Aha...

• Gestalt therapy and marketing by JG, 8/26/98
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    • Hmmm... by JG, 11/29/98
      
      

Javier,

I very much do appreciate personal contact and, as you know, of what use is gestalt therapy in humanity without strong personal contact! You honour me with your kind words of confidence Javier. I am well met. Isn't it wonderful that through this forum we, who began so sharply, have gestalted ourselves into new experiences and awarenesses shared. Makes the many days ahead brighter and more inviting. This is how I like contact cuzz it is solid and longstanding and easily refreshed in memory. I-Thou is so much finer than I-It. Thank you so much for the moment, my friend!

You might (I just can't resist the moment! :-) come to realize within yourself Javier that paradoxical change does not suggest (as I see it/apply it) that you must or should start from 0 again. Clearly you have not wasted any time (experiences) gaining your gestalt insights. Who can say your existence as a pyschologist was not simply your own prerequiste to achieve a more real and intense satisfaction of not only gestalt therapy but of having first hand knowledge of both sides of the paradox of "experiential truths -|- empiracle truths" -- as I understand paradox, we simply do best when the fruit of our labours is both tart and sweet; both seed and tree; both real and unreal. Your knowledge of all those shoulds and should nots could come in rather handy when you will be able to so clearly appreciate the differences of what a real free and existentional justified experience of I-Thou is as a human out of the bondage of all those shoulds and should nots. Nobody appreciates freedom more than one who was once a true slave. Throw the chains off to be sure Javier, but you might do well to welcome the memory of your paradox with a strong confidence of your knowing both sides of the tracks.

For myself Javier, my life is bursting with paradoxes. I am a drug addict who remembers the joyful entrancement of a cold beer and a hit of orange LSD but has not substanced abused since 1981. I am a polio survivor fighting a battle in which even if I win I loose. I am a gestalt therapist without a formal recognition degree or licensure. I am a foster parent to special needs children and I myself am from a broken home. I am the President and Executive Director/Program Director of a charity rehab program today and in 1981 I myself was a patient in a drug rehab home struggling through a dual-diagnosis treatment trying to bring myself back from oblivion.

I have been through tough times and good times in abundance. I have spent over three years in armpit to toes body plaster casts endured so that miracle surgical techniques could enable me to walk. By that time I was a total drug addict and would promptly destroy any good that the surgery might have manifested. Science could attempt to fix my bones and tendons but they could do nothing for my person. The real me. I was lost before they began. I simply lost my life/mind in those years my friend. What a trip! Talk about do's and don'ts! I remember being so incapacitated at college while taking my Business Admin program that I spent most of my time simply trying to hold on to the truth that everybody around me could NOT read my thoughts, even if it surely "felt" like they could. Ya, I was a real broadcaster for sure. Unreal. Like a whole new world now. Christ Javier, the stories I could tell ya, when I think about it now. So long ago, and yet the knowledge I gained from those experiences is invaluable to me today.

And so will your knowledge my friend. I know what feeling desperate is about. My mind screams to me yet still today when something inside me shows my path in life. So simple and so complex at the same time. A real paradox for sure. Ah well, human is as human does. I know this about me and about you Javier....we both have already attained many, many goals. Perhaps the greatest goal or achievment any of us can attain is to truly and simply know ourselves as the human beings that we all are.

I hope you get some more responses than just mine JG, but your right in any case, it has indeed been fun!

as always,

Dale

p.s. Ya, this is the gestalt forum isn't it!?!

oh ya,

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and yours Javier.

• Aha! Aha! to Dale by Bob Bock, 3/30/99