The online session can be a private session, a couple one or a group one, although for technical reasons more than 5 people per time might be not so comfortable, though everything is possible!
Online sessions have some advantages that might fit our modern way of life, such us the convenience to have one anywhere you are, without spending time in transference, both for the therapist and the client.
Also it gives us the freedom to develop a therapeutic relationship beyond borders, according to more personalized criteria such as who this person is or the method that he/she uses or the philosophy of his/her life, regardless the distance!
Online sessions are held with the use of Skype software.
During private sessions, we work on the issues that come up as a need to be processed on here and now.
The main tools for that are, cultivating the awareness of the person on the three levels of awareness (mind,body,environment) on here and now, giving honest feedback, mirroring phrases and movements, clarifying what happens based on the phenomenology, cultivating the accurate use of language in self-expression, exploring our self-awareness as it exists till now and exploring new expansions of awareness and practice.
You can ask for a session for a single issue (single or couple of sessions), for a short-term therapeutic relationship (few months), or a longer one (one or more years).
The sessions can take place to my office in the center of Athens near Syntagma square.
The Psychogenetic System is a collection of theories about how our romantic relationship styles are influenced by our observations in early childhood of our own parents' relationship processes, as well as procedures for discovering, rewriting and adding to more mature perceptions and reactions in our present romantic relationships. Teachworth's Psychogenetic System theories, which comprise a unique system of relationship counseling, were first developed in 1991 by Anne Teachworth, a Certified Gestalt Therapist, the Founder and Director of the Gestalt Institute of New Orleans since 1976. These theories and associated counseling techniques facilitate psychotherapeutic resolutions to a romantic couple's relationship problems by mining their early childhood reactions to their own parents' relationship shortcomings.
Teachworth first wrote about her "Psychogenetics" theory about relationship counseling in "Three Couples Transformed" which was published as a chapter in the book A Living Legacy of Fritz and Laura Perls: Contemporary Case Studies by Bud Feder and Ruth Ronall (1997). Anne’s counseling method for this is described in depth in her own book on the subject, Why We Pick The Mates We Do, first published in 1997; now its Seventh edition, revised in 2007.
Psychogenetics utilizes elements of Transactional Analysis Gestalt Therapy Redecision Therapy and Neurolinguistic Programming all of which Anne has a strong training background in. Additionally, she has trained therapists for many years, co-instructing with Richard Bandler, Laura Perls, Joseph Zinker, Dan Blum, Violet Oaklander, Anne Ancelin Schutzenberger, Stella Resnick, Phyllis Jenkins, Leonard Ravich and others well known in the world psychotherapy community. Since Anne Teachworth's death in February 2012, her legacy utilizing the Psychogenetics System in relationship counseling continues through The Gestalt Institute of New Orleans by her son Jeff Teachworth, also a Certified Psychogenetics Coach and a Certified Gestalt Therapist (see Gestalt-Institute.com.)
Teachworth's theories suggests that each of us, unconsciously, reinvent our early family pattern of belonging—no matter how dysfunctional—because it is the context of the strongest feelings of belonging.
Psychogenetics suggests that our later adult mate choosing is highly colored by an unconscious compulsion to find a suitable “playmate” to roleplay one of the two spousal roles assimilated in our early childhood, our "Inner Mate Model", while we ourselves play the other identified role, referred to as our "Inner Adult Model". As young adults we can become powerfully attracted unconsciously to someone who matches our "Inner Mate Model" regardless of whether they are a productive mate for us. We are drawn into "playing house" with a partner who will play one of the two roles, while we play the other.
Original to Psychogenetics is the observation, reported by multiple clients of Teachworth's in her book, how in a sequence of marriages, the same adult can go back and forth between the spousal role their father or mother played with each other.
Psychogenetics offers much insight into the commonly observed pattern of the same man or woman, in multiple marriages, choosing “the same type of partner.” Psychogenetics modifies this to say: our unconscious is compelled to play either one of two spousal roles we naively learned in early childhood years, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THESE ROLES FUNCTION WELL OR POORLY. As adults our unconscious is strongly influenced to utilize these TWO reference points to pick marriage partners.
Practising Awareness through Gestalt group sessions
In these groups the participants are called to practise their awareness in here and now through games and different kind of exercises among the group members. After this part, everyone seat together to share their experience and there the therapist helps to deepen in the awareness taken and creates experiments to expand it. The therapist might be working with one or more participants at a time. This group gestalt sessions can be general or with more specific themes announced per time.
Interactive Gestalt Group Therapy
This form of gestalt group has been created from Bud Feder. In this kind of group there are very specific rules.The participants are called to stay present with their experience in here and now with the other members and share it with the group and even make personalized comments to reveil how they perceive each other in the moment. The participants are not allowed to talk for past of future issues or informations or worries and so on.The point of this group is to work purely on realising the interruptions in the circle of the experience that each person is doing. The lack of further stories facilitates the clear realization of how people really relate with each other and what issues come in the surface for them while they relate.