The empty chair

Fritz Perls trained as a psychoanalyst, then broke away to found Gestalt therapy with Laura Perls and Paul Goodman in the 1940s and 50s. Gestalt belongs to the same humanistic family as Carl Rogers: it cares about what you feel here and now, more than theories about why.

Perls noticed that people could talk about a difficult person for hours and feel nothing change. "My dad was always a bit distant, I suppose because of how he was brought up." So he would put an empty chair in front of them and ask them to talk to their father instead, as if he were sitting there. The explanations tended to stop, and the feelings arrived: "Dad, you never once asked how I was."

Perls was a showman, and much of what he claimed wasn't tested. The chair has been. From the 1980s, the psychologist Leslie Greenberg and his colleagues studied it carefully, especially for "unfinished business": hurt or resentment toward someone important that still hasn't settled. In one trial, people who did empty-chair work in therapy improved more than people in a psychoeducation group, and those who got furthest were the ones who came to see the other person differently or let go of what they still needed from them.

A few things make the difference between a chair that works and one that is just an awkward monologue:

• Talk to them, using "you", not about them.
• Use the present tense, as if they are here now.
• Get specific: one thing that happened, not a summary of everything.
• Say what you felt, and what you needed and didn't get.
• Let anger and grief come if they come. Nobody else will hear it.

The person never has to hear any of this. The chair is for you. Sometimes it leads to a real conversation, and sometimes it lets you put down something you were waiting for them to give you.

There is a version for self-criticism, too. Put your inner critic in the chair and let it speak, then answer it from the part of you on the receiving end. People are often surprised by how harsh the critic sounds out loud, and by how the other side eventually answers back.

Marcus and Ade were best friends for ten years. Then Ade moved to Glasgow, and over a year his replies dried up. Marcus still feels a jolt whenever his name comes up. He tries the empty chair, and this is what he says:

"Ade was always a bit flaky, honestly. I suppose people just drift apart. It's fine. It happens to everyone, doesn't it?"