This has to be the most “used” word in psychotherapy as well as being the least understood. For example, you might say: I have a problem taking support, or I don’t have people around me to support me… In the early days of Gestalt therapy, support meant self support — if we were lucky we created that as children to protect those parts of self-expression that no one seemed to appreciate. We grow up into self-sufficient adults, which socially is a highly valued state. But support doesn’t mean finding the right person or the right environment. Support is always present, it is neither positive nor negative. If we do something well it is because that aspect of ourselves has been supported by our peers, our family, our social group. In the same way our neuroses, our hiding, our dissociation, our smallness or our bigness, has been supported, often to a greater degree — which is why we spend much of our time in those states rather than a state of satisfaction, or the bliss that comes from being our honest selves.

My former colleague and friend Joanne Greenham would ask people to share how they learned to ride a bike. The stories are as different as the number of people in the room. For one person someone ran alongside of them until they were ready, another had training wheels until they asked for a two-wheeler, another had a caring parent spend a day with them riding around in an empty parking lot. Each story carried with it the essence of the support each one would seek for their entire life. A partner in their learning. Permission to develop at their own pace. Safety to just be themselves, and someone to have faith they will get there.

In our work environments, our relationships, we rarely negotiate for the conditions that will support our excellence. Instead we wait for the magical someone who will know what we most need and provide it, and in the meanwhile take the full responsibility of our performance onto ourselves.

The primary self-support is our physical body although we separate ourselves from “it” through pulling ourselves up, pushing ourselves forward, ignoring our pains, not listening to the high times or low times, and especially through controlling our breathing as if we could control time. Traumatic injury is a disconnection from support that is most needed in the worst circumstances. Regaining our ability to find support through our body’s relaxed connection to gravity, a return to the breath-imbued flexible architecture of our body self, can depend on one other person who has skill in only one area – the ability to simply be there to reassure by their presence that we are not alone. My old friend Jack Schwartz used to call the human arms: jumper cables. Support is not what we do for one another, it is the ability to be there for one another with respect and openness.

The Gestalt Cycle is one of the primary teaching tools of Gestalt therapy. It is a model of the steps to satisfaction that begins with feeling, which in seconds becomes awareness of the feeling and its message, and leads to following our feeling into fulfillment, then integration of the experience and real rest. What underlays the cycle is support at every stage. Without support our experiences can be stultified, frustrating, unfinished. Fulfillment is part of our body program, as is feeling, longing, deep rest. In the absence of felt support, this cycle becomes the addictive cycle, the ultimate self-support and self-sufficiency. Addiction is a continual yearning for the incomplete support never to be discovered, because of the absence of connection to our body self, and the absence of our ability to believe in the existence of the reassuring other.