Making Good Contact

How to reach out and stay in touch

We use the word contact casually. Stay in contact, let's make contact, we lost contact. In Gestalt therapy it carries more weight than that. Contact is where change happens, where growth becomes possible, where we meet the world and let ourselves be altered by the meeting. Without it we are going through the motions, performing a version of being alive rather than living one.

We do not exist in isolation. We are always in relation to something. Other people, our surroundings, 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 can emerge between us that wasn't there before.

Martin Buber, whose work greatly influences Gestalt therapy, described two 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 day and life would be unworkable if we didn't. It is the shorthand by which we get through the supermarket, the commute, the working week. But when I-It becomes the only way we relate, something is lost. We become efficient and a bit 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. It comes and it goes. We cannot will ourselves into it. We can 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. But how do we get there? Sally Denham-Vaughan, writing in the Gestalt context, has explored this with more precision. She describes an interplay between will and grace, two forces that need each other and cannot be reduced to one another. Will is the effortful, intentional dimension. The choice to show up, to pay attention, to stay present when every instinct says withdraw. Grace is what arrives unbidden, the shift that opens up when we stop trying to control what happens. Neither alone is enough. Will without grace becomes rigid and forced, and closes down the very contact it is reaching for. Grace without will is passivity, a kind of magical thinking that says if I just wait long enough, connection will find me. The work is in holding both. Bringing what we have, and then letting go enough for something beyond our control to happen.

So what helps us become people capable of good contact, not just occasionally, but as a way of being?

The first thing is awareness. Gestalt therapy puts enormous weight 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 than I was. Awareness does not require us to change anything. Only to notice what is.

Then there is support. We cannot make good contact from a place of collapse. Support means the ground beneath us, literally. The felt sense of our bodies held in space, the breath moving in and out, the chair taking our weight. And it means relational ground. The people, communities and places that allow us to take risks, to be vulnerable, to try something and fail without it destroying us.

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

Good contact is not a technique. We bring our attention, our willingness, our courage, and then we wait for the meeting to come, or not.

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.