The main contributors to Gestalt therapy are two couples Fritz Pearls, Laura Posner Pearls and Earving and Miriam Polster. Polsters theory incorporated aspects of support and acceptance between the therapist and client. Pearls had two main goals in therapy: to help people accept parts of themselves that they had disowned and to begin finding resources from within to overcome their problems instead of using external resources. Gestalt is a German word that literally means whole or completion (Corey,196). Specify the difference between many parts together versus a whole. Gestalt therapy focuses on the here and now by basing its experiments on physiological and existential thoughts. In this theory people are not just products of their environment but extensions of their environment (Corey,194). In a Gestalt approach session clients are asked to become aware of themselves and their experience in the present moment. By rooting themselves in the present they can change their current situation. The past is gone and the future is not yet here, but the present is a time when the customer is in control. The Gestalt therapist focuses on helping the client become self-sufficient and not dependent on the therapist's help (Corey, 196). Gestalt therapists ask what and how questions away from why questions to help the client become involved in the present. Because questions often trigger memories of the past, preventing the client from being present in the current session. Often during the session the therapist will ask you “what is happening to you now?”, “what is happening now” or “how are you experiencing your fear now”. Clients may have previously built beliefs about how they experience their emotions that may… middle of paper… A client begins to adapt when they feel comfortable enough to choose to try new behaviors in self-confidence. their therapist's office. Because this experience is new to the client, choices may be made with apprehension but, with the support of the therapist, the client may choose to begin making these choices in the outside world. When customers determine that they know how to get what they need from the environment they have achieved assimilation. To achieve assimilation, clients must first find ways to influence their environment rather than accept it. Customers may take a stand on an issue as a way to try to get what they want. At this point the client has moved from unawareness to making new discoveries, realizing how to adapt to himself, and finally to assimilation where the client now has confidence in separating himself from his environment (Corey, p.204-205).