There are people who cannot stop. They organise, they hurry, they keep up; and when something is finished, they are already preparing the next thing. They often say “once this is over, I’ll calm down”, but it is never over, because movement is no longer the means — it has become their way of existing.
And there are people who cannot begin. They know exactly what they would like to change, they have analysed it for years, and yet they remain immovable. It is not that they do not try; it is that every attempt runs into an inner obstacle and is held back.
They look like opposites. In reality they share the same thing: they have lost the rhythm between stillness and flow.
The image of the river
The phrase “the mountain and the river” is not mine. I borrow it from two psychotherapists, Christine Campbell and Jack Fris, who wrote about a period of their lives that lasted nine months: one of them was waiting for a lung transplant and was very seriously ill. Everything that had supported them until then had stopped working — above all the sense that they could make plans, that they belonged to the world of the healthy people around them.
What sustained them was something unexpected. Eight friends began coming to their home every Tuesday evening to read aloud, taking turns, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake — a book that is almost incomprehensible, described as one of the most difficult works of fiction ever written, full of words that do not exist. No one understood what they were reading. And precisely because no one understood, no one needed to be right. They stopped trying to solve the book and began to play with it: they changed accents, they sang when a song appeared, they handed out roles. The illness did not disappear, nor did the anguish of waiting. But for two hours a week a space was created in which fear was not the only thing present. In psychotherapy we often call this the possibility of coexistence: anguish and play can exist at the same time, worry and laughter, pain and contact, the threat of death and life.
Scholars of Finnegans Wake say that if the book has a story, it is the story of a mountain in love with a river. Campbell and Fris kept this image to describe something they had lived through in their own skin: that in the most extreme moments we are saved neither by action nor by resignation, but by something in between.
The paradoxical theory of change
In 1970 Arnold Beisser formulated a proposition that sounds contradictory and is among the most innovative ideas Gestalt therapy rests upon: change does not happen when we try to become what we are not, but when we become what we already are (Beisser, 1970).
We may have noticed this in everyday life. Anyone who has lain in bed trying to fall asleep has discovered that the effort is precisely the obstacle. Anyone who has told themselves “don’t get anxious now” just before speaking in front of people knows that the instruction produces the opposite. Anyone who has tried to “get over” a loss through scheduling and overwork has probably watched it return through another door.
This does not mean we abandon effort, or resign ourselves to whatever is difficult. It means that change does not begin with rejecting ourselves but with making contact with ourselves. If I am constantly trying not to be anxious, frightened or angry, my attention turns towards making the experience disappear rather than understanding it. But when I can acknowledge what I feel now, without needing to fix it immediately or drive it away, space is created for awareness. And it is awareness that allows us to stop operating automatically. Where there was only reaction, the possibility of choice begins to appear.
Consider a familiar moment. You come home after a difficult day and, without realising it, you are short with your partner. He asks what is wrong and your first reaction is “nothing”. You try to carry on as though nothing is happening, to show that you are fine. And yet, the more you suppress what is going on inside you, the more irritable you become. A small disappointment is enough to make you snap.
Something changes when, instead of fighting not to feel this way, you pause for a moment and say: “I think I’m exhausted and anxious.” The anxiety does not vanish in that moment. But it no longer has to be carried in secret. From the moment it has a name, it becomes an experience you can observe rather than a force driving you without your knowing. Perhaps then you can ask for a little time, rest, or explain what is happening to you instead of continuing to react automatically.
As long as a feeling remains unformed, it directs us. Once it has a name, we can stand facing it. It does not cease to exist, but it ceases to be our whole world. A small distance opens between us and our experience, and within that distance the possibility of choice is born. Perhaps this is where change begins. This is also supported by research. Recognising and verbally naming an emotion (“affect labeling”) does not make the emotion disappear, but it reduces the need to avoid it or to react to it impulsively. When a feeling becomes an object of awareness and observation rather than something that floods us, we gain greater flexibility and control over our choices. We do not only react; we can also choose. We are the ones who have the feeling, rather than the feeling having us.
Often we do not try to change because we are listening to our real needs, but because we are chasing an image of who we “ought” to be: calmer, more assertive, more successful, more patient. Our energy is then directed not towards life but towards the constant comparison between what we are and what we believe we are obliged to become. The greater that distance, the harder change becomes.
The middle mode
In the foundational Gestalt text, Perls, Hefferline and Goodman describe how an artist works: their awareness, they write, is in a “middle mode”, neither active nor passive. The artist does not calculate the next step, but is not swept along either; they accept the conditions as they are, stay engaged with the work, and the solution ripens through it (Perls, Hefferline & Goodman, 1951). Change happens step by step through contact with what is happening here and now. Every authentic encounter with ourselves, with others or with our environment can alter our course. We do not need to know where we want to go in order to begin — and perhaps, in the end, the problem is neither that we move too much nor that we stay still. Perhaps we lose the ability to alternate between the two, according to what the moment needs.
The most significant human experiences happen in this middle mode. Sleep does not come through effort, but nor does it come if we stay standing; we need to lie down and then stop pressing it to arrive. The name we cannot recall appears the moment we stop searching for it. The same holds for creativity, for love, for grief. Something has to move; and then, something has to be let go.
The mountain does not represent inertia, nor the river disorder. A mountain stands firm, gives shape to the landscape, determines where the water will run. A river moves, but it moves somewhere; it follows the contours rather than ignoring them. The person who has frozen is not still in the sense of a mountain; they are clenched, and clenching costs more energy than movement. The person who never stops is not flowing; they are running, and running is not always movement towards something — often it is flight from something we are afraid to meet when we stop.
Failing better
Beckett wrote a sentence that has been hung on office walls as though it were a productivity slogan, while it says something far harsher and far more relieving: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (Beckett, 1983). Psychotherapy often shows us that we suffer not only from what happened to us but from the demand never to fail again. In this way, however, we avoid not only failure but every new experience. Life shrinks in order to accommodate safety.
Failure here is not a stop along the road, but part of the ground we walk on for as long as we are human. Many people live with the idea that at some point a great deal will change and then, at last, the life they dream of will begin: when the anxiety is resolved, when the weight comes off, when they have rested, when they stop being the way they are. In the meantime, life passes in waiting for that ideal condition.
The opposite of perfection is not carelessness. It is commitment and courage: to keep investing in what we are doing even when it is clumsy, uncertain and not turning out the way we would like.
Where psychotherapy comes in
Therapy is not the place where someone corrects us. It is one of the few spaces where we do not have to move forward and do not have to have answers — and precisely for that reason something begins to move. People often tell me they do not know what to say, how to say it, that they have not prepared anything. And I answer that psychotherapy is not a lesson; there is no need to express oneself correctly, to speak with the right words, with eloquence, with correct syntax and clarity. We work with whatever is here at this moment, and in that way we put thought together in a way we may not have learned until now.
The rhythm between stillness and flow is not taught as a technique; it is relearned within a relationship where no one is in a hurry. In psychotherapy we usually begin with a request: anxiety, relationships, grief, panic attacks, the sense that something is not right. But therapy does not unfold like a list of goals to be completed by a particular date. Change has its own timing. Sometimes it moves quickly and sometimes it needs to pause for a while. This rhythm is not a sign of failure but part of the process itself.
The friends who gathered every Tuesday evening did not cure anyone and did not understand the book. They were simply there, together, in front of something that was beyond them, and that proved to be enough to keep them standing. Perhaps this, in the end, is what psychological maturity is. Learning when we need to stand like a mountain and when to move like a river. And above all, ceasing to believe that only one of the two movements has value. A mountain and a river: one stands, the other moves, and neither makes sense without the other.
References
- Beckett, S. (1983). Worstward Ho. New York: Grove Press.
- Beisser, A. (1970). The paradoxical theory of change. In J. Fagan & I. L. Shepherd (Eds.), Gestalt Therapy Now (pp. 77–80). Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books.
- Campbell, C., & Fris, J. (2022). The mountain and the river: Stillness and flow and the art of therapy. In P. Cole (Ed.), The Relational Heart of Gestalt Therapy: Contemporary Perspectives. London: Routledge.
- Gold, E., & Zahm, S. (2018). Buddhist Psychology and Gestalt Therapy Integrated: Psychotherapy for the 21st Century. Portland: Metta Press.
- Lieberman, M. D., et al. (2007). Putting feelings into words.
- Perls, F., Hefferline, R., & Goodman, P. (1951). Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. New York: Julian Press.
- Zinker, J. (1977). Creative Process in Gestalt Therapy. New York: Brunner/Mazel.
