) (cf. Perls, Hefferline & Goodman, 1951/2019). Healing often begins when the inner zone is no longer overwhelmed by the middle zone. In this way, immediate bodily sensations can regain space in the face of the constant commentary of the mind.
The body thus forms a central point of departure in Gestalt therapy, as past emotional experiences are often embedded in habitual bodily tensions (Fogarty et al., 2016, p. 38). Fogarty et al. shift their terminology from working with embodiment (2016) to working with embodied awareness (2020, p. 496), thereby emphasising that bodily awareness remains constantly linked to thoughts and feelings, rather than standing on its own (Fogarty et al., 2016, p. 38). The relational nature of this embodiment is crucial: the therapist consciously perceives their own bodily processes during the session and thus co-creates an ’embodied field’ together with the client (Fogarty et al., 2016, p. 38). By calibrating their bodily presence, they enter into resonance with the client’s experience. This process of resonance, in the sense of Fuchs’s primary empathy (cf. Chapter 2.3), is profoundly bodily and ultimately aims to empower the client to feel their own bodily experience whilst simultaneously entering into resonance with others: a reciprocal, body-centred process (Fogarty et al., 2016, p. 38).
What is happening clinically here is the ‘inter-embodiment’ discussed in Chapter 2.3 in its therapeutic application: a bodily-grounded, pre-reflexive process of resonance (Fuchs & Schmidsberger, 2024, p. 114). This identifies the emotional focus of this chapter : feeling is not a mental state, but something that happens bodily between two people.
‘[…] Direct experience is grounding and corrective, and thus already possesses its own therapeutic potential.’ (Hartmann-Kottek, 2014, p. 228, abridged)
Clinically, this becomes evident in practice: a client reports feeling anxious and is invited not to talk about it, but to sense where the anxiety is located in their body right now, at this very moment: the tightness in their throat, their shallow breathing, their hands that have grown cold. It is only this step from description to bodily presence that makes change possible. This applies to both sides: not only to the client’s body, but equally to that of the therapist.
One’s own physicality is an important diagnostic tool in the therapeutic process. This ‘self-resonance’ refers to the awareness of one’s own physical reaction to what the client brings into the therapeutic space: tension, warmth, tiredness, a lump in the throat. These physical reactions show the therapist what is happening between them and the client.
Appel-Opper (2024, p. 31 ff.) describes this reciprocal process as body-to-body communication.Footnote 1 Appel-Opper has been working in the English-speaking world for many years and therefore prefers the term ‘living body’ to ‘body’. She expressly leaves it up to readers to interpret her use of ’body’ as ‘Leib’ (Appel-Opper, 2024, p. 30, footnote 1). Her ‘inter-bodily’ processes are accordingly rendered here as ‘between-bodily’. Her model focuses not only on two whole bodies, but on individual parts: two lungs breathing in and out in unison, two hearts beating in unison, four feet within the co-created field. The two bodies communicate on a level beneath language, and the therapist becomes a seismograph of the field (the clinical application of Fuchs’s ‘resonating body’, cf. Chapter 2.3). She specifies the parameters of perception in concrete terms: minimal changes in breathing patterns, eye contact, sitting posture, muscle tone, skin colour and minute movements, on both sides (Appel-Opper, 2024, p. 37). Reflecting on one of her clinical sequences, she notes that both had ‘become bodies relating to one another’ (Appel-Opper, 2024, p. 38).
This capacity for resonance requires vulnerability: only a therapist who allows themselves to be touched and does not hide behind a mask of technical neutrality can serve as a sounding board. This openness to being touched becomes practically visible in what Votsmeier-Röhr and Wulf (2024, p. 182) describe as self-revelation within the process: The therapist shares their own emotional response, for example, ‘As you say that, I notice that I’m getting quite agitated.’ Such disclosures serve the client’s process, not to relieve the therapist (Votsmeier-Röhr & Wulf, 2024, p. 181).
Equally important is the constant distinction between personal resonance (that which forms part of one’s own history and needs to be clarified in supervision or personal therapy) and resonance with the client – that which the other person evokes in the here and now. An example from Appel-Opper illustrates how this works in practice. A client speaks impassively about traumatic experiences, and Appel-Opper senses a heaviness within herself. This heaviness does not stem from her own history; it is her body’s response to the client. Such relational resonance should not be confused with confluence (Appel-Opper, 2024, p. 33, footnote 6): she senses the client without merging with her. Making this distinction time and again is an ongoing training task.
Spagnuolo Lobb structurally integrates the training of this capacity for resonance into the training programme: aesthetic relational knowledge comprises bodily awareness, resonance and empathy. Her observation regarding malleability is noteworthy: bodily awareness and resonance can be systematically trained, whilst empathy, as a core competence, is less malleable (Spagnuolo Lobb et al., 2022; Spagnuolo Lobb et al., 2023). This is precisely where Gestalt therapy training comes in: it trains precisely those skills that can be learnt and practised – bodily awareness and resonance. Drawing on body-oriented practice, Schorn (2020, p. 51) confirms this mandate: therapists who recognise the significance of the implicit and intersubjective space of experience must continually develop and reflect on their bodily behaviour in the present moment and their capacity for resonance.
This ability can be cultivated, but cannot be passed on like a set of rules. It develops as a bodily-situational skill over the course of a long professional career. In a survey of around 5,000 therapists from a wide variety of schools of thought, Orlinsky and Rønnestad demonstrated that this development takes time and that sufficiently trained therapists are by no means interchangeable (Orlinsky & Rønnestad, 2005, cited in Buchholz, 2013, p. 47). It is not the mastered technique that makes the difference, but the person who has been shaped over the years. Moreover, many of those surveyed recall making real developmental strides only after completing their formal training (Orlinsky & Rønnestad, 2005, cited in Buchholz, 2013, p. 49). Competence does not develop from textbooks, but through lived practice, self-experience and supervision. The IG Wien competence study confirms this with its own data: The perceived confidence in application increases highly significantly across the expertise groups, from beginners to training therapists, particularly in the bodily-relational competences such as presence, responsiveness and awareness of bodily processes, which this chapter describes (Grillmeier-Rehder, 2020, p. 123).
At the end of a psychotherapist’s training, the result is not a catalogue of procedures to be drawn upon, but a personal style, a unique therapeutic idiom (Orlinsky & Rønnestad, 2005, cited in Buchholz, 2013, pp. 50–51). What emerges in this way is bound to a body and a life story and can neither be outsourced nor acquired retrospectively. A system without its own history of bodily experience cannot therefore acquire such competence, but can only reproduce its description.
The classical concepts of transference and countertransference can also be understood as bodily resonances: countertransference in the broader sense is a bodily resonance of the therapist in response to the client (Wegscheider, 2020, p. 102; cf. Chapter 2.3). However, bodily resonance is not the only way to engage with the client.
Fuchs (2023, p. 182) distinguishes between three diagnostic perspectives. The first-person perspective describes what the client themselves experiences. It requires understanding and empathetic engagement on the part of the therapist. The third-person perspective refers to the objectifying view from the outside, which is necessary for categorisations, findings and testing. Finally, the second-person perspective describes how the client presents themselves physically, in the encounter in the here and now. In this perspective, one’s own body reveals something about the other person: a tightening in the stomach, a breath that grows shallower.
’The second-person perspective [...] understands mental illness not as an inner world, but as an embodied process that manifests itself in the “phenomenal field” of the I-You encounter. […]” (Fuchs, 2023, p. 182, abridged)
It is precisely this ‘medium of understanding’ that forms the methodological focus of Gestalt therapy.
What Fuchs describes systematically, Martin Buber has named, within the philosophy of dialogue, with two terms: ‘encompassment’ and ’becoming-one’.
‘Inclusion’ refers to an attitude that goes beyond the cognitive adoption of another’s perspective: the therapist must feel the other side of the relationship as a bodily touch, ‘as a bodily touch’ (Buber, 1967, p. 173, cited in Jacobs, 1989, p. 12), to ’empathise with it almost physically’ (Wegscheider, 2020, p. 85). Encompassment is bodily empathy, not intellectual imagination. Buber continues in the same passage: if the client were capable of this themselves, ‘there would be no need for therapy and no relationship’ (Buber, 1967, p. 173, cited in Jacobs, 1989, p. 19). Clinically, this means that the therapist is not only working when they speak. Their primary work is embracing: physically holding the client within their own perception, whilst allowing whatever emerges to emerge. The word, when it comes, is the secondary event.
Votsmeier-Röhr and Wulf (2024, p. 180 ff.) elaborate on this stance as ’being able to be there and here at the same time’: empathising with the phenomenological reality of the other whilst at the same time maintaining one’s own sense of centre. In contrast to pure empathy, the focus here is not on the other person, but on shared participation in the situation – that is, on the ‘in-between’ (cf. Chapter 2.2). This encompassing is considered successful when the client conveys that they have felt understood, and the therapist has both attuned themselves to the other person and felt well in touch with themselves (Votsmeier-Röhr & Wulf, 2024, p. 181).
Becoming aware is the second concept. It differs from mere observation in that it is a bodily realisation (cf. Wegscheider, 2020, p. 86). Those who observe see the raised shoulders, the averted gaze. Those who become aware sense what these signs do not reveal: the tension in one’s own body, a hesitation, a heaviness that spreads through the room. Becoming aware thus captures what is present between the two, without it being articulated.
Encompassment and becoming aware are therefore not techniques, but bodily postures. Their effectiveness does not depend on what the therapist says, but on the quality of their presence. The therapist does not heal through intervention, but rather, through their presence, holds the space in which the person, as a living organism, can once again regulate themselves.
Gestalt therapy understands the person as an organism within a field and, following Perls, Hefferline and Goodman (1951/2019), assumes that this organism possesses an inherent tendency towards ‘good Gestalt’. Once awareness is restored, this self-regulation can resume of its own accord. This concept has its own lineage: It traces back to Goldstein’s holistic theory of the organism, with whom Fritz and Laura Perls worked, and does not refer to a static equilibrium but rather to a ‘middle tension’, a dynamic imbalance that corresponds to a person’s individual nature (Goldstein, 1934, cited in Votsmeier-Röhr & Wulf, 2024, p. 64).
Fuchs describes the same process in philosophical terms. What Gestalt therapy calls organismic self-regulation, he refers to as psychological homeostasis: the person’s striving for inner equilibrium (Fuchs, 2023, pp. 176–177). If this equilibrium is not achieved, individual parts become autonomous and come into conflict with one another.
This brings us full circle to Rosa’s unavailability (section 2.2). What applied there to resonance applies here to healing: it cannot be brought about, only made possible. The therapeutic breakthrough is not caused, but rather made possible by an attitude that accompanies the process rather than controlling it. The more physically present the therapist is and the less they intervene technically, the more effective they areFootnote 2 Approaches grounded in the Leib and the ‘between-Leib’ emphasise that therapeutic efficacy arises from the therapist’s Leib-based presence and resonance within the process, not from technical-schematic interventions (own formulation; cf. Fuchs, 2023; Fuchs & Schmidsberger, 2024). .
Awareness and bodily self-resonance train perception, and in the person-to-person encounter, through embracing and becoming attuned, what lies beneath the surface becomes palpable. In this physically cultivated space, organismic self-regulation can be set in motion once more. This space arises at the boundary of contact.