Gestalt: individuality and acceptance

The below words from Gestalt are good to contemplate when considering the nature of coercion…the impetus is in all of us…think about how often we’ve thought we knew what someone else should do or think or feel. Force in psychiatry is violent and it harms people permanently.

The “Gestalt prayer”

I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped. — Fritz Perls from Gestalt Therapy Verbatim

Coercion and force is part of the standard of care in psychiatry. It’s not questioned enough because the average person thinks it’s appropriate. Society, in general supports violence in the practice of psychiatry even, and mostly when they don’t understand that is what they are doing.

This is something we all need to consider when we are doing our own shadow work. How do we impose ourselves on others? How are we violent given the ways we’ve been conditioned in this world?

We consider this during a time when our government is imposing itself on anyone it doesn’t like. It’s dangerous. To fight it we need to understand how the same energies work within us. In doing these sorts of contemplations we are doing shadow work for humanity.

More related:

• Celebrating non-compliance…
• Challenging Authority in Mental Health Care
• Forced treatment does not work (Lancet reports on a study)
• Coercion, subtle or otherwise, is the rule in psychiatric care…
• Paradoxical Theory Of Change – Gestalt
• When Psychiatry Retraumatizes
• Professional denial is retraumatization

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