The Empty Chair Technique:
What to Do When the Dialogue Gets Stuck?

Beyond Learning the Technique

The two-day workshop will focus particularly on the subtleties of therapeutic intervention and certain difficulties that repeatedly arise in practice:

• What exactly the therapist does and says, when to intervene, and how.
• How to maintain the experiential and embodied dimension without pushing the process towards a predetermined outcome.
• How to understand what is happening when the dialogue loses its energy and vitality.
• How to recognise when polarities begin to become confused or reversed.
• How to work with the client’s awkwardness or “performance anxiety.”
• How to recognise moments when the emotional charge shifts from the dialogue into the transference.
• How the timing and sequencing of therapeutic interventions affect the process.

The aim is not to reduce the technique to a series of “correct steps,” but to develop a deeper understanding of its principles, possibilities, and inherent difficulties, enabling us to use it with greater freedom, flexibility, and spontaneity.

What We Will Explore

Over the course of the two days, we will work progressively through the key stages of empty chair work.

1. Identifying the Polarities

How do we identify the different positions, voices, or relational dynamics that need to be differentiated, named, and brought into dialogue?

2. Setting Up the Dialogue

How can we introduce the technique naturally and effectively, so that it emerges organically from the therapeutic process rather than being experienced as something artificial or imposed?

3. Guiding the Process

How much guidance is helpful? When does the therapist need to intervene, and when is it preferable to allow the process to unfold with minimal intervention?

What can we do when the dialogue becomes repetitive, intellectualised, awkward, or emotionally flat—and particularly when the polarities begin to blur or reverse?

4. Facilitating Resolution

How can the therapist support the expansion of awareness without imposing a predetermined “successful” outcome?

We will also explore the possibility of moving beyond the initial polarity by introducing a third position.

External and Internal Relationships

The empty chair technique can be used to explore both actual relationships and internal conflicts, fantasies, dreams, or different aspects of the self.

Through spatial separation and experiential dialogue between these different parts, connections may emerge between the client’s inner world and their ways of relating to others.

An Integrative Approach

The empty chair technique originates in Gestalt therapy, which is grounded in field theory, but is now widely used in other therapeutic approaches as well.

Michael approaches the technique integratively, drawing on Gestalt therapy, body psychotherapy, psychoanalytic and relational perspectives in psychotherapy, systemic approaches, and other therapeutic traditions.

The workshop is intended for psychotherapists and counsellors from different therapeutic orientations who already use experiential methods or are interested in integrating them into their clinical practice.

How We Will Work

Theoretical discussions will alternate with therapeutic and supervision demonstrations, as well as practical exercises in pairs, triads, and small groups. Throughout the two days, the emphasis will be on applying theoretical principles to therapeutic practice. Participants will also receive a detailed written handout covering many of the key ideas and principles presented during the workshop.