I like patterns. Well, to be more precise, I like what it feels like when I perceive some kind of pattern present, some kind of organised process going on around me. I suppose that is also part of what attracted me to Christianity and to gestalt therapy.The word “gestalt” cannot be translated straight across from German into English, but roughly it means a whole pattern. A good gestalt, then, is a crisp, distinct whole figure of some kind. By contrast, seeing something kind of fuzzy, blurry, and broken up is not a good gestalt. A good gestalt results in the sense of grasp and closure. You “get it” and then, because you got it, you either stand stunned with admiration and awe, or you simply move on. When patterns are incomplete, people have to deal with unfinished business.In Christianity we are told that the patterns in creation point to the nature of the Creator: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made…”Because of that I have a stunned amazement when I study the human nervous system. Did you know, for instance, that next to the sensory-motor pathways, where we receive perceptions from the environment and then act, so as to move in some way and interact with the environment, there are specialised neurons that “observe” first our own actions and then pick up on the same kinds of actions in others? They mirror our actions in the actions of others, and this is what enables us to understand what other people are doing without it having to be told or explained to us. Because I have reached for the buzzer on the bus to get off at the next stop, I can understand if someone near me is beginning to reach for the buzzer to get off at his or her stop. It is a pattern at work, a kind of neurobiological gestalt that also speaks of purpose. The brain and how it works is a biochemical work of art, a masterpiece.When a pattern is entirely contained in one’s mind, one’s imagination, it can be understood as an abstraction, and idea. These things are called constructs, because we create the patterns in our minds in order to, well, bring order, to organise and make gestalts. We construct them.Sometimes, however, patterns can overlap one another and become confusing. Recently I have been studying four overlapping constructs with regard to psychotherapy: common factors, consilience, integration, and convergence.Common factors are those features that all approaches to psychotherapy manifest. These are the factors that many regard make all forms of psychotherapy roughly equal in effectiveness. To be sure, there are specific factors that distinguish one approach from another, but it is the factors that these approaches have in common that account for most of the change in psychotherapy.Consilience is the idea that knowledge can be shared across domains. The patterns one observes in physics appear again in philosophy. In psychotherapy a process or pattern may be called one thing by one approach and something else by a different approach, but when considered on its own merits, the process or pattern seems to “jump together” across these domains and constitute essentially the same thing. This is the case between gestalt therapy and mindfulness, or gestalt’s paradoxical theory of change and what is currently known as “acceptance and commitment therapy”.Integration is when a therapist cherry picks procedures from the research literature to form an eclectic practice. The integration is accomplished by bringing together in one practice, as practised by one, specific therapist, a number of otherwise disparate procedures.Convergence, as in “convergent evolution”, is when separate species develop the same features through otherwise separate processes, but both in response to the same or similar environmental demands. In psychotherapy, different theoretical systems have been moving towards one another over the years by adopting the same basic theoretical tenets. For instance, psychoanalysis has moved from a one-person psychology in which the analyst sat behind the patient and focused on the free associations of the patient, to a two-person psychology in which the analyst moved out in front of the patient, the two people looked one another in the eyes, and they developed working relationship that became known as relational psychoanalysis. Later, such analysts also realised that this process was taking place in a larger system or social-environmental context, and so the approach became known as relational systems psychoanalysis. Relational systems psychoanalysis is virtually identical to gestalt therapy, because of gestalt’s longstanding understanding of contact between two people, which forms a relationship over time, and the unified field, which is all things having effect for the people concerned. Other convergences among cognitive-behavioral, phenomenological-existential, experiential, and psychodynamic psychotherapies for instance can be observed as well.So, it can all become quite confusing. How are these things related to one another? Well, I suppose that is for each person to consider, but for me it works like this: (1) When therapists work with people and the therapy has been seen to “work”, there is an 80 percent chance it’s because it doesn’t matter whether the therapist was a cognitive-behaviorist, psychoanalyst, or gestalt therapist; it’s because of the factors that are common to all those approaches. (2) What we know about what psychotherapy is and how it works, the theoretical patterns involved, seems to exist in other domains of knowledge both inside and outside of psychotherapy itself. (3) Individual psychotherapists often scan the clinical landscape and select practices that are consistent with their own world views; they integrate them into their relative practices. (4) Individual systems of psychotherapy that remain viable do so because they respond to continuing environmental demands and develop or adopt theoretical tenets accordingly; as that happens theory develops independently across clinical perspectives, but that theory is consilient. Thus, the clinical systems are converging.There is another way of understanding this. All truth is God’s truth. If something is true, it is true because God has made it, brought it into existence as either a thing or a process. For instance, God uses fractals, which are reoccurring patterns observed across various dimensions, like the vortex of water going down the drain in the bathtub and how it resembles the vortex of wind and clouds in a hurricane or the swirling vortex of the universe orbiting a central star. In history, and thus also in scripture, God uses types, which are historical-cultural patterns, to teach about aspects of redemption: the blood of the Passover Lamb in Exodus is the blood of Christ that allows God to pass over our individual sins.