To connect authentically with others, we need to develop a double awareness: perceiving what is happening inside us (at the level of feelings and bodily sensations) and at the same time what is unfolding outside us, in the relational field. Attunement in the present is not a static state but a dynamic flow. Healthy and authentic relationships require this capacity of ours to bring together our inner experience with the external one, taking responsibility for the position we adopt towards the Other.
According to a special task force set up by the American Psychological Association (APA), the therapeutic relationship is just as important as — or more important than — the choice of the right psychotherapeutic approach. A good psychotherapist is not a cold technocrat who can apply a protocol perfectly, but someone who can create a deep connection and a relationship of trust and safety.
Within the therapy room, the therapist is not a passive observer of what we express. On the contrary, she brings her living presence into the relationship. This “I–Thou” meeting, as Martin Buber would call it, is the core of change. Often the dissatisfaction we feel in life springs from the quality of our relationships. If we have learned to survive by restricting ourselves — by staying good and quiet, for instance — then that dynamic will appear in therapy too, through a process called transference. This is the valuable relational material: the interaction in the present between client and therapist becomes the mirror and the laboratory for the way the person exists in the “outside” world too.
An adolescent client hesitated for a long time to express her thoughts and the expectations she had of me and of the therapeutic process. She was afraid that if she told me what she needed from it, I might get angry and withdraw — a pattern she carried from earlier relationships in her life, and which of course emerged in our therapeutic relationship too. What she carried from earlier relational experiences was the conviction that “If I say what I want, if I assert myself, I might tire you out, you might reject me or move away.”
She had learned to “make herself smaller” and to silence her needs in order to secure connection with others. In the end, within the safety of the relationship, she was able to bear expressing what she needed — and that act worked as a corrective emotional experience. Instead of the therapeutic work staying at a theoretical level about the past, we used the relationship between us as a tool of awareness. The fact that she could risk her authenticity and discover that my presence remained steady, and that what she feared (rejection and withdrawal) did not happen, created a new relational reality.
Corresponding patterns might be the tendency to take care of one’s therapist by not wanting to tire or disappoint her, a tendency towards control, towards clinging or towards devaluation, or towards seeking reassurance from the therapeutic relationship. These relational patterns are the ways people have learned to feel safe in relationships.
Presence in Gestalt psychotherapy is not a technique but a therapeutic condition. In a world that often asks us to disconnect from our feelings in order to be functional, the therapeutic encounter offers us the space to be whole.
Therapy does not aim only at relieving symptoms, but at recovering our full existence and our authenticity within relationships. When a client feels that they are genuinely “seen” and “heard”, they begin to transform the fear of rejection into the courage to connect. The therapist’s presence is the ground on which a client can dare to meet the world from a new position: that of authentic existence.
A phrase I keep from my supervision, belonging to one of the great teachers of Gestalt, distils the whole essence of therapeutic work: “Your presence is a present to someone.” Presence is a gift, and this simple sentence contains the core of the therapeutic process: change does not come through techniques, but through the experience of relationship as an ontological experience.
