Making Good Contact

How to reach out and stay in touch

There is something deceptively simple about the idea of contact. We use the word casually, 'stay in contact', 'let's make contact', 'we lost contact' but in Gestalt therapy, contact is everything. It is the moment where change happens, where growth becomes possible, where we meet the world and allow ourselves to be altered by that meeting. Without it, we are merely going through the motions, performing a version of aliveness rather than living it.

To explain what I mean, I’d start with the basic observation that we do not exist in isolation. We are always in relation to something, other people, our environment, our own bodily experience, our thoughts and feelings. Contact in Gestalt therapy is what happens at the boundary between self and other, the point where I end and you begin, and where something new can emerge between us.

Martin Buber, the philosopher whose work greatly influences Gestalt therapy, described two fundamental ways of being in relation. He called them 'I–Thou' and 'I–It'. In an 'I–It' relationship, I relate to the other as an object something to be used, categorised, filed away. There is nothing wrong with this; we do it all the time and life would be unworkable if we didn't. It's a shorthand by which we navigate the world. But when 'I–It' becomes the only way of relating, something essential is lost. We become efficient but empty, connected in form but not in substance.

'I–Thou' is different. It is the moment of genuine meeting, where I encounter you not as a collection of attributes or a means to an end, but as a whole being. Buber was clear that 'I–Thou' cannot be forced or sustained indefinitely. It comes and it goes, a flash of something luminous that we cannot hold onto. We cannot will ourselves into it, only create the conditions in which it becomes possible, and then be willing to meet it when it arrives.

Buber gives us a way of recognising genuine contact when it happens. But how do we get there? Sally Denham-Vaughan, writing in the Gestalt context has explored this question with more precision. She describes a dynamic interplay between 'will' and 'grace' in the process of making contact, two forces that need each other but cannot be reduced to one another. 'Will' is the effortful, intentional dimension, the choice to show up, to pay attention, to stay present even when every instinct says withdraw. 'Grace', by contrast, is what arrives unbidden, the shift that opens up when we stop trying to control the outcome. Denham-Vaughan's insight is that neither alone is sufficient. 'Will' without 'grace' becomes rigid, forced, effortful in a way that actually closes down the very contact it seeks. 'Grace' without 'will' is passivity, a kind of magical thinking that says if I just wait long enough, connection will find me. The key is in holding both, bringing everything we have, and then letting go enough for something beyond our control to happen.

So what supports us in becoming people who are capable of good contact, not just occasionally, but as a way of being in the world?

The first thing is awareness. Gestalt therapy places enormous emphasis on awareness not as intellectual understanding, but as the felt, bodily sense of what is happening right now. When I notice the tightness in my chest, the way I am holding my breath, the impulse to look away I am already more present. Awareness does not require us to change anything. Simply to notice what is.

The second is support. We cannot make good contact from a place of collapse. This means, literally, the ground beneath us the felt sense of our bodies held in space, the breath moving in and out, the chair taking our weight. And it means the relational ground too: the people, communities, and environments that allow us to take risks, to be vulnerable, to try something new without the fear that it will destroy us.

The third is willingness. Not will in the muscular, effortful sense, but something softer, a willingness to be affected, to let experience in. Most of us have spent years building very effective ways of not being affected, and for good reason. Those strategies were creative, necessary responses to difficult circumstances. They kept us safe when we needed keeping safe. But a strategy that once protected us can quietly become the thing that keeps us from the very contact we long for. In my practice I work with many people in exactly this place, able to see what they want, unable to reach for it, and only slowly discovering what stands in the way.

Making good contact is not a technique. It is a practice, a way of orienting ourselves towards life with openness and honesty. We bring what we can, our attention, our willingness, our courage, and then we wait, with open heart, for the grace of a genuine meeting.

References
Buber, M. (1958) I and Thou. Trans. R.G. Smith. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Denham-Vaughan, S. (2005) 'Will and Grace: The Integrative Dialectic in Gestalt Psychotherapy Theory and Practice.' British Gestalt Journal, 14(1), pp. 5–14.
Denham-Vaughan, S. (2010) 'The Liminal Space and Twelve Action Practices for Gracious Living.' British Gestalt Journal, 19(2), pp. 34–45.