Hello, I’m Ralph Porter
Let’s Talk
Everyone can have a healthy relationship with themselves and the people around them, though sometimes we end up hindering ourselves.
My wife and I live in the beautiful town of Boerne, Texas.
I have formal training in Gestalt therapy, and I follow this approach. In my opinion, it is one of the most effective methods for helping you to gain a better understanding of yourself and of the way you interact with the world at the present moment; it is this kind of awareness that enables choice to arise, and choices usually show up in situations where you never before thought there would be any.
I am a Licensed Professional Counselor, a Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor, and a National Certified Counselor.
- Texas LPC No. 82166
- Colorado LPC No. LPC.0024698
- Missouri LPC No. 2026049205
- Texas LCDC No. 15067
- NCC No. 1234778
How I work
I am a counselor who has been professionally licensed and who specializes in Gestalt therapy; in short, our approach is to concentrate on the present moment and to deal with it as it occurs, rather than using the session to examine your past from a safe position.
It is mainly a conversation, but in this one you pay more attention than you usually do. I notice the ways in which you shift your focus as you are speaking—what arises just before a difficult moment, the joke that shows up at such a time—and then I mention these things and ask your opinion on them. As you are the one who knows best about your own experiences, if I have made a mistake, please let me know.
The outcome is greater awareness, and this awareness is not just a preliminary step before the actual work; it is in fact the principal portion of the work. Choices which initially appeared to be unavailable often do become available when you are able to clearly see what you are doing and what costs you are incurring.
If you have seen the old films
When you look up Gestalt therapy, you are likely to see footage of Fritz Perls in the late 1960s—him in a jumpsuit at Esalen, being working with a person who was sitting in an empty chair in front of an audience. That footage is striking, it is essentially all that the internet remembers, and it is not what this text is about.
Perls passed away in 1970, after which the individuals who had been trained by him spent the next fifty years substituting the confrontational hot-seat approach with a dialogic one—that is, two people remaining in a room and working together, the relationship between them being seen as an integral part of the method rather than something that diverted from it. Bob Resnick, who had been trained and certified by Perls himself, spent his entire career carrying out that very correction, and it is the present-day relational tradition that I followed.
The footage should be regarded as a historical record and not as an account of the session. For the more detailed information about those two men, there are biographies of both of them here.
I came to this as a client
At first I didn't approach it as a student and it was not due to any academic interest; instead I had reasons which I would have expressed differently back then, and what Gestalt therapy achieved was showing me a number of things that I had been deliberately avoiding looking at—without trying to make me give up any of those beliefs, nor did it offer me a programme for self-improvement. That was not what I had expected therapy to be, and that is mainly the reason why I went on to train in it.
Since then having been on the other side of it, what still amazes me is the amount of things that become accessible to people when they stop trying to manage themselves. This isn't generally the result of a sudden insight. Instead it's because someone notices, for the first time and out loud, what they actually do—and then hears it.
The thing I don't want to stop doing is this: people are more resourceful than they tend to think, and that is why most of what I do consists of getting out of the way of them while remaining highly attentive.
Who I work with
I provide therapy to adults, either on an individual basis or as a couple. A large portion of my work involves dealing with borderline personality disorder and other related personality patterns. The other kinds of issues that are most frequently raised are anxiety and the feeling of always being on edge; relationships that have either become stagnant or have suddenly deteriorated; addiction, and the difficult years that actually follow cessation of using; depression; grief, which includes suffering through losses that other people think you should have moved on from by this stage; anger and what lies beneath it; and the periods when a person's life takes on a new form — such as a job, a marriage, a diagnosis, or the gradual realisation that you no longer want the thing that you had organised your life around.
For certain people the issue is obvious while for others they cannot put their finger on it. In both cases the situation is manageable. It's not necessary to have a diagnosis and it's not necessary to have determined what the real problem is before we begin—in fact, that's usually the very first thing we do together.
I won't attempt to appear as if I am the best person for every situation. In cases where the requirement lies outside my area of expertise, it will be better to say so from the start and assist you in finding someone more suitable than to take the appointment.
I talk like a person
That is to say, there should be no jargon, no way of putting your sentences back at yourself with the ends round about, and no stating what your actions mean. If I notice something — for instance, where your attention had been, the thing you had overlooked, the joke that came at a difficult moment — I will mention it and then ask you what you think of it. You are the one who know.
You may disagree with me; I prefer to be corrected than to be politely humourled, and it is often at the point where I am wrong aloud that the useful part begins. If my remark offends you, then say so too.
I never fill all the silent moments, since some of the most valuable times during a session are those periods when both of us remain quiet and I have come to the realization that I should not intervene in them. Likewise, I won't tell you that something is alright if it isn't.
From time to time I will encourage you to remain with something that you would prefer to get over with. You can always say no, and that would not be a failure; in fact, the fact that you realise you want to move on is itself the effort.
What I want for you
I never intend to specify the kind of person you should become; that is intentional, not merely modest. Usually, when a therapist decides upon what a satisfactory result would be, the client picks up on it and begins to achieve it, and the kind of thing you come to want as a result of that kind of pressure doesn't last when it meets a Tuesday afternoon.
All I really want is something more specific and harder to pretend about: that you have a clear and slow view of your actual behaviour, of the cost it involves to you, and of your desires—especially those desires which are inconvenient. Choice arises in this way much more reliably than it does from a plan. The majority of the things people say are impossible end up being cases of things they had never before allowed themselves to look at directly.
You are free to define your specific objectives yourself from the beginning and state them clearly. We will refer back to them and it is acceptable for you to alter them. By the sixth week you will usually have a better understanding of the situation than you did on the first day, so it would be odd to expect you to meet a target that had been set by someone who didn't have as much information.
I prefer that you shouldn't have to rely on me forever. A satisfactory conclusion isn't that all the issues have been settled; it's that you are able to look after things yourself so well that it seems unnecessary to pay me to assist.
