Empty Chair Technique: A Gestalt Dialogue for Unfinished Business and Inner Conflict

About this tool

The empty chair technique is a therapy exercise in which you speak to an empty chair as if a particular person, or a part of yourself, were sitting in it, and then switch seats and answer from that side. It sounds theatrical and sometimes feels that way for the first minute. What it does is turn an argument you have been having silently in your head, often for years, into a spoken dialogue you can hear, feel and finish. People use it to say what they never said to a parent, an ex-partner or someone who has died, and to get a critical inner voice out into the open where it can be answered.

It comes from Gestalt therapy. Fritz Perls, who developed Gestalt therapy with Laura Perls and Paul Goodman in the 1940s and 1950s, borrowed the chair from Jacob Moreno's psychodrama and made it central to his workshop style: the client in the 'hot seat', an empty chair opposite, and a dialogue between the two sides of a conflict. Perls was interested in what he called unfinished business, feelings toward someone that were never expressed and so keep intruding on the present. He was also interested in internal splits, the 'topdog' that issues demands and the 'underdog' that resists them. Both got a chair.

Leslie Greenberg and his colleagues took these tasks out of the Gestalt workshop and studied them step by step in what became emotion-focused therapy, first set out in Facilitating Emotional Change by Greenberg, Laura Rice and Robert Elliott in 1993. They separated two exercises that are often lumped together. The two-chair dialogue is for a conflict inside you, most often a self-critical split: one chair holds the critic ('you are lazy, you will fail'), the other holds the part that receives the criticism, and the aim is for the criticized side to find its own voice and for the critic to soften into something more like a concern. The empty-chair dialogue is for unfinished business with another person: you imagine them in the chair, say what was never said, take their seat and respond, and work toward some resolution, which may be forgiveness, holding them to account, a boundary, a goodbye, or simply a feeling fully expressed. This page offers a guided version of both. Greenberg's emotion-focused therapy for individuals is a different line of work from Sue Johnson's Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples, although they share a name and some roots.

Greenberg's group ran process research on hundreds of recorded sessions, identifying the sequence that leads to resolution: expressing the feeling, reaching the need underneath it, and a shift in how the other person or the critic is seen. Sandra Paivio and Greenberg's 1995 trial compared twelve sessions of empty-chair work for unfinished business with a psychoeducation group and found larger gains on measures of distress, unfinished business and the relationship, maintained at follow-up. Emotion-focused therapy as a whole has a reasonable trial record for depression and for unresolved interpersonal injuries. Two cautions are fair. The trials are small and come mostly from the method's developers, and they studied the technique inside a full course of therapy with a trained therapist shaping each step, not a worksheet done alone. That is not nothing, but it is less than the confident tone of some self-help articles suggests.

Empty chair work helps when you know exactly what you wish you had said and have never had the chance, when a relationship ended without an ending, when grief has got stuck on something unresolved, or when a critical voice in your head sounds suspiciously like someone you grew up with. The two-chair version helps when you keep lecturing yourself and cannot work out why the lectures change nothing. Both are used in Gestalt, emotion-focused, psychodrama and some schema and compassion-focused therapies, and both are sometimes called chair work.

Now the most important paragraph on the page: who should not do this alone. If the person in the other chair abused you, physically, sexually or emotionally, do not do this exercise on your own. Imagining an abuser in the room can bring the fear back in full, and the switch into their chair, speaking in their voice, can be destabilising. The same caution applies to a loss that still feels raw or overwhelming, however long ago it was, when the dialogue can open grief faster than you can hold it. In both cases the exercise can still be valuable, but it belongs in a session with a therapist present who can pace it, stop it and help you come back. If you dissociate, have a trauma history, or are in a period of poor sleep or high stress, the same advice holds. The safety check at the start of this tool is there for that reason.

To do it well, speak out loud, even if it feels silly; the technique depends on hearing yourself. Use the present tense and the second person: 'you left' rather than 'he left'. Stay with one feeling at a time rather than reciting the whole history. When you move to the other chair, actually move, and try to answer as they would, not as you wish they would. Watch for the moment the feeling changes, which is usually when the exercise has done its work, and do not force a resolution. Some dialogues end in a boundary, some in a goodbye, and some end 'to be continued'. All three are legitimate endings.

The common mistakes: treating it as a rehearsal for a real confrontation, which it is not, because the person in the chair is your image of them and what you need to say to that image is often not what you need to say to the actual person. Staying in your head and narrating instead of speaking. Switching chairs so fast that neither side gets heard. Skipping the question underneath the anger, which is almost always a need: to have been protected, chosen, believed or told the truth. And pushing on through a flooded first attempt. If the exercise overwhelms you, stop; that is a reason to pause and reassess, ideally with a therapist, not a verdict on you.

If this exercise brings up more than you expected, or you keep returning to the same unfinished business, a therapist trained in emotion-focused, Gestalt or experiential therapy can take it further and do it with you in the room. Psychology.com's directory is free to search by specialty.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Checked the Gestalt and EFT lineage, the two-chair versus empty-chair distinction, and the cautions on abuse and recent bereavement.

References

1. Perls F, Hefferline RF, Goodman P. Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. Julian Press; 1951.
2. Greenberg LS, Rice LN, Elliott R. Facilitating Emotional Change: The Moment-by-Moment Process. Guilford Press; 1993.
3. Paivio SC, Greenberg LS. Resolving "unfinished business": Efficacy of experiential therapy using empty-chair dialogue. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. 1995;63(3):419-425.
4. Elliott R, Watson JC, Goldman RN, Greenberg LS. Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy: The Process-Experiential Approach to Change. American Psychological Association; 2004.
5. Greenberg LS. Emotion-Focused Therapy. Rev. ed. American Psychological Association; 2017.

Empty Chair Technique FAQ