Gestalt Empty Chair Work: Liberating Our Hurt Inner Child Toward Completeness

At the heart of this book is the author's personal journey of psychological, intellectual, and career growth, including a description of how he has "brought his unique self" into his counseling work with students and community groups from ethnically and socially diverse backgrounds. The personal development work illustrates how Gestalt Therapy methods can support people learning to know their deep emotional, thinking, and behaving selves by using awareness of the ongoing connection between body awareness in constructing a unique psychological self. What one will find in this book is an honest, practical, and educated teaching of what it means to get to know yourself and how to build a personality that reflects your true self, what the author calls our "Hand-on-Heart Self." The author shares his own personal development and his counseling of others, explaining key principles that govern Gestalt personal development work and how these can be employed to free individuals from an unaware past to an aware and enlivened present and future. The book includes a chapter summarizing many of the psychological books that have been instrumental in the author's understanding of what it means to develop or "complete" oneself. The author also shares how he has translated his doctoral studies in counseling psychology into a concrete method, "The 0-100% Competence Method and Circle of Development," for assisting persons to become aware of their unique self as well as how to assess, structure, and monitor their on-going personal development.