28/10/2017
As first popularized by Fritz Perls, one of the founders of gestalt therapy, an empty chair faced the client.
The empty chair is one of many interactive techniques used to help engage the client's feelings, thoughts and behaviors.
The empty chair technique is characteristic of some styles of gestalt therapy. It is often effective at facilitating clients' integration of different aspects or "disowned parts" of their personality in order to further psychotherapeutic insight. It is one of a variety of interventions that help people move from talking about something towards the fullness of immediate, present experience - sensation, affect, cognition, movement. The less people are "in touch," or "verbalizing," or abstractly thinking, the more likely therapists are to use this as an expressive technique.
Way of therapy:
The client imagined someone (or himself, herself, or parts of him or herself) in it, and spoke, gestured, or otherwise communicated to the "empty chair," which was now not so empty. The client then sat in the chair, continuing the conversation, this time reversing roles. Variations of the "empty chair" developed over the decades in order to fit the clinical needs of the situation - and as gestalt therapy evolved. The client might participate in this technique without the "prop" of an actual empty chair. Importantly, the technique today always includes attention to the relational dynamic between the client and the psychotherapist.
The actuall thing which happens in this technique / therapy is that client first burst his emotions to empty chair then he shifts his place from chair to empty chair and defends emotion by becoming the person whom previously he was imagining.
This therapy help person to relieve stress and helps him to move on.
~Malik