“The family is playing an informal game at the dinner table. It’s the Christmas season, and the centerpiece is a candle-lit Weihnachten Carousel (aka windmill carousel or pyramid carousel): the updraft from the candles turns a balsa wood windmill which rotates carousels on the three levels of the pyramid. On these carousels is a Nativity scene: Mary, Joseph, the crèche, the wise men, the angels, the animals, and so on, all brightly painted and gaily rotating within the wooden framework. The game is a version of I Spy. 8-year-old Peter is ‘it’; he has ‘spied’ an item on the carousel, and the rest of the family takes turns asking yes/no questions to try to guess which item Peter has selected: Is it moving? No. Is it made of wood? Yes. Is it white or partly white? Yes. The children love this game, which they have made up and elaborated over the years. Eventually the family gives up and requires Peter to tell what he has spied; he says it is the balls that sit on the fence posts around the base of carousel. ‘Peter! There isn’t any white on those balls! They’re totally red!’ And they are: the balls are, objectively, uniformly red painted, not a speck of white paint on them. The family has a light-hearted conversation about how much easier it would have been had Peter given the correct answer to his brother’s ‘Is it white or partly white?’ question. Peter doesn’t enter into this conversation.
However, a more careful look at the red balls reveals that each has the reflection of the two adjacent candle flames on it, two tiny spots of experienced white on the objectively uniformly red-painted balls. The spots are tiny, and they don’t count as ‘white’ for anyone except Peter, who may be more sensorially aware than anyone else in the family. But they are indeed, looked at closely, experientially white. Peter has been punished (mildly, to be sure) for his sensory sensitivity, and he doesn’t have the confidence to defend himself.
We speculate that inner experiences (sensory awareness, inner speech, inner seeing, etc.) are skills that may be acquired across development. Peter has learned a small lesson: that sensory awareness doesn’t count; that talking about your sensory awarenesses will get you punished. We speculate that a long series of that kind of event— in the family, in the classroom, eventually in the workplace — may cause Peter’s sensory awareness skill either to atrophy or to go underground: he will not talk about it, even to himself; he will be embarrassed if he is somehow cornered into talking about it (as was Ephraim); he will deny that he has it; he will not really identify the fact that he has it in his self-narratives.” （p. 248f）

Direct citation from:
Hurlburt, R. T., Heavey, C. L., & Bensaheb, A. (2009). Sensory awareness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16(10-12), 231-251.

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“Perhaps，as Buber suggests, an I-Thou relation is a more fundamental way of accessing the way things are than an I-it relation. In any case, there are, I suggest, no good grounds for assuming that the impersonal, objective stance is the only one through which things are adequately revealed.” (p. 243)

One answer philosophy professor Matthew Ratcliffe (University of York) provides for the circularity that arises from assuming that a theoretical stance of the world should have priority over experience:

"Why should certain cognitive processes have authority?
Because the world is such and such way.
Why do you think the world is like that?
Because those processes reveal it to be."
(ebd.)

Ratcliffe, M. (2007). Rethinking commonsense psychology - A critique of folk psychology, theory of mind and simulation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

The author also wrote an account of the phenomenology of depression, claiming that "despite the vast amount of research that has been conducted into the causes and treatment of depression, the experience of depression remains poorly understood," offering a new view.

Ratcliffe, M. (2014). Experiences of depression: A study in phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (click here for chapter 1)

I haven't read the book, yet, but maybe it's not so new to Gestalt therapists...

I open this topic category to share only some interesting text snippets of papers that make me think about Gestalt work immediately. Entries here are more like crumbs left after a crispy bite, but they are not the bite itself...

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Pennebaker, Mehl, & Niederhoffer (2003):

"The reality is that in daily speech, emotional writing, and even affect-laden poetry, less than 5% of the words people use can be classified as emotional. From an evolutionary perspective, language did not emerge as a vehicle to express emotion. In reviewing the various word use studies, it is striking how weakly emotion words predict people’s emotional state." (p. 571)

Do people simply
not have the habit (because other means are more useful)
not have the language
do not wish to reveal
emotional terms in writing?

And if people (independent of the reason) do not write emotional terms, may they also not speak them often (and convey emotions via other channels)?