Losers"
Although people are born to win, they are also born helpless and totally dependent on their environment. Winners successfully make the transition from total helplessness to independence, and then interdependence. Losers do not. Somewhere along the line they begin to avoid becoming self-responsible.
Few people are total winners or losers. Most of them are winners in some areas of their live in losers in other. Their winning or losing is influenced by what happens to them in childhood.
A lack of response to dependency needs, poor nutrition,brutality,unhappy relationship,disease,continuing disappointment,inadequate physical care, and traumatic events are among the many experience that contribute to making people losers Such experiences interrupt, deter or prevent the normal progress toward autonomy and self-actualization. To cope with negative experience a child learns to manipulate himself and other. These manipulative techniques are hard to give up later in life and often become set patterns. A winner works to shed them. A loser hangs on to them.
A loser represses his capacity to express spontaneously and apparently his full range of possible behavior. He may be unaware of other options for his life if the path he chooses goes nowhere. He afraid to try new things. He maintains his own status quo. He is a repeater. He repeats not only his own mistakes, he often repeats those of his family and culture.
A losers has difficulty giving and receiving affection. He does not enter into intimate,honest,direct relationships and channels his energies into living up to their expectations.
When a person wants to discover and change his "losing streak"when he wants to become more like the winner he was born to be,he can use gestalt-type experiments and transactions analysis to make change happen.These are two new,exciting,psychological approaches to human problems.The first was given new,life by Dr.Frederick Perts;the second was developed by Dr.Eric Berne.
Perts was born in Germany in1893 and left the country when Hitler came into power.Berne was born in Montreal in 1910.Both men were trained as Freudian psychoanalysts; both broke away from the use of orthodox psychoanalysis; both found their greatest popularity and acceptance in the United States.
Gestalt therapy is not new.However,its current popularity has grown very rapidly since it was given new impetus and direction by Dr.Frederick Perts. gestalt is a German word for which there is not exact English equivalent;it means,roughly,the forming of an organized,meaningful whole.
Perts perceives many personalities as lacking wholeness,as being fragmented.He claims people are often aware of only parts of themselves rather than of the whole self.For example,a woman may not know or want to admit that sometimes she acts like her mother;a man may not know or admit that sometimes he wants to cry like a baby.
The aim of gestalt therapy is to help one to become whole to help the person become aware of,admit to,reclaim,and integrate his fragmented parts.Integration helps a person make the transition from dependency to self-sufficiency;from authoritarian outer support to authentic inner support.