ERICA EDWARDS THERAPY

Open your heart. Share your truth. Embrace your life. 

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5 Tips to Bounce Back from Life's Curveballs | Erica Edwards Therapy | San Francisco Counseling

You're navigating through life, head held high, making moves, focused on your goals, progressing toward the best version of you..

Ready to Bounce Back? Let’s Get You On Your Feet! 

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Everyday is a second chance...for love, forgiveness, success, and peace.

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If you know of anyone who might be interested in San Francisco/the Bay Area, please share. :)

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By Erica Edwards "Remember, the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you." - Rumi

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By Erica Edwards

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Your Daily Gestalt Principle: The Paradox of Change

By Erica Edwards

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” - Carl Rogers

Be with what is. Settle into the confusion. Sit in the discomfort. Slow Down. The less you “do,” the more will shift.

The Paradox of Change theory suggests that when you release what you would like to become, you attempt to be what you actually are. Give yourself the permission to be who you are...from moment to moment.

Invoke the part of you that trusts, that breathes, that allows the divine process to unfold. Be curious about what arises and make an attempt to release control. Instead of searching for answers, be with the questions and stay with your experience.

Medical Intuitive Caroline Myss, PhD, states in her work Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing,“We are forever looking for the easy meditation, the easy exercise, that will lift us out of the fog, but consciousness doesn’t work that way.” She suggests that the only way out is through, by letting go. “Let go of how you thought your life should be, and embrace the life that is trying to work its way into your consciousness” (Myss,1996 p.257).

Release what you want to change about your life and sink into the reality of your life. Detach from expectations and open yourself up to all possible outcomes.  

If you’re feeling anger, feel it...really feel it. Let it in and know that eventually, it will pass. But, let it exist. When grief sneaks up on you, allow it to express itself and deliver whatever message or insight it is trying to communicate to you. Give it space and trust that it brings with it blessings and lessons.

When you identify and accept your “stuckness,”(what Gestalt therapists call an “impasse”), answers will begin to emerge...because change is inevitable. Change is the only constant. When we accept the present moment, we save energy that would otherwise be spent in a futile battle fighting against reality. Look at acceptance as a pre-requisite for change. Surrender to your truth.

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Trust the process. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the butterfly calls the beginning. You're changing too, even if you cannot see where you are headed. Surrender, allow, receive, accept, fly.

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Your Daily Gestalt Principle: Self-Responsibility

By Erica Edwards

2. YOU are the expert of your life. Not your therapist.

The Gestalt Therapist acts as a non-judgmental witness, facilitator, and companion along your journey toward greater self-understanding…not a GUIDE. While you may not think you know what to do, I (and others in the Gestalt community) firmly believe you hold the answers to your questions and the solutions to your own problems. You may just need some support uncovering, discovering, or recovering what you need. 

Gestalt therapy is a non-pathology based theory. This means that the therapist does not attach diagnoses or labels to your experiences based on the symptoms you describe. Rather, the Gestalt therapist will want to provide more space for your symptoms to exist, so that they can begin to speak their truths, in the name of wholeness. This therapy is not about “treating clients,” but about helping people “live with who they are in their entirety,” even the parts they wish would vanish instead. 

Fritz Perls states, “What we want to do in Gestalt therapy is to integrate all the dispersed and disowned alienated parts of the self and make the person whole again. A wholesome person is a person who functions well, can rely on his own resources, and can resume his growth, wherever the person gets stuck in his growth” (Perls, 1973, The Gestalt Approach & Eye Witness to Therapy, p.179).

Gestalt therapy encourages self-responsibility so that you learn to tap into your personal power and make self-directed changes in your life, decisions created in the pursuit of following your own aliveness and truth.

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Expanding Awareness with Gestalt Psychotherapy

By Erica Edwards

Finding the right kind of therapy can be tough. So many modalities. So many therapists. So many choices. You want support and results.

While Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) receives most of the attention in today’s psychology field, Gestalt Therapy is an alternative modality that I strongly believe provides a more solid platform for greater integration and holistic healing.

Gestalt therapy, a humanistic, client-centered psychology that evolved during the 1950s and 1960s, is an inclusive therapy geared to explore and expand one’s external and internal awareness. Utilizing tenets from phenomenology, existential philosophy, somatic work, and theory of change, Gestalt Therapy exists as a vehicle to investigate one’s emotions and thoughts through a “here-and-now” lens. Depressed? How does that “depression” show up in the therapy room? Relationship problems? How does your pattern of conflict repeat itself in relation with your counselor? Gestalt therapy challenges people to meet their actions, feelings, and thoughts with curiosity and wonder in the present moment. In Gestalt Therapy, there is no “right” or “wrong.” There are parts. There is a “part” of you that may want to move on from a relationship. And there may be a “part” of you that wants to stay locked in the current, yet dissatisfying cycle. There is a “part” of you that may want to change your eating habits. And there is a “part” of you that enjoys your current diet, despite the undesired consequences. Gestalt Therapy encourages acceptance of all the parts of you, the parts you shun and the parts you embrace. In the contact between these parts, answers emerge, consciousness builds, and the seedlings of action begin to form.

In this article series, I describe how I utilize Gestalt work in my own practice and the ways in which I believe this type of therapy can benefit you. 

Welcome to the first daily installment...

The Principles of Gestalt Therapy

1. “Lose your Mind and Come to Your Senses” - Fritz Perls

Utilize those 5 senses. Sight, Sound, Touch, Smell, Taste. Well, and I’ll add a 6th: Intuition. What do you notice? What do you sense your body communicating to you? From the gurgling of your tummy to the tingling in your toes, what are you aware of as you sit silently, engaged in your lived experience? While thoughts and memories can be important to discuss in therapy, try to stay present with what is happening in the here-and-now and how your attention shifts from sensation to sensation, moment to moment. This can simply begin with focusing on your breath. Gestalt therapy holds the belief that your body is coded by your past. Your body exists as a time capsule of all your lived experiences. By allowing feelings and visceral sensations to show up organically through the body, you unlock doors to healing opportunities, chances to resolve unfinished internal conflicts and trauma. Gestalt theory suggests that every experience has the capacity to be a healing experience. Listening to your body plays a key role in the process.

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This Is How We Date Now

We don't commit now. We can order up a human being in the same way we can order up pad thai on Seamless. We think intimacy lies in a perfectly-executed string of emoji. We think effort is a “good m...

A Portrait of Modern Relationships

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Brené Brown: Listening to shame

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

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By Erica Edwards

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To the question of your life, you are the answer, and to the problems of your life, you are the solution.

Joe Cordare