30/07/2025
What is a Gestalt, and why is it important? In psychology and related fields, it refers to a concept where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So what I hear you say in your endless pursuit of truth!
See below, in essence, you can see some shapes that we older people may describe as packmen. Most people can see a triangle, but is it really there? Well, no, bits are missing; however, your mind sees it because our brains have evolved to fill in the gaps because that is how, as a species, we learnt to survive, by outthinking our enemy and coming up with survival strategies.
So we feel unsafe if we don't know everything about a situation, and worse than that, our mind will tend to default to predicting that something bad is going to happen and then catastrophise about it, because only bad things will kill us as they did 200,000 years ago. This default process increases anxiety, stress and fear responses (have you ever had your boss come to you and ask you to meet in their office in 1/2 an hour, what did you spend that 1/2 an hour thinking about? So the next time you have a stress/anxiety/fear response, ask yourself, what actual evidence do you have for it? In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) this is called psychological suffering, which is the distress we cause ourselves (separate from the external stressor, psychological pain) that happens in our mind. (Notice below to see a visual gestalt.)
