To maintain good health we do many things: eat "healthy", sleep or rest, play sports, etc. Only with good health can we enjoy what it means to develop, continue to grow in the continuous exchange that our body does in the environment.
Living beings preserve, develop and grow thanks to continued contact with the environment. We breathe oxygen and eat food, and after a metabolization process, we assimilate it as an integral part of our being, discarding what is not useful to us.
In short, we self-regulate in search of balance, but any interference in self-regulation causes an imbalance and with it sometimes a disease.
When we speak of personal growth we are also speaking of psychological nutrition, of evolutionary development of our personality, which is made up of everything learned and assimilated.
It is through experience that we incorporate this “psychological food”, and we do so in relation to the novelties that we find in the environment that surrounds us, with the “other”. We cannot separate ourselves from the environment if we want to explain how we grow, since in a healthy process, our psychological growth follows the same mental metabolism as physiological: we go out to meet the other and nourish ourselves with the experience of the encounter,: chewing each bite to be able to discriminate "I like this", "I don't like this", in an interwoven succession of "here and now", as if it were a dance of affections.
Only when we force ourselves to swallow parts of the social that do not go with our desires, perhaps because we swallow concepts about ourselves, that incapacitate us, intoxicate us or simply do not correspond to our true potentialities, we feel dissatisfied, something fails, and we don't know what it is.
Something has been choked in the past that makes it difficult for us in the present moment. When we do not have the opportunity to digest or spit out these contents because they are not so closely part of our consciousness, they are lived and recognized by a feeling of discomfort, blockage, emptiness, anxiety, anguish, lack of vitality…
Incorporating a material without “chewing” (like when we are students and we learn the data by heart and make it valid only because certain authority figures say so), does not help us grow.
Growing up, psychologically, implies knowing what you want and this implies realizing what you feel or could be needing: what affection you have to share or what you want to appropriate the environment.
Sharing is not easy, since it involves enduring the excitement that arises as a result of the me / you interaction.
Feeling can sometimes be painful. Many of us caught up in past experience have developed mechanisms to avoid pain. One way to do this is to avoid feeling. Desensitizing ourselves. Losing contact with ourselves. Disconnecting ourselves from our own body, preventing us from realizing our feelings and emotions. We stop breathing (breathing a little), we contract our muscles to contain an emotion. When this is done in a chronic or continuous way from our childhood, we lose the reference of what we are feeling because before we can realize it, we have already put in place the mechanisms of tension, contraction or repression, in such a way that the emotion is left out. of our conscience. And we were disoriented.
The energy used in our muscles to retain emotions is not available to meet the other (the world) We are too busy controlling our emotional world to feel it as "dangerous", thereby losing part of our vitality.
Let us remember that "consciousness is characterized by contact, sensation, excitement and the formation of the Gestalt".
We all know how this situation can affect our Health. The headaches that can cause these tensions. The great collaboration offered by the control of emotions in the aggravation of a disease. The loss suffered by the organism when it is deprived of the vitality and spontaneity for which it was created.
A healthy relationship with our environment involves realizing our needs and how we relate to the world to satisfy them. We grow when we allow ourselves to be spontaneous and take risks in the encounter with the other, nourishing ourselves with the newness that is in him or rather in the experience of our encounter, or rejecting what is not nourishing, and not incorporating whole parts of the other in replacement of our lack or gaps.
If we use our energy in this, we will not need to maintain mechanisms that interrupt our vital flow. We would recover part of our vitality and with it part of our Health.
Gestalt therapy does not consist so much in finding solutions by the therapist to all the needs of his client (this would suppose that he knows more about his needs) than in helping him to be more self-aware.
It is through personal awareness that we recover lost parts of our personality. That yes in relation to our environment that in a therapy we are talking about the client / therapist relationship and how together they will carry out the contact process, or how they will avoid this process. This same form of interruption is what is generating discomfort in the client in their daily life. Developing this awareness enables what we have come to call, personal growth.
Bibliography
- Perls, Hefferline and Paul Goodman, Gestalt Therapy: Excitation and growth of the human personality. 1951. Translated by Carmen Vázquez in the CTP-4 Books Collection, Madrid 2001.
