Unfinished Business from Gestalt Therapy
- Unfinished business refers to the event in which authentic/original emotions were not expressed and no closure was obtained.
- People with unfinished business often resent the past and because of this, they are unable to focus on the here and now.
- One of the major goals of Gestalt Therapy is to help people work through their unfinished business and bring about closure.
- How to find out whether there is any unfinished business: When you have nothing to do or you are doing something physically and no mental work is involved, do you get thoughts about an event or a person and they bother you? If the answer is “Yes”, it seems like an unfinished business.
In order to finish the unfinished business or bring a closure, empty chair or double chair or role play techniques can be used. Empty Chair, Double Chair and Role play techniques can help the counselors to find out the authentic emotion(s).If the emotion is rated 6 or above, then double chair technique or role play technique is suggested. If it is 5 or below, empty chair technique may be enough.
The techniques to deal with unfinished business are given below:
- Talking to a non judgmental and empathic person who will not advice. Telling the empathic person not to advise but just to listen in the beginning itself.
- writing in a paper & tearing, typing in cell phone/laptop & deleting – while writing or typing – no description but as a conversation whatever you wanted to tell the other person
- Recording the talk to the other person in mobile phone and deleting it.
- writing a poem or story describing the emotions in the first person with lots of conversations and not in 3rd person description
- Assigning colours for the emotion you are going through and painting or drawing the people with whom you have unfinished business and add conversations (Do not store these materials. Remove them from the environment. Finish the unfinished businesses)