Deepening your relationship with yourself and others

You know the golden rule about “Getting in touch with yourself” Great idea, right? Not always so easy to accomplish. Well, Focusing teaches you how to do just that: Get in touch with yourself so what’s going on inside you becomes a powerful ally that helps you to resolve conflict and pursue your dreams. It can be easily learned and practiced on your own, with a partner, or in therapy. It is like finding a map to the goodness that lies deep within you.

Researching a natural human capacity

Focusing and Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy come from the pioneering work of philosopher and psychologist, Eugene Gendlin at the University of Chicago. He was curious about why psychotherapy was helpful for some people but not for others. He and his colleagues studied tapes of hundreds of hours of therapy sessions and discovered that successful clients had a vague, hard-to-describe, “inner awareness”, or “bodily felt sense” about their problems. He noticed that paying attention to this felt sense in specific ways led to inner change. Based on this realization, Gendlin developed a method of helping people access their inner awareness, which he called, Focusing.

How does it work?

Focusing is a natural body-centered process of bringing awareness to the place inside you that senses how you relate to a situation or problem in your life. How we feel about someone or some experience may be vague and subtle or like a knot in your stomach that tells you something is not right. This inner sensing and interacting with our bodily felt sense is what Focusing is all about.

Here’s an example from my work!

Recently I was working with a couple; he was expressing his frustrations about her long hours at work and the stress she brings home. She felt attacked and like she could never get it right. The relationship has been stressed by the death of his father. I sensed this was an opening into something more deeply felt in their relationship. I asked her to sense how she was feeling…in her body. There was anger, pain and sadness. It felt like a horrible tightness in her chest (“like I’m having a panic attack”) and the feeling of being unable to swallow or get enough air to breathe. With the use of Focusing Oriented language she was able to relax and keep her pain (felt awareness) company. From this came a river of experience about perfectionism that went back to childhood and her parent’s divorce. Something about what she was experiencing now was like what she felt years ago as a child when her family fell apart. “I thought I had worked though all of that” she said. “I had no idea she felt like that,” he said. They looked at each other not knowing what else to say (this new awareness did not yet have words). These are the moments in therapy when something new and rich bubbles up and changes our relationships and us.

Focusing can help you to:

• Discover your joy and peace of mind that comes with self-acceptance.
• Transform “enemies” like self-criticism and confusion into powerful allies.
• Make decisions and solve problems more creatively.
• Overcome procrastination, perfectionism and the need to control
• Access your rich inner life that lies beyond repetitive thoughts and feelings
• Become a better, more emotionally attuned parent, partner, coworker and friend.
• Learn to trust your body and it’s wisdom so you know what you really feel and want.