Gestalt therapy is an approach that differs from others in that clinicians work to encourage and facilitate personal exploration, helping clients gain a better understanding of their emotions and needs. Clients may find that they have conflicting experiences that can be better understood with the use of Gestalt therapy techniques.
Gestalt therapy is not used as often as other therapeutic approaches, though it has provided valuable insight into techniques and interventions that could be used in sessions. You may find that incorporating these techniques is impactful with clients living with anxiety, depression, grief, unresolved emotional experiences, and interpersonal challenges.
The framework of this therapeutic approach can be applied to emotional, behavioral, and interpersonal challenges. You can help clients increase their present-moment awareness, including their emotional experiences. Your work can also help clients better understand the connection between their past and present, while promoting personal responsibility.
8 Gestalt Therapy Techniques
Gestalt therapy techniques can help clients achieve a variety of goals. Examples include increasing self-awareness, identifying emotional patterns, and learning to be in the moment. Techniques often focus on the “here and now” and may bring attention to thoughts, emotions, behaviors, or physical sensations. Techniques are specific exercises that can be used within the safety of therapy sessions. You can use techniques to help clients experience emotions, thereby increasing emotional regulation and insight.
1) Empty Chair Technique
As one of the most recognizable Gestalt therapy techniques, the empty chair technique can be used to address internal conflicts, interpersonal difficulties, and unresolved emotions.
What It Is: The empty chair technique encourages clients to express their thoughts to an empty chair, as though another person or a part of themselves was sitting in it. Clients often switch chairs to respond with different perspectives, often leading to new insights and understandings.
How It Helps Clients: This Gestalt therapy technique can help clients actively express their thoughts and emotions. It can also be helpful with unresolved conflicts and promoting effective communication.
How To Do It: You’ll need two chairs facing one another for your client to move between. Begin by asking them to imagine another person, an emotion, or an aspect of themselves sitting across from them. They can then speak directly to the imagined entity, moving between the chairs to respond, creating a continual dialogue. Encourage them to explore their emotions, physical sensations, and thoughts throughout. Ensure that you have time to process this experience and their emotional responses afterward.
2) Exaggeration Technique
Exaggeration can amplify gestures, repeated behaviors, or body language to promote awareness.
What It Is: The exaggeration technique involves asking your client to exaggerate something they are unconsciously showing. This could include their tone of voice, facial expressions, movements, or posture.
How It Helps Clients: This technique can help clients gain a stronger awareness of their body language, allowing them to see the connections between their emotions and physical sensations.
How To Do It: After you have observed repeated gestures or movements in session, you can ask your client to exaggerate the observed behavior intentionally. Take time to explore the emotions tied to this behavior, and process thoughts that arise. You can then explore the behavior’s meaning across various settings and its impact.
3) Staying With the Feeling
With this technique, you’ll confront avoidance behaviors head-on by encouraging your client to remain present in their emotions when they are uncomfortable or challenging.
What It Is: Staying with the feeling is a technique you can use to help clients focus on difficult emotions without resorting to avoidance behaviors or intellectualizing. You can help your client cope with their discomfort as they explore the emotion challenging them.
How It Helps Clients: This technique helps clients decrease avoidance behaviors by improving their distress tolerance and other coping skills. Acceptance is another benefit of this technique, which can help decrease internal struggles of shame or guilt tied to emotional experiences.
How To Do It: Begin by asking your client to identify an emotion that they often try to avoid or suppress. Ask them to describe their experience with this emotion in detail, including the physical sensations they experience. Support your client as they stay focused and work through the emotional discomfort they experience. Ensure that you have time to process their experience, including their takeaways from remaining present with distress.
4) Dream Work
Dream work views dreams as reflections of fragmented parts of the self or unresolved emotions.
What It Is: Dream work in Gestalt therapy involves having clients describe their dreams in detail and reenact aspects of those dreams from multiple perspectives.
How It Helps Clients: You can use dream work to help increase self-awareness and explore unconscious emotions. This can help clients identify internal conflicts and promote emotional integration.
How To Do It: Begin by asking your client to describe their dream in the present tense. Ask them to share the key symbols, objects, or people within their dream. They can speak as if each were an element in the dream they previously shared. Bring attention to the meanings and themes in the dream, exploring how they relate to current experiences.
5) Reversal Technique
The reversal technique can help the client explore emotions or traits that they commonly suppress or avoid.
What It Is: This technique focuses on having clients engage in behaviors that are the opposite of their go-tos. This can also apply to their typical emotional patterns.
How It Helps Clients: You can use the reversal technique to increase awareness and help clients break rigid behavioral patterns. This change can promote emotional flexibility and help them identify underlying fears driving their behavior.
How To Do It: Begin by asking your client to identify a behavior they avoid, then ask them to intentionally do the opposite of what they usually do. As they are engaging in the behavior, they spend time exploring their thoughts and emotions. You can then explore the new insights they gained and how those perspectives affect their everyday lives.
6) Body Awareness
Body awareness is a foundational Gestalt technique used to increase awareness of physical sensations connected to emotions and unmet needs.
What It Is: This technique focuses on helping clients notice bodily sensations, posture, tension, breathing, and movement patterns as they occur in the present moment.
How It Helps Clients: Body awareness can help clients recognize emotions and experiences that may exist outside of conscious awareness. This can improve emotional insight, self-awareness, and mind-body connection.
How To Do It: Encourage your client to slow down and observe their physical sensations during sessions. Draw attention to posture changes, muscle tension, breathing patterns, or gestures as they emerge. Explore how these physical experiences connect to thoughts, emotions, or relational experiences.
7) Dialogue Work
Dialogue work is a Gestalt technique that explores internal conflict through direct experiential communication.
What It Is: This technique involves facilitating dialogue between conflicting parts of the self, such as the “top dog” and “underdog,” or between competing emotions, needs, or perspectives.
How It Helps Clients: Dialogue work can increase self-awareness and emotional integration by helping clients experience and express conflicting internal experiences directly.
How To Do It: Invite your client to alternate between perspectives while speaking aloud from each position. Encourage full emotional expression and awareness of bodily sensations throughout the exercise. Explore emerging insights and unresolved tensions afterward.
8) Making the Rounds
Making the rounds is a structured Gestalt technique used primarily in group therapy settings to increase awareness and interpersonal engagement.
What It Is: This technique involves asking clients to repeat a statement, interaction, or behavior with multiple people in a group environment.
How It Helps Clients: Making the rounds can increase awareness of interpersonal patterns, social anxiety, avoidance, and emotional responses in real time. It also encourages direct communication and authentic expression.
How To Do It: In a group setting, ask your client to approach each group member individually while repeating a chosen statement or interaction. Encourage awareness of emotional reactions, physical sensations, and relational patterns throughout the exercise.
5 Gestalt Therapy Interventions to Use in Sessions
Gestalt therapy interventions are strategies that you can use to guide your sessions. They can influence how you structure your sessions, create your treatment plans, and your overall treatment process. Gestalt therapy interventions are often focused on present moment experiences, emotional expression, and interpersonal dynamics. The use of these interventions can help clients live more authentically in their daily lives.
1) Present Moment Awareness
Present-moment awareness is a key characteristic of Gestalt therapy and helps clients remain grounded in real-time experiences.
What It Is: Present-moment awareness is incorporated into sessions through gentle redirection. You may find yourself focusing on what they’re thinking, feeling, and experiencing in session rather than on the past or future.
How It Helps Clients: This intervention helps improve awareness. It can also reduce rumination or anxiety about the future and decrease repetitive “what if” cycles. Clients may also gain a deeper understanding of themselves and their experiences.
How To Do It: When you notice that your client is becoming avoidant or intellectualizing, gently bring their attention back to the present moment. You may ask them to notice their current emotions or physical sensations while asking questions focused on the here and now. Encourage your client to observe their experience without judging it.
2) Experiential Emotional Awareness
Experiential emotional awareness focuses on supporting clients in learning to identify, express, and process emotions as they arise.
What It Is: With this intervention, you can help your client learn about avoided or suppressed emotions by inviting them to express and reflecting on their experiences.
How It Helps Clients: Emotionally processing experiences can help reduce suppression and avoidance behaviors. Clients can learn to regulate challenging emotions better and work towards increasing their level of acceptance.
How To Do It: Begin by identifying avoidance behaviors that your client experiences. Encourage them to name and describe the emotion that they’re trying to avoid, while also being aware of the physical sensations it brings. Validate your clients’ experiences appropriately and explore what this means for them.
3) Experiential Dialogue
Experiential dialogue interventions are used to deepen emotional awareness and increase your clients’ interpersonal understanding.
What It Is: In this intervention, you will engage in experiential conversations with your client to explore their reactions, emotions, and relational patterns as they arise in session.
How It Helps Clients: This can strengthen the therapeutic relationship, improving treatment outcomes. It can also encourage authentic communication and improve interpersonal awareness, which can translate into other relationships outside of sessions.
How To Do It: Begin by observing relational patterns that arise between yourself and your client. You can draw attention to these observations in real time, inviting open and honest communication. You can explore reactions to your interactions and explore new insights. Encourage your client to be authentic when expressing their emotions.
4) Awareness Continuum
The awareness continuum is a core Gestalt intervention focused on strengthening ongoing present-moment awareness.
What It Is: This intervention encourages clients to continuously notice and describe their internal and external experiences as they occur in real time.
How It Helps Clients: The awareness continuum can help clients reduce automatic or disconnected functioning while increasing awareness of thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and environmental experiences.
How To Do It: Guide your client through noticing present experiences moment by moment. Encourage observations such as “I notice…” statements regarding thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and surroundings. Redirect attention gently whenever clients move into excessive interpretation or abstraction.
5) Working With Polarities
Working with polarities is a Gestalt intervention used to explore opposing parts of the self.
What It Is: This intervention focuses on identifying and exploring conflicting internal experiences, traits, or needs that may create emotional tension or rigidity.
How It Helps Clients: Exploring polarities can increase self-acceptance and emotional flexibility by helping clients integrate disowned or suppressed aspects of themselves.
How To Do It: Help your client identify opposing parts or tendencies, such as dependency versus independence or control versus vulnerability. Encourage experiential exploration of each side through dialogue, movement, or reflection. Explore how both parts serve important functions.
Other Helpful Gestalt Therapy Resources
TherapyByPro is a leading resource for mental health professionals offering an assortment of documentation templates, activities, and worksheets. You can customize these evidence-based resources to your clients and their presenting concerns. Examples of Gestalt Therapy resources we encourage you to explore include:
- Creating a Gestalt Therapy Treatment Plan
- Gestalt Therapy Questions to Ask in Counseling
- 10 Gestalt Therapy Exercises and Resources
- View all of our Gestalt Therapy Worksheets you can use with clients.
Frequently Asked Clinical Questions
Below are FAQs clinicians are asking:
How does a clinician manage a client who intellectualizes their emotional experience during the empty chair technique?
Gently interrupt the abstract narration and redirect the client’s focus to their physical body sensations in the immediate room. Shift the prompt from “What do you think about what they said?” to experiential requests like “As you imagine them sitting there, notice the exact tightness forming in your chest right now and speak directly from that physical sensation.”
What should a therapist do if the exaggeration technique triggers severe emotional flooding or panic in a session?
De-escalate the physical amplification immediately and transition the client safely into grounding and co-regulation exercises. Instruct the client to consciously relax the exaggerated muscle group or posture, alter their physical positioning in the room, and use the awareness continuum to name neutral external objects until their autonomic nervous system stabilizes.
How do you introduce experiential Gestalt experiments to a client who displays intense skepticism or fear of looking foolish?
Frame the intervention as a low-pressure, collaborative behavioral trial rather than a formal dramatic performance. Demystify the clinical rationale during the psychoeducation phase by explaining that active physical experimentation accesses deeply rooted emotional blocks far faster than traditional cognitive talking alone.
When is it clinically appropriate to assign Gestalt therapy techniques as independent between-session homework?
Rarely, as most active Gestalt experiments require a live, attuned clinical witness to facilitate safety and deep emotional tracking. While basic body awareness tracking or an awareness continuum can be recorded in a daily journal, complex experiential exercises like dream work or dialogue work should remain confined to the safety of your face-to-face sessions.
Can Gestalt techniques be safely integrated with clients actively processing acute, unintegrated trauma memories?
No, highly experiential techniques should be delayed until the client possesses stable emotional regulation capacity and a secure therapeutic alliance. Forcing a highly reactive client into expressive modalities like the empty chair or staying with the feeling without sufficient containment risks tracking them straight into severe psychological retraumatization.
Final Thoughts on Using Gestalt Therapy in Sessions
Gestalt therapy is an approach that you can use to help clients who are struggling with anxiety or rumination. With a strong focus on the here and now and emotional processing, clients can learn to become more authentic in their everyday lives. Gestalt therapy techniques and interventions are used to increase present-moment awareness of thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. Clients can also gain valuable insights into behavioral patterns.
Experiential activities like dream work and the empty chair technique invite active participation that works to learn more about unresolved emotions and interpersonal dynamics. Gestalt therapy is a collaborative therapy that requires a strong theraputic alliance.
If you are interested in learning more about implementing the Gestalt therapy techniques and interventions introduced in our article, we encourage you to explore continuing education and other training opportunities in your clinical niche.
References:
- Wagner, E. F., & Moore, B. A. (n.d.). Counseling and substance abuse. American Counseling Association. https://web.archive.org/web/20170809044937id_/http://www.counseling.org/docs/david-kaplan’s-files/wagner-moore.pdf?sfvrsn=2