European Focusing Association (EFA)
Notes from General Assembly
Loutraki, 14 May 2018
[Where there has been a unanimous showing of ‘green cards’it means that the Assembly has agreed to this proposal.]
Agenda items & Feedback from interest groups
Agenda Items
3 Priority Items (agreed by the whole group by green card)
- Heidi-The next event to be organised by EFA
- Mia- The European website
- Steering group(Tine’s email read out about the need for the Steering group to take time to process how it has worked/ hasn’t worked before new members join it)
[Other items from participants for which there was no time]
Hejo- A European publication
Lucy- process put in place for supporting people when conflicts arise
Hejo- English: how can we reach the people who’re not comfortable with speaking English?
Steering group Items
- Online workshops
- The next General Assembly
- The next European conference
- Collaboration with Person-Centred groups]
Before the agenda items:
Hejo gave the background to EFA:
EFA began in 2009 and was formed by a group of coordinators with the aim of fostering collaboration and support amongst European Focusers. We have been EFA since Cambridge (2016) after a Vision Statement had been prepared and approved there. We need to consider what kind of organisation should we be? The underlying question is: what do we need to make Focusing great again? EFA is a networking organisation that has no legal status.
Agenda Items
- The next event to be organised by EFA
Heidi- Regardless of what happens with the International conference there should be an EFA conference every second year and we should have a more informal gathering every year in between. And the General Assembly should be part of that. (only green cards- agreed)
- Website
Paula- the world needs to learn from the brilliant minds in Europe.
Nikos- you need to register for the website and create an account.
Pavlos- importance of all of this in terms of promoting collaboration.
Hejo- agrees that we should have online workshops and encourage online collaboration. Maybe the website could include Zoom. Maybe webinars should be paid for.
Pat (Foster)- reinforced Mia’s proposal with a proposal from the steering group re the website. We have funds from the conference. From the proceeds of the first EFA conference all expenses incurred and Nikos’s time since 2015 should be reimbursed and all remaining funds should go to fund the website (including Nikos’s time/ that of any other webmaster for the future). The webmaster should make all decisions regarding the website. (only green cards-all points in this paragraph agreed)
Meg- webinars should be free.
Mia- what is offered on the website should be information rather than advertising. We could simply add links.
Nikos- at the moment people do post workshops (i.e. do advertise there).
Ruth- at the moment she offers workshops through TIFI and a third of the fees go to TIFI. Could the funds go to EFA? (Pat- we can’t take money because in Greece we cannot take funds.)
It was also proposed that an extra 20 Euros be added to any future conference fee to continue to fund the website. (green cards- agreed)
Nikos- asked the Assembly to please subscribe to the EFA website and we can discuss this website issue there and all other issues.
3. Steering Group
The steering group is not a Board, but it takes decisions.
Hejo- the aim is to listen to others. Who should be on the steering group? Up to now it’s been who turned up. Need to create a balance between being structured and unstructured.
Mia- likes the fact that it is informal. Has respect for people who are actually willing to ‘do’ things.
Christiane- Who will go on?
Nikos- being on the steering group means to ‘create’, to do things, planning.
Fiona- has been here since Athens 2015 and wants to step down, but would like to help with the transition to integrate new people into the group.
Judy- also here from Athens 2015 wants to step down from the group in its present form, but would like to help with a transition and to process the learning from the group. Also happy to continue to work on certain aspects (e.g. English texts for the website, etc.). Referred also to Tine’s email that recommends ‘a pause’ for us to look at how the steering group has functioned/ not functioned and what it needs to go forward.
Possible new members:
- Ruth Hirsch put herself forward
- Another suggestion was that it should involve people representing interest groups
BUT
Mia- proposed that we use the European website for people to nominate themselves/ offer themselves, saying what they can offer or bring to the steering group and for the community to comment and agree who should be on the steering group. This would give a stronger mandate for the person who puts themselves forward to replace leaving members. (green cards-agreed)
Hanspeter- proposes that there is a report on the activity of the steering group every year, to be presented at the AGM (green cards- agreed)
Feedback from Interest Groups
Marine-what brings us ‘aliveness’? What keeps us young? The group met once, but was deep. Conclusion that life is precious through facing death, finding meaning in life.
People who are interested in this should contact Marine at [email protected].
Ifat- The topic was ‘Spirituality in life through/with Focusing - connecting earth with sky'. During our 3 meetings, we noticed on an experiential level that when we open a shared space and speak from the inside, the wisdom comes, and with time it changes not only us but also our surroundings. We explored how our attention/consciousness can make a difference to spaces, and how it can help when we are in groups, in ‘shared’ space. We explored how this work/practice/intention can not only help us as individuals but can affect the universe on an energetic level, bringing light and hope to difficult places
Patricia from Montreal - Wholebody Focusing and Heartfelt Conversation. The first group established Gounded Presence, formed a ‘We’, shared what came and were inspired to join Greg Madison's group later that evening. A new group of 6 formed on Sunday, following Annat Gal-On’s workshop on Focusing Oriented Relationships. The heartfelt connection was profound, moving from the Greater Space where we are all One to the uniqueness of each individual grounded in the Here & Now, yet still forming this safe interconnected Web. We left knowing that we could draw on this group in the future to move forward our work with the relationships that need our care & attention.
For more on WBF Heartfelt Connection: [email protected] and www.wholebodyfocusing.com.
Hejo-European programme on coaching. Not so many people interested in coaching. So decided to open it to more people for them to bring in existing workshops. People can learn from each other across countries to start this programme.
Hejo-interest group of only himself to consider issues of racism in everyday life. Would like to continue this with colleagues from Europe. How can we make an impact on this very unsettling development in Europe? Proposes meeting by Zoom.
Martina- Laughter and Humour in Focusing. Desire to have more joyfulness in our lives. How come that doesn’t happen as much as we would like? Can we enjoy ourselves and also do something meaningful? Is it ok to be silly for its own sake? Looked at how humour can bring more ease, more vivacity, more aliveness, and can facilitate a “shift”. It can also be manipulative and used to re-direct a conversation. Understanding a joke gives a feeling of belonging, and perhaps in not understanding you feel left out. Joyfulness and sadness are part of life. The Greek word “Charmolipi” encompasses both. Can we make space for both? Contact: Martina Flavin Email: [email protected]
Fiona- Teaching group. What is the crucial, most important thing to teach, when teaching Focusing? 2ndmeeting peer supervision. Continued also with Focusing teachers in Europe group. Anyone who is teaching Focusing is welcome to join. We don’t want to standardise, but we want to create standards that enable Focusing teachers to offer ‘EFA-recognised courses and trainings.’ We are looking at what is needed for courses to be EFA recognised. People should connect with Fiona if they want to be part of this group. [email protected].
Hanspeter- 3 of us met to discuss how we can reach young people for Focusing. We will open this group for everyone via the EFA webpage.
Lucy (for Greg)- A group of us formed an interest group on the ‘subversive potential of Focusing Activism’. This evolved into a discussion about sensitive political conversations that we can’t have: in the broader world and within the Focusing world. This followed from experiences of being aggressively attacked on Facebook by people using ‘identity politics’, accusations of privilege, and tactics of shaming and silencing. We wanted to reintroduce complexity into narratives that have become overly simplistic and divisive, challenging the strategy of categorising people according to broad social-economic-gender-race. We wanted to experience ‘safety’ in open dialogue rather than censorship. Our discussion broadened again to include any conversation that is hard to have within the Focusing world as well as more broadly (questions of power, hierarchy, competition etc in Focusing). We will send an email with a link to a closed Facebook group for Focusers who want support to express their views on any difficult topic about how we gather together and respond to the world.
Meg-wants to see if there is interest in forming a group to explore identity politics- cultural, gender, social identification- through inner relationship focusing. Also interested in using interactive focusing as part of this and to address the imbalance of power within relationships and across cultures. For more details please contact [email protected].
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
(Photograps & graphics by Nikos Kypriotakis)
Here you can find more photographs from the Conference
(Michal Madar Porat - Israel, The Netherlands)
Sharings / from the Presenters
Handouts & PowerPoints
Lectures & Presentations
A new approach to understanding Focusing
by Campbell Purton
by Campbell Purton
Handout - Lecture
a_new_way_of_thinking_about_focusing._website_version.pdf | |
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A new way of thinking about Focusing
Campbell Purton
Paper presented at the First European Focusing Association Conference, Loutraki, Greece. 10-14 May 2017
In this paper I want to suggest a new way of thinking about Focusing. I would like to think that this new way will help us to understand a bit more clearly what we are doing when we engage in Focusing, and also that it may help to resolve some of the difficulties that Focusing teachers face when they try to explain Focusing to newcomers.
Many Focusers, whether newcomers or ‘old hands’, may never have been troubled by the problems I will be discussing. That is in itself an interesting fact, which I think is due to the problems in question being essentially philosophical problems. Philosophy, from the time of Socrates onwards, has been interested in questions such as ‘What is time?’, ‘How is knowledge possible?’, ‘How can we know what other people feel?’ The more a philosopher digs into such questions, the more difficult they turn out to be. But for most people, most of the time, the questions don’t arise. The fact that there seem to be deep philosophical puzzles about time, knowledge and other people’s feelings doesn’t usually interfere with our abilities to use these concepts in everyday life. On the other hand, the philosophical problems can every so often come to the surface and cause real trouble. An example would be that of behaviourist psychology, where the philosophical problem of our knowledge of other minds led some psychologists to try to develop a psychology that reduced mind to behaviour. Similarly, there are neuroscientists today who, without much understanding of the philosophical problems involved, try to explain our thoughts and feelings in terms of processes occurring in the brain.
In the same way, people can learn the basic Focusing concepts, such as ‘felt sense’, ‘handle’, ‘resonating’, without being troubled by philosophical questions such ‘What isa felt sense?’ or ‘How is it possible to learn about one’s situation by attending to a vague murky feeling in the centre of the body?’ Yet, as I hope to show, the philosophical problems lurk in the background, and can interfere with our attempts to explain what Focusing is.
What is a ‘felt sense’?
Probably the central concept of Focusing is that of a felt sense. Kevin Krycka (2014, pp. 54-5), a professor of psychology at the University of Seattle discusses the importance of Focusing to psychotherapy in general and says, and says “By far the chief contribution FOT makes is bringing the felt sense to the field of psychotherapy”.
However, Focusing teachers don’t always find it easy to explain to students what a felt sense is. Some sort of explanation is called for, because Gendlin means something quite specific by the phrase, and in his more theoretical writings spends a lot of time explaining how felt senses are different from ordinary bodily sensations, or emotions, or images, or other ‘mental phenomena’. He writes that there is no word in English that means what he means; that is why he had to invent the phrase.
Ann Weiser Cornell (2005, p. 219), who probably has more experience of teaching Focusing than anyone else in the world wrote a few years ago: “After 33 years with Focusing I feel as though I am just beginning to really understand what a felt sense is”. When I myself first learned Focusing from Barbara McGavin in the early 1990’s she was already saying, along with Ann Weiser, that she thought that use of the phrase ‘felt sense’ could do more harm than good, because students naturally want to know what a felt sense is, but the explanations given usually don’t enable them to decide whether what they feel isa felt sense or not. And then they spend much of their Focusing session in trying to decide.
Ann wrote in 1996 “The biggest barrier to successfully finding a felt sense is wondering if you are doing it right – if you ‘really’ have one” (Cornell 1996, p. 29). But the reason that students can spend so long wondering about whether they have a felt sense is that the teachersfind it very difficult to explain what the phrase means. Occasionally, people have tried to say why it is so difficult to explain what a felt sense is. For example, Peter Levine (1997, p. 67) , who wanted to make use of the term ‘felt sense’ in his work on trauma wrote: “The felt sense is a difficult concept to define with words, as language is a linear process and the felt sense is a non-linear experience”. However, I don’t think that sheds much light on the matter.
Here are some more reasons why people can find the notion of a felt sense puzzling: Gendlin says that a felt sense is a special kind of bodily sensation, and that it is usually located in the centre of the body. However, other Focusing teachers hold that a felt sense may form anywhere in the body. Ann Weiser writes that felt senses can be located outside the body, as when a Focuser says that something scary that was inside their body has now moved to being behind their right shoulder. Other Focusing teachers hold that felt senses may have no bodily location at all. These disagreements are puzzling; is it that felt senses take quite different forms in different people? But why then do they all count as examples of the same thing?
Another thing that can cause difficulties is that the phrase ‘felt sense’ has been picked up by therapists and others who use it in ways of their own. For some writers, the felt sense of a situation is simply the ‘feel’ of a situation, so that if someone is asked how they feel about their situation, and they reply “It feels very embarrassing!”, then this embarrassed feeling would count as a felt sense. But for Gendlin, feeling embarrassed is not a felt sense; it is an emotion. A felt sense is a murky, unclear feeling that leads to steps of change, not something that can be expressed by a familiar emotion word.
In thinking about these things I have been helped a lot by looking at the work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein [See the footnote at the end of this text]. Wittgenstein is an unusual philosopher in that, at least in his later work, he is not concerned to develop a systemof philosophy, in the way that many philosophers have, such as Kant or Schopenhauer, or indeed Gendlin himself in his philosophical work A Process Model. Wittgenstein is sceptical about such systems and approaches philosophical problems in less systematic way. He sees many philosophical problems as arising from misleading pictures that we have about the way our language works, and sees the aim of philosophy as simply to remove the intellectual confusions that we can get caught up in. Philosophy thus becomes in a way analogous to psychotherapy, though unlike therapy it is concerned with widespread, intellectual confusions, rather than with personal, emotional confusions. Rather like good psychotherapy, this way of doing philosophy tends to be slow, and sensitive to detail. It is not a matter of quick definitions and logical arguments, but of looking closely at how we actually use words, and also of noticing how our ways of picturingthe use of words can mislead us. I hope that what I mean by this will become a clearer as we proceed
I hope to have shown so far, that there are some real difficulties with the notion of a felt sense, difficulties that should be of interest not only to philosophers, but also to Focusers. Quite apart from it being satisfying to feel clear about what we are doing, there is Ann Weiser’s point that the difficulties with the notion of a felt sense may help to explain why Focusing has not caught on in the therapy world in the way that mindfulness has. Kevin Krycka (2014, p. 60) makes the same kind of point when he writes:
…the felt sense, the core of FOT practice… remains elusive and difficult to describe….This reality makes it very difficult for FOT to find and hold a place in contemporary theory and practice because, although many may be genuinely interested, it is simply too difficult to grasp the approach without continued experiential practice with a teacher or therapist.
Feelings
One thing that seems clear is that a felt sense is a special kind of feeling. Now, in English there are many different things that are loosely called ‘feelings’, for example, emotionssuch as anger or fear; moodssuch as anxiety or depression; bodily sensations such as itches and muscle tensions; desires and impulses; likings and dislikings; feelings of familiar situations such as ‘the feeling you get when someone gives you a present that you don’t want’; hunches such as the hunch that a decision is wrong, though you can’t say why. The dividing lines between these different kinds of feelings are not always sharp - for example, it can be difficult to say how some examples of fear differ from some examples of anxiety. However, there is no doubt that in the everyday language of feelings there are many useful distinctions. A feeling of tension in the jaw is somehow different in kindfrom a feeling of jealousy, even though they might be present at the same time.
Feelings are only one category amongst what we could call mental phenomena. There are also, for example, beliefs, intentions, attitudes and several others. The category of feelings could be compared with that of marine animals. There are plenty of other animals apart from marine animals, but also within the marine animals category there are many different kinds of creature. There are fish, which tend to look rather similar to each other, but also lobsters, crabs, octopuses, all of which are very different from fish. Then there are whales and dolphins, which look a bit like fish, but which turn out to be very different when examined in more detail. Also, you may have seen natural history programmes on TV which show us very strange creatures from the depths of the ocean, which are almost transparent, have no obvious heads, but long spindly legs, or possibly antennae. It is hard to know where they fit in with the more familiar creatures - they are a special and unfamiliar sort of marine animal.
If we compare the classification of marine animals with the everyday classification of feelings, then perhaps felt senses are analogous to these strange creatures. Gendlin says that the felt sense is a feeling, that it could be classified as a sensation - but it is a special sort of sensation. It is also rather like an emotion, but nevertheless isn’t an emotion.
Now consider another analogy, which I think will be more helpful. On a computer keyboard there are 26 alphabetic keys, 10 numeric keys, several more keys for asterisks, hyphens, brackets and so on. Each of these is used to produce a particular character on the screen, and later on a printout. The characters are given code numbers in the ASCII classification, so that uppercase ‘A’ is number 65, ‘B’ is 66 and so on. We might explain this to someone unfamiliar with keyboards by saying that each key corresponds to a printed character. After watching us type for a bit they say “But what about the space key - it doesn’t print anything!” We say “No, that one just leaves a space, but you can still think of it as a character. Admittedly it is a rather odd sort of character. But it is listed as character 32 in the ASCII system.” They say “OK, but what about this one - marked ‘RETURN’? What character is that?” We explain that pressing this key brings the cursor back to the beginning of the next line. It doesn’t print a character at all. They say “But couldn’t you think of this as a veryspecial sort of character?” What should we say? Perhaps “Well I suppose you couldthink of it that way. It ischaracter 13 in the ASCII list.” They say “This is fascinating - what a verystrange character”. But of course there is nothing at all strange here. It only seems that there is something strange, because we had been picturing the keys as all working in the same way, so as to produce something on the screen. And in a way that is true - the space key could be said to produce somethingon the screen, but that something is a nothing. How strange! But again, of course, there is nothing strange here. The feeling of strangeness is a kind of illusion which is generated by the way we have been picturing the use of the keys.
In the comparison of feelings with kinds of marine animals we ended with the strange deep-sea creature. It really exists, and really is strange compared with the other creatures. In the comparison with keyboard symbols we end instead with a strange way of speaking. Wittgenstein suggests that in thinking about what are called mental phenomena, we often get into strange ways of talking, and then think that we are dealing with strange kinds of things, innerthings. But for him these strange kind of things are in a sense illusions. It is not that we don’t have feelings. Of course we do. But picturing feelings as inner things or processes is like picturing SPACE or RETURN as strange kinds of character.
I hope that all this will become clearer as we go on. For the moment I just want to convey something of the flavour of Wittgenstein’s approach to our ways of talking about feelings.
As I said earlier, Gendlin regards a felt sense as a feeling that is in some ways like a bodily sensation, such as a feeling of muscle tension, and in some ways like an emotion, such as fear. I will say a bit more about bodily sensations later, but will first discuss the nature of emotions.
Emotions
Emotions, I think, are always linked with particular kinds of situation. For any named emotion, we can, with a bit of thought, say roughly what the relevant kind of situation is. For example, we speak of fear in situations where there is a response to some perceived danger. We speak of jealousy in situations where person A is upset because person B has preferred person C to them. We speak of hoping for an event to occur where the person would be disappointed if the event did not occur. Embarrassment involves one having done something socially inappropriate. Feeling guilty involves one having done something one considers to be wrong. These are just rough sketches; our emotional language is subtle and complex, so that more may need to be said to specify what the relevant kind of situation is. The important point is that we can, at least roughly, set out what the situation is that corresponds to each named emotion.
But emotions are not limited to those which have names, and within each named emotion there will be varieties of emotional feeling that can be specified in various ways. For example, we feel jealous, but it is a particular sortof jealousy. Thus someone might say, not simply that they are jealous, but that they are jealous in a resigned sort of way, rather than in an aggressive sort of way. In some languages there could be different words for these two kinds of jealousy. Or someone might say “Yes, I amjealous… but… I was thinking of Anna Karenina …. I’m jealous in the sort of way that Dolly is jealous of the governess, not in the way that Kareninis jealous ofVronsky”.
These varieties of an emotion are often specified by novelists by telling a story of the sort of situation which gives rise to the emotion. And often in Focusing sessions, little stories are told, some of which are expressed in imagery. To take an example from Ann Weiser (2005, pp. 228-9), a Focuser speaks of
having an image of seeing a row of blackbirds on a wire. They are huddled together and a cold wind is blowing….Then she says that some of them are flying away but some are just staying there. It’s like they are resigned to the cold, the ones that are staying…Those are the ones that no other bird is near. They’re on their own….There’s especially one of them. It’s huddled…and cold…and sad”
This story-imagery specifies the emotional response much more exactly than it can be specified by a single word. Nevertheless, we are still speaking of a kindof situation here. The person listening might say “It sounds a bit like what John felt in that story you mentioned last week”, and the Focuser might say “Yes, like that - exactly.”
When she was around three or four years old my daughter liked being read stories about Little Grey Rabbit and a rather boisterous character called Hare. She had listened to one of these stories the previous night, and when her mother next morning did something that upset her she exclaimed “Oh Mummy - just like Hare!” Little Grey Rabbit’s situation and my daughter’s situation were no doubt different in many ways, but my daughter recognised the same kind of situation, and the same kind of emotional feeling.
Thus while there are many emotions for which we have names (far more than those in the lists that psychologists are fond of), beyond these there is an indefinite number of emotions that correspond to kinds of situation that are familiar within a particular culture, and can only be expressed by telling little stories. I will call these un-named emotions ‘emotional feelings’. One source of confusion in talking about felt senses is that we may be inclined to think of a felt sense as the emotional feel of a situation. The blackbirds story was the expression, in imagery, of the emotional feel of a situation, but such an emotional feel is not a felt sense. In fact the blackbirds story continues as follows “It’s huddled… and cold…and sad… No not exactly sad...he’s more… hard to put into words...” Here is the felt sense, and it is here, as Ann says, that the person strictly speaking begins to Focus. In Focusing sessions the expression of emotional feeling, and the expression of a felt sense, often interleave with one another. Another example, taken from Gendlin (1996) is this: A client says
What came to me was like, the image I have, when I got it I had an image of a fence, and part of it is really treacherous. Its like … barbed wire … you don’t touch that; you can’t go through or get past it, but another part of it has a little hole, and that part I could slip through…A part of it is just poles and a little barbed wire, and I could really crawl over it if I wanted to. [What] felt the best right now was to crawl through that little hole, that felt…like… felt like saying “Here I am; I’m coming through,” a really neat part coming through, and looking back to see the reaction, at the same time feeling, I don’t care what the reaction is.
Here there is the expression of emotional feeling through words as well as imagery, but every so often the client pauses, and waits for either a furtherimage, or furtherwords. “It’s like…<pause>...barbed wire” or “felt like…<pause>...saying ‘Here I am; I’m coming’.” As Gendlin uses the term, the felt senses here occur in the pauses; they are not the emotional feelings that are expressed in the words and images. But it is easy to get confused here. In his first paper on Focusing Gendlin did not use the term ‘felt sense’ but instead spoke of trying to get the feel of a problem as a whole. Suppose we ask someone to do this, and they say “Yes, I can feel it as a whole – it is a feeling of being put in a position where, whatever I do, I will hurt someone”. That is a clearly articulated emotional feeling, but just because it is clearly articulated, it is not a felt sense. A felt sense, Gendlin says, is something vague or murky. By contrast, if someone says, “Yes, I canfeel it as a whole…but it’s hard to put it put it into words”, that tells us that they have a felt sense.
I will return to the question of when, exactly, we speak of felt senses, but first we need to look at another issue that has been prominent in the discussion of felt senses This is the question of whether a felt sense is a bodily sensation, whether it is felt in the body. In order to approach that question it will be helpful to consider whether emotions, and emotional feelings, are felt in the body.
Do emotions involve bodily sensations?
I said that to have an emotion involves responding to a situation of a particular kind, but there are many different types of response. If we see someone running from a bull, we say that they are afraid. To run in that context isto be afraid. But another person, on seeing the bull charging towards them, might freeze, and that too would count as fear. Someone else, seeing the bull from a distance, might experience tension in their chest or stomach, and feeling these bodily sensations could be said to be their fear. Or afterbeing chased by the bull, the person, now sitting at home, might have recurrent thoughts and images about the incident, and theseresponses could be said to constitute the fear that they still feel following the episode.
Consider the emotion of hope as another example. We say that someone hopes that an event will occur, if they would be disappointed if it did not occur. A person’s hope for something could be manifest in their imagining the occurrence of the event, or in their pacing excitedly up and down, or in a holding of the breath, but these responses only count as manifestations of hope if the situation is one in which the person will be disappointed if the event doesn’t occur. The responses in themselvesdo not constitute hope, or feelings of hope. The same responses could be manifestations of an expectationthat the event will occur. But hoping is different from expecting. We often expect events that we certainly don’t hope for, and we can hope for things that we don’t really expect to occur. These two feelings are not distinguished by any differences in the bodily sensations involved, but by the fact that in hoping we would be disappointedif the event doesn’t occur, while in expecting we would be surprisedif it doesn’t occur.
So, emotions mayinvolve bodily sensations, as well as many other kinds of response. But none of these things are essential to the emotion being the sort of emotion it is. For there to be an emotion one has to respond in some way to a particular kind of situation, but how one responds can involve behaviour, thoughts, impulses, imagery, as well as bodily sensations.
In some cases, the response to the situation may involve quite intense desires or aversions, and the accompanying impulses and bodily sensations may overwhelm us. It is a familiar view that emotions are to be contrasted with rational beliefs, but that is not generallytrue. We may quitereasonablyfeel hopeful that an event will occur, and our feeling of guilt could be entirely appropriate to the situation.
In some cases the response may be almost entirely linguistic. We learn to use the word ‘wistful’ in certain kinds of circumstance (though I couldn’t say right now what those kinds of circumstance are, and probably you can’t). Nor need my feeling wistful involve any specific behaviour, or bodily sensations, or thoughts or images. My sayingI feel wistful may be my onlyresponse to the kind of circumstances I find myself in.. But don’t I have a wistful feeling? a ‘datum’, or ‘direct referent’, as Gendlin sometimes calls it? Well, I can saythat, but it doesn’t seem to add anything to my saying that I amwistful. There is no feeling here that is independent of what I say, no feeling on which I basewhat I say. I don’t base what I say on anything; certainly not my knowledge of the circumstances in which the use of the word is learned. For I can’t say what these circumstances are. I have learned to use the word, but I haven’t learned to say how it is used. I have simply picked up the use of the word as an articulation of my response.
If that seems puzzling, compare it how it is with having a hunch or intuition about something: Hunches can form a helpful bridge to the notion of a felt sense. Suppose that on returning home from a walk, we have to decide whether to turn right or turn left. I say “To the left!”. My companion says “How do you know?” I reply “It’s just a hunch, but I bet I’m right!” We go to the left and indeed this turns out to be the way home. To have a hunch is to think that something is so, without being able to justifywhat one thinks. It is not just a guess; we sometimes are very sure that our hunch is right. Now suppose someone says “When you said ‘To the left!’ surely something must have gone on in your mind that madeyou say that. Perhaps you had an image of turning left? Or maybe the word ‘left’ just came into your mind? There must have been somethingthat made you say ‘To the left!’.” I reply that there really wasn’t anything like that. We came to the junction and I spontaneously said ‘To the left’. That was all that happened. I had a hunch, but that is just to say I couldn’t justify what I said. But now the sceptical person says “But you must have had a feelingthat you should turn left! The hunch was that feeling!” What should I say to that? Perhaps “How do youknow what went on in me? I’m telling you that nothing went on, but you have a picture or theory that says something musthave gone on. Well, so much the worse for the theory!” This talk of the hunch as a ‘feeling’ adds nothing at all to a description of what happened. It seems to be the invention of a person who believes that we mustalways have feelings, in the sense of inner data, going on in our minds before we can speak. Yet that is clearly not true. Usually we speak without anything special going on in our mind.
In sum: we could say that to have an emotion is to respond a particular kind of situation. The response may be a matter of having certain bodily sensations, or other things such as characteristic behaviour, facial expressions, impulses, thoughts or images. It is misleading to say that the emotion isthe response: that the running away, or the inclination to run away, or the dry throat, or the facial expression isthe fear. But nor is it right to say that the response is simply a sign or accompaniment of the emotion.
We want there to be a thing or a process that isthe emotion, but not all words function as the names of things or processes. Emotion words draw our attention to particular kinds of lived situation, but there need not be anything in the situation that isthe emotion. If someone hopes that an event will occur, that is a particular kind of situation; it is the kind of situation in which they would be disappointed if the event did not occur. But it does not follow that there is a thing or process in the situation that is the hope. We are inclined to picture the hope as something going on in the person at the time, but the fact is that nothingneed have gone on in them at the time. They mighthave thoughts or images of the anticipated event, but there is no necessity for such things to have gone on. All that is necessary is that they would respond to the non-occurrence of the event with disappointment. If we know that, then we know that they hope for the event.
The picture of feelings as inner events or processes is a captivating one. Wittgenstein suggests that it arises partly from another captivating picture, that of the meaningsof words being the thingsthey refer to. In an infants’ school classroom there may be pictures on the wall of dogs, trees, tables and so on, each being intended to illustrate the meaning of the word that is written alongside the picture. We think of the meaning of the words as being displayed in the pictures, and say that the meaning of a word is the kind of thing it picks out. But there are many, many words for which that is not true. There are no things in the world that are picked out by the words ‘Not’, or ‘Therefore’ - Wittgenstein argues that to specify what a word means does not usually involve presenting examples of the things or processes it refers to, but specifying how that word is used. ‘Not’, for example, is used to make a denial, ‘Therefore’ tells us that what has just been said is a reason for believing what is about to be said. There are no ‘nots’ or ‘therefores’ in the world.
If we can free ourselves from the picture that for each word there is a kind of thing, we may be able to see that there doesn’t have to be a feeling that a person has when they hope for something, or fear something, or experience some other emotion. But as Wittgenstein says, it is hard to free ourselves from such pictures, because they are embedded in our language. I just referred to ‘experiencing some other emotion’, and this form of words suggests that there is, in addition to the emotion, the experiencingof the emotion. Then this can bring us back to picturing hope as an inner process, that we are now calling an experiencing.
It is not that there is anything wrong with saying that a person feels hope, or experiences a feeling of hope, just as there is nothing wrong with saying that a person feels that they should take the right-hand path. But if we try to take these feelings out of their contexts and ask what they are in themselves, we are likely to end up talking nonsense. We might for example ask whether the feeling of hope is a bodily sensation, and wonder whether that tingly sensation we feel isthe hope. Or we might ask where in our body do we have the hunch that we should take the right-hand path? Can we detect the hunch in the way our legs are inclined to move? Such questions, I think, lead us only into confusion. They are not sensible questions to ask, because they presuppose that words for feelings are names of things or processes going on inside the person.
Felt senses
In the previous section we have been concerned with one important group of feelings, those that are called ‘emotions’. As I said earlier, there are many other kinds of feeling, but the one we are especially interested in is the kind of feeling that Gendlin calls a ‘felt sense’. Gendlin had discovered in his work with counselling clients that the clients who make best progress are those who engage in therapy in a special way. Rather than simply talking about their difficulties, or speculating about what is wrong with them, or directly expressing their emotions, they say what they are thinking or feeling, but then pause. The therapist can see that this is a special sort of pause; it is not that the client has run out of things to say, or that they are afraid to go on. Rather they are searching for words for something that they can’t yet express. They may screw up their face, rotate their hand in the air, or say things like “It’s not that I am afraid of him, but…<pause>…I’m not easy with him…<pause>…He makes me feel sort of tangled up inside…<pause>…I can’t put it into words…” They are clearly responding to some difficulty in their relationship with this person, but they can’t articulatethat response. Or rather, they can’t articulate it yet. Their situation is one of being on the way toarticulating their response.
It is in thiskind of situation that we say that the person has a felt sense of something. They have, as it were, reached the edge of what they can say. Gendlin discusses an example where a person is talking about their fear of approaching someone at a party: They say “I think I know what goes into that fear; it’s that I’ve always been scared just to make a decision on my own. I’m scared it will be wrong. But… uhm…”. This person, Gendlin writes, “has a sense of the edge. ‘Uhm’ is the felt sense.”
What the “Uhm” tells us is that the person hasn’t yet found a way of articulating their response, but that they hope to do so soon. Instead of saying “Uhm” they might rotate their hand in the air. Or if they are familiar with Focusing they might say that they have a peculiar sort of feeling, a felt sense. But it is misleading to say that there is a thing there that they feel when they have a felt sense, just as it is misleading to say that there is a thing which one feels when one hopes for something, or that there is a feeling called a hunch when one has a hunch.
As in the case of hopes and hunches we may experience variousbodily sensations when we have a felt sense. We might feel tension in our chest, or a gnawing feeling in the stomach, or bodily sensations associated with rotating our hand in the air, or drumming our fingers on the desk. Are thesethe felt sense? Well, it is the same as it is with the emotions. We do speak of feeling anger in our chest or fear in our gut, and may be able to identify the bodily sensations involved, such as muscular tightness or contraction. But as we have seen, it is misleading to say that the emotion is that bodily sensation; rather we are responding to a situation in which we are being insulted or threatened, and for that reason are said to be angry or scared. Just by attending to the bodily sensations we couldn’t tell which emotion we are feeling. It is only in the relevant contexts that we can say that the tightness is the anger or the contracted feeling is the fear.
In the case of a felt sense, the relevant context is that the person is responding to a situation, but can’t yet articulate their response. That is the point at which they pause and say “Uhm”. When Gendlin says the “Uhm” is the felt sense we know what he means, but clearly he is not saying that the felt sense is the utterance of a word. In the same way the felt sense is not the rotation of the hand in the air, nor the gnawing sensations the person might have in their stomach. The difficulty is that we picture a felt sense as some sort of inner thing or process, but fail to realise that in saying that someone has a felt sense we are not reporting on anything going on in them. What we are reporting is that they can’t yet find a way of articulating their response.
It may help to reflect on what happens when the person doessucceed in articulating their response. They may let out a deep breath, smile, say “Now I’ve got it”, or they may simply say “OK, I’m jealous (or scared or whatever)”. Now, just beforethey said or did these things, did they have to have a feelingthat they had found what they were looking for? They may well say “No – it just came to me”. But doesn’t saying “Now I’ve got it!” or the deep release of breath express a feeling? Well, as with hunches, someone might say that there mustbe such a feeling; but I think we have a right be suspicious when a person insists something mustbe so.
What I am suggesting is that to say that someone has a felt sense is to say that they are responding to a situation, can’t yet articulate their response, but hope and expect to do so soon. More briefly, we can say with Gendlin that the felt sense is the “Uhm”. However, there are many places where Gendlin says something much more than that. In discussing where the change steps in therapy come from he says (Gendlin 1984):
The steps of change and process do not come directly from the recognizable feelings as such.
They come, rather, from an unclear, fuzzy, murky "something there", an odd sort of direct datum of awareness.
And:
What do we assume the client will do with a listening response? We hope and assume that clients will check the response, not with what they said or thought, but with some more inner being, place, datum... "the felt sense," we have no ordinary word for that.
It is this notion of an inner datum that Wittgenstein questions. Undoubtedly we talk of inner thoughts and feelings, and we may picture them as inner things, or processes going on in our heads or bodies. But this is surely picture language: we do not mean that if a surgeon opened up our head or body they would find the thoughts or feelings there. It is a way of talking, a picturesque mode of description, and one which does not mislead us in everyday conversations. The problems only begin when we suppose that the inner processes constitute explanationsfor what we say and do. Then we will start to say things like “He said he was afraid because there was a scary feeling (or process or datum), inside him, and he recognised it as fear”. But thatis not why an English speaker says “I am afraid”; the real explanation is that they have learned to use this phrase in situations where some danger threatens.
The same misleading picture of the inner datum is what causes the difficulties with the phrase ‘felt sense’. A person may pause in a Focusing session and speak of having a vague feeling that they cannot put into words. To have such a feeling is to have a felt sense. There is no problem with that. The problem comes if we now try to explain why they pause by saying that they have a special sort of feeling, or inner datum, to which they now need to give their attention, and from which may soon come other feelings that are helpful for them. The inner datum, or felt sense, is supposed to contain all the intricate detail of the problem, and within it, the person may find something that is of help to them. That is the picture.
However, the real explanation of why the person pauses is simply that they can’t yet find the words to articulate their response, although they are seeking them, and with luck will soon find them. They find them through attending to the problem as a whole, and realising that just these words give expression to some aspect of the problem.
The difference between the two formulations is that in the first formulation the person attends to an inner datum, and describes it, whereas in the second they attend to their situWittgenstein (1992) is especially relevant. ationand articulate their response to it. I think that the reason Gendlin prefers the first formulation is that he is concerned with an important difference in the way clients speak in therapy. It is the difference between simply speaking, and speaking after pausing to check whether this really is what one wants to say, or is all that one wants to say. Gendlin thinks that in the pause one consults an inner datum, whereas I think Wittgenstein would say that this inner datum is a fabrication, or an illusion. For Gendlin, the inner datum is an “it”, a direct referent, something one can attend to, in there, there where we have our feelings. The job of the therapist is then to respond to the client in a way that helps the client the find the inner datum.
The alternative formulation is that the client is responding to their situation in a way that they can’t yet fully articulate. The job of the therapist is to encourage the client to attend further to their situation, and to articulate further whatever new responses come to them. I would like to end by looking in a bit more detail at how this alternative formulation would work in practice.
Much of the traditional Focusing framework can remain in place, beginning with Clearing a Space. This is not something one always needs to do, but it can be an important way of bringing attention to a specific problem. The point is to attend exclusively to thatproblem, for the moment. How do we do that? Well, by not letting ourselves be distracted by the other problems. We attend to one thing by not allowing ourselves to attend to other things, as we mind our own business by not minding other people’s business (White 1964). It can help if we give some briefattention to the other problems - we are not just ignoring them – and then attend to the problem we wish to work with. Then the next step is to attend to this problem as a whole. Before the session we may have spent some time thinking about the problem or noticing various things that are involved in it. We may need to remind ourselves of what the problem is, and what seems to be upsetting or concerning about it. In other words we bring that whole problem to mind. We are going to Focus on the problem, but we want to go beyond what we already know about it, beyond the familiar difficult feelings that it arouses in us. To get to something new, we need to attend to the whole of the problem. What might help us is not to be found in what we already know, but nor do we know whereit is to be found in the situation. It could be anywhere, or we might need to construct something new. So we need to keep the whole problem in mind.
How do we attend to it as a whole? Well, by not attending to its particular aspects. If we find ourselves attending some particular aspect of the problem, we need to stop doing that, and let our attention come back to the problem as a whole. This is probably the most difficult part of Focusing; we are so used to attending to details, that we find it hard to attend to something as a whole. Yet we cando this: the problem is thereas a whole; we chose it from amongst other problems. All we have to do is to open ourselves to all of that,putting aside any specific aspects that come to mind.
Familiar Focusing questions may now help. As we keep our attention on the problem as a whole, we can gently ask ourselves “What is this really all about?” or “What is the crux of this?” or “What is needed here?” Then we wait, and see if anything comes. Often something does come, and often it is a surprise to us. It could be a word, a bodily sensation, an impulse, a wish, a liking for something, an image, a fragment of music, a memory. It is something that has come from our awareness of the problem as a whole, and is likely therefore to have some relevance to the problem. It is something newin connection with the problem. So now we gently ask “What is it about the problem that brings this?” “What is it about the problem that makes me think of this, or feel that, want to do this, remember that?” And again we wait. Then other feelings, or words and so on, may come, and whatever comes, we may try asking “Is that exactly it?”, and then sense the reply “Yes, it is”, or “No, not exactly; more like this.”or,“No, not justthat; also this”. Finally, if we are fortunate, we may find ourselves saying something like “Oh, so that’swhat it’s about!” or “So there’s a whole new side to this!” or “I never thought of it like that”.
All this can be explained without using the term ‘felt sense’, but it is clear enough where that phrase couldbe brought in. It is at the point where we attend to the problem as a whole. At this point someone might say to themself “I’m feeling the problem as a whole”, and they might picturethis feeling of the problem as a vague, fuzzy thing that they sense in their stomach, but which nevertheless contains within it all the familiar aspects of the problem, together with innumerable other aspects that could be helpful. This picture need not cause trouble, so long as the Focuser remains aware that they need to be attending to the feel of the problemand its unarticulated edges. What wouldcause trouble would be if they started to ask whether this fuzzy image they have really is a felt sense, or whether they should be attending to the tight feeling in their stomach. Then, I think, they would get lost.
As I mentioned earlier, in his very first paper on Focusing in 1969, Gendlin himself did not use the term ‘felt sense’. Instead, he laid out in the following way some guidelines for therapists who would be teaching focusing to patients. He writes (Gendlin 1969, p. 5):
One must explain that it is possible to sense a problem as a whole…People rarely let the crux of the problem come freshly to them from their feel of the problem as a whole. They already know what the crux is, or they decide what it is. Therefore, before we begin, we instruct the patient on this …point: ‘When you have a feel of the whole problem, don’t decide what is important about it. Feel it all and don’t decide anything. Wait and let the main crux come to you freshly’.
I think that way of putting it is much less likely to cause difficulties than the way in which he formulated the Focusing instructions later on.
The crucial point is that one is to attend to the feel of the problem, and then wait to see what morethere is to it, or where the ‘edges’ of the problem are. But ‘Attending to the feel of the problem’ should be understood to mean no more than ‘Attending to the problem’. It is one of those cases where referring to a feeling adds nothing to what can be said without referring to the feeling. For example, to be hopeful, to feel hopeful, to have a feeling of hope are just different ways of saying the same thing, namely, that one will be disappointed if the hoped-for event doesn’t occur. There is nothing wrong with picturing hope as an inner feeling, but this isa picture, or a way of speaking.
As a final analogy, consider the fact that instead of saying that a person has a felt sense of something, we might, in English, say that they have something ‘on the tip of their tongue’. That says the same thing, namely that they can’t yet articulate their response, but it is clearly just a way of speaking. Someone who started to wonder about whatexactly was there on the tip of their tongue when they were trying to articulate their response, would surely be deeply confused. In the same way, I think, a person is confused if they start to wonder about what exactly is there in the centre of their body when they are trying to articulate their response..
Conclusion
This discussion has been quite elaborate, but that is not because Focusing is itself something elaborate. It is the confusions and misunderstandings surrounding Focusing that give rise to the elaborations. In Wittgenstein’s metaphor, the untangling of a knot has to be as complex as the knot itself, but the result of untangling it is something simple.
It seems to me that there doesn’t haveto be any fundamental difficulty in teaching Focusing. I am a bit sceptical about the extract I quoted from Krycka, that “it is simply too difficult to grasp the approach without continued experiential practice with a teacher or therapist”. After all, Gendlin wrote his original Focusing book as a self-help manual, and it has sold over half a million copies. I think that in practice people are able to read past the picture-language that Gendlin often uses in speaking of the felt sense as a murky inner datum, and appreciate that what he really means is that we need to give attention to those places where we are responding to our situation in a way that we can’t yet fully articulate. That may not always be easy to do, but it is not anything complicated or mysterious.
REFERENCES
Canfield, J. (2007a). Becoming Human: The development of Language, Self, and Self-Consciousness. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Canfield, J. (2007b). Wittgenstein on fear. In D. Moyal-Sharrock (Ed.), Perpicuous Presentations: Essays on Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology(pp. 12-27). Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Cornell, Ann Weiser (1996) The Power of Focusing. Oakland: New Harbinger.
Cornell, Ann Weiser (2005) The Radical Acceptance of Everything. Berkeley: Calluna
Press
Gendlin, Eugene (1969) Focusing. In the Gendlin On-line Library
Gendlin, Eugene (1984) The client’s client: the edge of awareness. In the Gendlin On-line
Library
Gendlin, Eugene (1996) Focusing-oriented Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press.
Jolley, Kelly Dean (2010) Wittgenstein: Key Concepts. Durham: Acumen.
Krycka, Kevin (2014) Thinking and practicing FOT in the twenty-first century. In: Greg
Madison (ed.) Theory and Practice of Focusing-Oriented Therapy: Beyond the
Talking Cure. London: Jessica Kingsley
Levine, Peter (1997) Waking the Tiger. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books
Moyal-Sharrock, D. (2000). ‘Words as deeds’: Wittgenstein's 'spontaneous utterances' and
the dissolution of the explanatory gap. Philosophical Psychology, 13(3), 355-372.
ter Hark, M. (1990). Beyond the Inner and the Outer: Wittgenstein's Philosophy of
Psychology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Vesey, G. (1991). Inner and Outer: Essays on a Philosophical Myth. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
White, A. (1964). Attention. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1963). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell
(Revised edition (2009). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1992). Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. 2:The Inner and the Outer. Oxford: Blackwell
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[Footnote] It is hard to give brief references for relevant material in Wittgenstein’s writings. Within his major work Philosophical Investigations (1963) one could begin with what he says on pages 4-6, 89-92, 97-104, 178-80, 187-9 (in the revised edition (Wittgenstein 2009) the corresponding pages are 7-10, 95-98, 103-111, 187-9, 196-8). Wittgenstein (1992) is also especially relevant. For those unfamiliar with his work, it might be better to start with secondary sources such as Jolley (2010) or Canfield (2007b). Other especially relevant secondary sources include ter Hark (1990), Vesey (1991), Moyal-Sharrock (2000); Canfield (2007a, ).
Campbell Purton
Paper presented at the First European Focusing Association Conference, Loutraki, Greece. 10-14 May 2017
In this paper I want to suggest a new way of thinking about Focusing. I would like to think that this new way will help us to understand a bit more clearly what we are doing when we engage in Focusing, and also that it may help to resolve some of the difficulties that Focusing teachers face when they try to explain Focusing to newcomers.
Many Focusers, whether newcomers or ‘old hands’, may never have been troubled by the problems I will be discussing. That is in itself an interesting fact, which I think is due to the problems in question being essentially philosophical problems. Philosophy, from the time of Socrates onwards, has been interested in questions such as ‘What is time?’, ‘How is knowledge possible?’, ‘How can we know what other people feel?’ The more a philosopher digs into such questions, the more difficult they turn out to be. But for most people, most of the time, the questions don’t arise. The fact that there seem to be deep philosophical puzzles about time, knowledge and other people’s feelings doesn’t usually interfere with our abilities to use these concepts in everyday life. On the other hand, the philosophical problems can every so often come to the surface and cause real trouble. An example would be that of behaviourist psychology, where the philosophical problem of our knowledge of other minds led some psychologists to try to develop a psychology that reduced mind to behaviour. Similarly, there are neuroscientists today who, without much understanding of the philosophical problems involved, try to explain our thoughts and feelings in terms of processes occurring in the brain.
In the same way, people can learn the basic Focusing concepts, such as ‘felt sense’, ‘handle’, ‘resonating’, without being troubled by philosophical questions such ‘What isa felt sense?’ or ‘How is it possible to learn about one’s situation by attending to a vague murky feeling in the centre of the body?’ Yet, as I hope to show, the philosophical problems lurk in the background, and can interfere with our attempts to explain what Focusing is.
What is a ‘felt sense’?
Probably the central concept of Focusing is that of a felt sense. Kevin Krycka (2014, pp. 54-5), a professor of psychology at the University of Seattle discusses the importance of Focusing to psychotherapy in general and says, and says “By far the chief contribution FOT makes is bringing the felt sense to the field of psychotherapy”.
However, Focusing teachers don’t always find it easy to explain to students what a felt sense is. Some sort of explanation is called for, because Gendlin means something quite specific by the phrase, and in his more theoretical writings spends a lot of time explaining how felt senses are different from ordinary bodily sensations, or emotions, or images, or other ‘mental phenomena’. He writes that there is no word in English that means what he means; that is why he had to invent the phrase.
Ann Weiser Cornell (2005, p. 219), who probably has more experience of teaching Focusing than anyone else in the world wrote a few years ago: “After 33 years with Focusing I feel as though I am just beginning to really understand what a felt sense is”. When I myself first learned Focusing from Barbara McGavin in the early 1990’s she was already saying, along with Ann Weiser, that she thought that use of the phrase ‘felt sense’ could do more harm than good, because students naturally want to know what a felt sense is, but the explanations given usually don’t enable them to decide whether what they feel isa felt sense or not. And then they spend much of their Focusing session in trying to decide.
Ann wrote in 1996 “The biggest barrier to successfully finding a felt sense is wondering if you are doing it right – if you ‘really’ have one” (Cornell 1996, p. 29). But the reason that students can spend so long wondering about whether they have a felt sense is that the teachersfind it very difficult to explain what the phrase means. Occasionally, people have tried to say why it is so difficult to explain what a felt sense is. For example, Peter Levine (1997, p. 67) , who wanted to make use of the term ‘felt sense’ in his work on trauma wrote: “The felt sense is a difficult concept to define with words, as language is a linear process and the felt sense is a non-linear experience”. However, I don’t think that sheds much light on the matter.
Here are some more reasons why people can find the notion of a felt sense puzzling: Gendlin says that a felt sense is a special kind of bodily sensation, and that it is usually located in the centre of the body. However, other Focusing teachers hold that a felt sense may form anywhere in the body. Ann Weiser writes that felt senses can be located outside the body, as when a Focuser says that something scary that was inside their body has now moved to being behind their right shoulder. Other Focusing teachers hold that felt senses may have no bodily location at all. These disagreements are puzzling; is it that felt senses take quite different forms in different people? But why then do they all count as examples of the same thing?
Another thing that can cause difficulties is that the phrase ‘felt sense’ has been picked up by therapists and others who use it in ways of their own. For some writers, the felt sense of a situation is simply the ‘feel’ of a situation, so that if someone is asked how they feel about their situation, and they reply “It feels very embarrassing!”, then this embarrassed feeling would count as a felt sense. But for Gendlin, feeling embarrassed is not a felt sense; it is an emotion. A felt sense is a murky, unclear feeling that leads to steps of change, not something that can be expressed by a familiar emotion word.
In thinking about these things I have been helped a lot by looking at the work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein [See the footnote at the end of this text]. Wittgenstein is an unusual philosopher in that, at least in his later work, he is not concerned to develop a systemof philosophy, in the way that many philosophers have, such as Kant or Schopenhauer, or indeed Gendlin himself in his philosophical work A Process Model. Wittgenstein is sceptical about such systems and approaches philosophical problems in less systematic way. He sees many philosophical problems as arising from misleading pictures that we have about the way our language works, and sees the aim of philosophy as simply to remove the intellectual confusions that we can get caught up in. Philosophy thus becomes in a way analogous to psychotherapy, though unlike therapy it is concerned with widespread, intellectual confusions, rather than with personal, emotional confusions. Rather like good psychotherapy, this way of doing philosophy tends to be slow, and sensitive to detail. It is not a matter of quick definitions and logical arguments, but of looking closely at how we actually use words, and also of noticing how our ways of picturingthe use of words can mislead us. I hope that what I mean by this will become a clearer as we proceed
I hope to have shown so far, that there are some real difficulties with the notion of a felt sense, difficulties that should be of interest not only to philosophers, but also to Focusers. Quite apart from it being satisfying to feel clear about what we are doing, there is Ann Weiser’s point that the difficulties with the notion of a felt sense may help to explain why Focusing has not caught on in the therapy world in the way that mindfulness has. Kevin Krycka (2014, p. 60) makes the same kind of point when he writes:
…the felt sense, the core of FOT practice… remains elusive and difficult to describe….This reality makes it very difficult for FOT to find and hold a place in contemporary theory and practice because, although many may be genuinely interested, it is simply too difficult to grasp the approach without continued experiential practice with a teacher or therapist.
Feelings
One thing that seems clear is that a felt sense is a special kind of feeling. Now, in English there are many different things that are loosely called ‘feelings’, for example, emotionssuch as anger or fear; moodssuch as anxiety or depression; bodily sensations such as itches and muscle tensions; desires and impulses; likings and dislikings; feelings of familiar situations such as ‘the feeling you get when someone gives you a present that you don’t want’; hunches such as the hunch that a decision is wrong, though you can’t say why. The dividing lines between these different kinds of feelings are not always sharp - for example, it can be difficult to say how some examples of fear differ from some examples of anxiety. However, there is no doubt that in the everyday language of feelings there are many useful distinctions. A feeling of tension in the jaw is somehow different in kindfrom a feeling of jealousy, even though they might be present at the same time.
Feelings are only one category amongst what we could call mental phenomena. There are also, for example, beliefs, intentions, attitudes and several others. The category of feelings could be compared with that of marine animals. There are plenty of other animals apart from marine animals, but also within the marine animals category there are many different kinds of creature. There are fish, which tend to look rather similar to each other, but also lobsters, crabs, octopuses, all of which are very different from fish. Then there are whales and dolphins, which look a bit like fish, but which turn out to be very different when examined in more detail. Also, you may have seen natural history programmes on TV which show us very strange creatures from the depths of the ocean, which are almost transparent, have no obvious heads, but long spindly legs, or possibly antennae. It is hard to know where they fit in with the more familiar creatures - they are a special and unfamiliar sort of marine animal.
If we compare the classification of marine animals with the everyday classification of feelings, then perhaps felt senses are analogous to these strange creatures. Gendlin says that the felt sense is a feeling, that it could be classified as a sensation - but it is a special sort of sensation. It is also rather like an emotion, but nevertheless isn’t an emotion.
Now consider another analogy, which I think will be more helpful. On a computer keyboard there are 26 alphabetic keys, 10 numeric keys, several more keys for asterisks, hyphens, brackets and so on. Each of these is used to produce a particular character on the screen, and later on a printout. The characters are given code numbers in the ASCII classification, so that uppercase ‘A’ is number 65, ‘B’ is 66 and so on. We might explain this to someone unfamiliar with keyboards by saying that each key corresponds to a printed character. After watching us type for a bit they say “But what about the space key - it doesn’t print anything!” We say “No, that one just leaves a space, but you can still think of it as a character. Admittedly it is a rather odd sort of character. But it is listed as character 32 in the ASCII system.” They say “OK, but what about this one - marked ‘RETURN’? What character is that?” We explain that pressing this key brings the cursor back to the beginning of the next line. It doesn’t print a character at all. They say “But couldn’t you think of this as a veryspecial sort of character?” What should we say? Perhaps “Well I suppose you couldthink of it that way. It ischaracter 13 in the ASCII list.” They say “This is fascinating - what a verystrange character”. But of course there is nothing at all strange here. It only seems that there is something strange, because we had been picturing the keys as all working in the same way, so as to produce something on the screen. And in a way that is true - the space key could be said to produce somethingon the screen, but that something is a nothing. How strange! But again, of course, there is nothing strange here. The feeling of strangeness is a kind of illusion which is generated by the way we have been picturing the use of the keys.
In the comparison of feelings with kinds of marine animals we ended with the strange deep-sea creature. It really exists, and really is strange compared with the other creatures. In the comparison with keyboard symbols we end instead with a strange way of speaking. Wittgenstein suggests that in thinking about what are called mental phenomena, we often get into strange ways of talking, and then think that we are dealing with strange kinds of things, innerthings. But for him these strange kind of things are in a sense illusions. It is not that we don’t have feelings. Of course we do. But picturing feelings as inner things or processes is like picturing SPACE or RETURN as strange kinds of character.
I hope that all this will become clearer as we go on. For the moment I just want to convey something of the flavour of Wittgenstein’s approach to our ways of talking about feelings.
As I said earlier, Gendlin regards a felt sense as a feeling that is in some ways like a bodily sensation, such as a feeling of muscle tension, and in some ways like an emotion, such as fear. I will say a bit more about bodily sensations later, but will first discuss the nature of emotions.
Emotions
Emotions, I think, are always linked with particular kinds of situation. For any named emotion, we can, with a bit of thought, say roughly what the relevant kind of situation is. For example, we speak of fear in situations where there is a response to some perceived danger. We speak of jealousy in situations where person A is upset because person B has preferred person C to them. We speak of hoping for an event to occur where the person would be disappointed if the event did not occur. Embarrassment involves one having done something socially inappropriate. Feeling guilty involves one having done something one considers to be wrong. These are just rough sketches; our emotional language is subtle and complex, so that more may need to be said to specify what the relevant kind of situation is. The important point is that we can, at least roughly, set out what the situation is that corresponds to each named emotion.
But emotions are not limited to those which have names, and within each named emotion there will be varieties of emotional feeling that can be specified in various ways. For example, we feel jealous, but it is a particular sortof jealousy. Thus someone might say, not simply that they are jealous, but that they are jealous in a resigned sort of way, rather than in an aggressive sort of way. In some languages there could be different words for these two kinds of jealousy. Or someone might say “Yes, I amjealous… but… I was thinking of Anna Karenina …. I’m jealous in the sort of way that Dolly is jealous of the governess, not in the way that Kareninis jealous ofVronsky”.
These varieties of an emotion are often specified by novelists by telling a story of the sort of situation which gives rise to the emotion. And often in Focusing sessions, little stories are told, some of which are expressed in imagery. To take an example from Ann Weiser (2005, pp. 228-9), a Focuser speaks of
having an image of seeing a row of blackbirds on a wire. They are huddled together and a cold wind is blowing….Then she says that some of them are flying away but some are just staying there. It’s like they are resigned to the cold, the ones that are staying…Those are the ones that no other bird is near. They’re on their own….There’s especially one of them. It’s huddled…and cold…and sad”
This story-imagery specifies the emotional response much more exactly than it can be specified by a single word. Nevertheless, we are still speaking of a kindof situation here. The person listening might say “It sounds a bit like what John felt in that story you mentioned last week”, and the Focuser might say “Yes, like that - exactly.”
When she was around three or four years old my daughter liked being read stories about Little Grey Rabbit and a rather boisterous character called Hare. She had listened to one of these stories the previous night, and when her mother next morning did something that upset her she exclaimed “Oh Mummy - just like Hare!” Little Grey Rabbit’s situation and my daughter’s situation were no doubt different in many ways, but my daughter recognised the same kind of situation, and the same kind of emotional feeling.
Thus while there are many emotions for which we have names (far more than those in the lists that psychologists are fond of), beyond these there is an indefinite number of emotions that correspond to kinds of situation that are familiar within a particular culture, and can only be expressed by telling little stories. I will call these un-named emotions ‘emotional feelings’. One source of confusion in talking about felt senses is that we may be inclined to think of a felt sense as the emotional feel of a situation. The blackbirds story was the expression, in imagery, of the emotional feel of a situation, but such an emotional feel is not a felt sense. In fact the blackbirds story continues as follows “It’s huddled… and cold…and sad… No not exactly sad...he’s more… hard to put into words...” Here is the felt sense, and it is here, as Ann says, that the person strictly speaking begins to Focus. In Focusing sessions the expression of emotional feeling, and the expression of a felt sense, often interleave with one another. Another example, taken from Gendlin (1996) is this: A client says
What came to me was like, the image I have, when I got it I had an image of a fence, and part of it is really treacherous. Its like … barbed wire … you don’t touch that; you can’t go through or get past it, but another part of it has a little hole, and that part I could slip through…A part of it is just poles and a little barbed wire, and I could really crawl over it if I wanted to. [What] felt the best right now was to crawl through that little hole, that felt…like… felt like saying “Here I am; I’m coming through,” a really neat part coming through, and looking back to see the reaction, at the same time feeling, I don’t care what the reaction is.
Here there is the expression of emotional feeling through words as well as imagery, but every so often the client pauses, and waits for either a furtherimage, or furtherwords. “It’s like…<pause>...barbed wire” or “felt like…<pause>...saying ‘Here I am; I’m coming’.” As Gendlin uses the term, the felt senses here occur in the pauses; they are not the emotional feelings that are expressed in the words and images. But it is easy to get confused here. In his first paper on Focusing Gendlin did not use the term ‘felt sense’ but instead spoke of trying to get the feel of a problem as a whole. Suppose we ask someone to do this, and they say “Yes, I can feel it as a whole – it is a feeling of being put in a position where, whatever I do, I will hurt someone”. That is a clearly articulated emotional feeling, but just because it is clearly articulated, it is not a felt sense. A felt sense, Gendlin says, is something vague or murky. By contrast, if someone says, “Yes, I canfeel it as a whole…but it’s hard to put it put it into words”, that tells us that they have a felt sense.
I will return to the question of when, exactly, we speak of felt senses, but first we need to look at another issue that has been prominent in the discussion of felt senses This is the question of whether a felt sense is a bodily sensation, whether it is felt in the body. In order to approach that question it will be helpful to consider whether emotions, and emotional feelings, are felt in the body.
Do emotions involve bodily sensations?
I said that to have an emotion involves responding to a situation of a particular kind, but there are many different types of response. If we see someone running from a bull, we say that they are afraid. To run in that context isto be afraid. But another person, on seeing the bull charging towards them, might freeze, and that too would count as fear. Someone else, seeing the bull from a distance, might experience tension in their chest or stomach, and feeling these bodily sensations could be said to be their fear. Or afterbeing chased by the bull, the person, now sitting at home, might have recurrent thoughts and images about the incident, and theseresponses could be said to constitute the fear that they still feel following the episode.
Consider the emotion of hope as another example. We say that someone hopes that an event will occur, if they would be disappointed if it did not occur. A person’s hope for something could be manifest in their imagining the occurrence of the event, or in their pacing excitedly up and down, or in a holding of the breath, but these responses only count as manifestations of hope if the situation is one in which the person will be disappointed if the event doesn’t occur. The responses in themselvesdo not constitute hope, or feelings of hope. The same responses could be manifestations of an expectationthat the event will occur. But hoping is different from expecting. We often expect events that we certainly don’t hope for, and we can hope for things that we don’t really expect to occur. These two feelings are not distinguished by any differences in the bodily sensations involved, but by the fact that in hoping we would be disappointedif the event doesn’t occur, while in expecting we would be surprisedif it doesn’t occur.
So, emotions mayinvolve bodily sensations, as well as many other kinds of response. But none of these things are essential to the emotion being the sort of emotion it is. For there to be an emotion one has to respond in some way to a particular kind of situation, but how one responds can involve behaviour, thoughts, impulses, imagery, as well as bodily sensations.
In some cases, the response to the situation may involve quite intense desires or aversions, and the accompanying impulses and bodily sensations may overwhelm us. It is a familiar view that emotions are to be contrasted with rational beliefs, but that is not generallytrue. We may quitereasonablyfeel hopeful that an event will occur, and our feeling of guilt could be entirely appropriate to the situation.
In some cases the response may be almost entirely linguistic. We learn to use the word ‘wistful’ in certain kinds of circumstance (though I couldn’t say right now what those kinds of circumstance are, and probably you can’t). Nor need my feeling wistful involve any specific behaviour, or bodily sensations, or thoughts or images. My sayingI feel wistful may be my onlyresponse to the kind of circumstances I find myself in.. But don’t I have a wistful feeling? a ‘datum’, or ‘direct referent’, as Gendlin sometimes calls it? Well, I can saythat, but it doesn’t seem to add anything to my saying that I amwistful. There is no feeling here that is independent of what I say, no feeling on which I basewhat I say. I don’t base what I say on anything; certainly not my knowledge of the circumstances in which the use of the word is learned. For I can’t say what these circumstances are. I have learned to use the word, but I haven’t learned to say how it is used. I have simply picked up the use of the word as an articulation of my response.
If that seems puzzling, compare it how it is with having a hunch or intuition about something: Hunches can form a helpful bridge to the notion of a felt sense. Suppose that on returning home from a walk, we have to decide whether to turn right or turn left. I say “To the left!”. My companion says “How do you know?” I reply “It’s just a hunch, but I bet I’m right!” We go to the left and indeed this turns out to be the way home. To have a hunch is to think that something is so, without being able to justifywhat one thinks. It is not just a guess; we sometimes are very sure that our hunch is right. Now suppose someone says “When you said ‘To the left!’ surely something must have gone on in your mind that madeyou say that. Perhaps you had an image of turning left? Or maybe the word ‘left’ just came into your mind? There must have been somethingthat made you say ‘To the left!’.” I reply that there really wasn’t anything like that. We came to the junction and I spontaneously said ‘To the left’. That was all that happened. I had a hunch, but that is just to say I couldn’t justify what I said. But now the sceptical person says “But you must have had a feelingthat you should turn left! The hunch was that feeling!” What should I say to that? Perhaps “How do youknow what went on in me? I’m telling you that nothing went on, but you have a picture or theory that says something musthave gone on. Well, so much the worse for the theory!” This talk of the hunch as a ‘feeling’ adds nothing at all to a description of what happened. It seems to be the invention of a person who believes that we mustalways have feelings, in the sense of inner data, going on in our minds before we can speak. Yet that is clearly not true. Usually we speak without anything special going on in our mind.
In sum: we could say that to have an emotion is to respond a particular kind of situation. The response may be a matter of having certain bodily sensations, or other things such as characteristic behaviour, facial expressions, impulses, thoughts or images. It is misleading to say that the emotion isthe response: that the running away, or the inclination to run away, or the dry throat, or the facial expression isthe fear. But nor is it right to say that the response is simply a sign or accompaniment of the emotion.
We want there to be a thing or a process that isthe emotion, but not all words function as the names of things or processes. Emotion words draw our attention to particular kinds of lived situation, but there need not be anything in the situation that isthe emotion. If someone hopes that an event will occur, that is a particular kind of situation; it is the kind of situation in which they would be disappointed if the event did not occur. But it does not follow that there is a thing or process in the situation that is the hope. We are inclined to picture the hope as something going on in the person at the time, but the fact is that nothingneed have gone on in them at the time. They mighthave thoughts or images of the anticipated event, but there is no necessity for such things to have gone on. All that is necessary is that they would respond to the non-occurrence of the event with disappointment. If we know that, then we know that they hope for the event.
The picture of feelings as inner events or processes is a captivating one. Wittgenstein suggests that it arises partly from another captivating picture, that of the meaningsof words being the thingsthey refer to. In an infants’ school classroom there may be pictures on the wall of dogs, trees, tables and so on, each being intended to illustrate the meaning of the word that is written alongside the picture. We think of the meaning of the words as being displayed in the pictures, and say that the meaning of a word is the kind of thing it picks out. But there are many, many words for which that is not true. There are no things in the world that are picked out by the words ‘Not’, or ‘Therefore’ - Wittgenstein argues that to specify what a word means does not usually involve presenting examples of the things or processes it refers to, but specifying how that word is used. ‘Not’, for example, is used to make a denial, ‘Therefore’ tells us that what has just been said is a reason for believing what is about to be said. There are no ‘nots’ or ‘therefores’ in the world.
If we can free ourselves from the picture that for each word there is a kind of thing, we may be able to see that there doesn’t have to be a feeling that a person has when they hope for something, or fear something, or experience some other emotion. But as Wittgenstein says, it is hard to free ourselves from such pictures, because they are embedded in our language. I just referred to ‘experiencing some other emotion’, and this form of words suggests that there is, in addition to the emotion, the experiencingof the emotion. Then this can bring us back to picturing hope as an inner process, that we are now calling an experiencing.
It is not that there is anything wrong with saying that a person feels hope, or experiences a feeling of hope, just as there is nothing wrong with saying that a person feels that they should take the right-hand path. But if we try to take these feelings out of their contexts and ask what they are in themselves, we are likely to end up talking nonsense. We might for example ask whether the feeling of hope is a bodily sensation, and wonder whether that tingly sensation we feel isthe hope. Or we might ask where in our body do we have the hunch that we should take the right-hand path? Can we detect the hunch in the way our legs are inclined to move? Such questions, I think, lead us only into confusion. They are not sensible questions to ask, because they presuppose that words for feelings are names of things or processes going on inside the person.
Felt senses
In the previous section we have been concerned with one important group of feelings, those that are called ‘emotions’. As I said earlier, there are many other kinds of feeling, but the one we are especially interested in is the kind of feeling that Gendlin calls a ‘felt sense’. Gendlin had discovered in his work with counselling clients that the clients who make best progress are those who engage in therapy in a special way. Rather than simply talking about their difficulties, or speculating about what is wrong with them, or directly expressing their emotions, they say what they are thinking or feeling, but then pause. The therapist can see that this is a special sort of pause; it is not that the client has run out of things to say, or that they are afraid to go on. Rather they are searching for words for something that they can’t yet express. They may screw up their face, rotate their hand in the air, or say things like “It’s not that I am afraid of him, but…<pause>…I’m not easy with him…<pause>…He makes me feel sort of tangled up inside…<pause>…I can’t put it into words…” They are clearly responding to some difficulty in their relationship with this person, but they can’t articulatethat response. Or rather, they can’t articulate it yet. Their situation is one of being on the way toarticulating their response.
It is in thiskind of situation that we say that the person has a felt sense of something. They have, as it were, reached the edge of what they can say. Gendlin discusses an example where a person is talking about their fear of approaching someone at a party: They say “I think I know what goes into that fear; it’s that I’ve always been scared just to make a decision on my own. I’m scared it will be wrong. But… uhm…”. This person, Gendlin writes, “has a sense of the edge. ‘Uhm’ is the felt sense.”
What the “Uhm” tells us is that the person hasn’t yet found a way of articulating their response, but that they hope to do so soon. Instead of saying “Uhm” they might rotate their hand in the air. Or if they are familiar with Focusing they might say that they have a peculiar sort of feeling, a felt sense. But it is misleading to say that there is a thing there that they feel when they have a felt sense, just as it is misleading to say that there is a thing which one feels when one hopes for something, or that there is a feeling called a hunch when one has a hunch.
As in the case of hopes and hunches we may experience variousbodily sensations when we have a felt sense. We might feel tension in our chest, or a gnawing feeling in the stomach, or bodily sensations associated with rotating our hand in the air, or drumming our fingers on the desk. Are thesethe felt sense? Well, it is the same as it is with the emotions. We do speak of feeling anger in our chest or fear in our gut, and may be able to identify the bodily sensations involved, such as muscular tightness or contraction. But as we have seen, it is misleading to say that the emotion is that bodily sensation; rather we are responding to a situation in which we are being insulted or threatened, and for that reason are said to be angry or scared. Just by attending to the bodily sensations we couldn’t tell which emotion we are feeling. It is only in the relevant contexts that we can say that the tightness is the anger or the contracted feeling is the fear.
In the case of a felt sense, the relevant context is that the person is responding to a situation, but can’t yet articulate their response. That is the point at which they pause and say “Uhm”. When Gendlin says the “Uhm” is the felt sense we know what he means, but clearly he is not saying that the felt sense is the utterance of a word. In the same way the felt sense is not the rotation of the hand in the air, nor the gnawing sensations the person might have in their stomach. The difficulty is that we picture a felt sense as some sort of inner thing or process, but fail to realise that in saying that someone has a felt sense we are not reporting on anything going on in them. What we are reporting is that they can’t yet find a way of articulating their response.
It may help to reflect on what happens when the person doessucceed in articulating their response. They may let out a deep breath, smile, say “Now I’ve got it”, or they may simply say “OK, I’m jealous (or scared or whatever)”. Now, just beforethey said or did these things, did they have to have a feelingthat they had found what they were looking for? They may well say “No – it just came to me”. But doesn’t saying “Now I’ve got it!” or the deep release of breath express a feeling? Well, as with hunches, someone might say that there mustbe such a feeling; but I think we have a right be suspicious when a person insists something mustbe so.
What I am suggesting is that to say that someone has a felt sense is to say that they are responding to a situation, can’t yet articulate their response, but hope and expect to do so soon. More briefly, we can say with Gendlin that the felt sense is the “Uhm”. However, there are many places where Gendlin says something much more than that. In discussing where the change steps in therapy come from he says (Gendlin 1984):
The steps of change and process do not come directly from the recognizable feelings as such.
They come, rather, from an unclear, fuzzy, murky "something there", an odd sort of direct datum of awareness.
And:
What do we assume the client will do with a listening response? We hope and assume that clients will check the response, not with what they said or thought, but with some more inner being, place, datum... "the felt sense," we have no ordinary word for that.
It is this notion of an inner datum that Wittgenstein questions. Undoubtedly we talk of inner thoughts and feelings, and we may picture them as inner things, or processes going on in our heads or bodies. But this is surely picture language: we do not mean that if a surgeon opened up our head or body they would find the thoughts or feelings there. It is a way of talking, a picturesque mode of description, and one which does not mislead us in everyday conversations. The problems only begin when we suppose that the inner processes constitute explanationsfor what we say and do. Then we will start to say things like “He said he was afraid because there was a scary feeling (or process or datum), inside him, and he recognised it as fear”. But thatis not why an English speaker says “I am afraid”; the real explanation is that they have learned to use this phrase in situations where some danger threatens.
The same misleading picture of the inner datum is what causes the difficulties with the phrase ‘felt sense’. A person may pause in a Focusing session and speak of having a vague feeling that they cannot put into words. To have such a feeling is to have a felt sense. There is no problem with that. The problem comes if we now try to explain why they pause by saying that they have a special sort of feeling, or inner datum, to which they now need to give their attention, and from which may soon come other feelings that are helpful for them. The inner datum, or felt sense, is supposed to contain all the intricate detail of the problem, and within it, the person may find something that is of help to them. That is the picture.
However, the real explanation of why the person pauses is simply that they can’t yet find the words to articulate their response, although they are seeking them, and with luck will soon find them. They find them through attending to the problem as a whole, and realising that just these words give expression to some aspect of the problem.
The difference between the two formulations is that in the first formulation the person attends to an inner datum, and describes it, whereas in the second they attend to their situWittgenstein (1992) is especially relevant. ationand articulate their response to it. I think that the reason Gendlin prefers the first formulation is that he is concerned with an important difference in the way clients speak in therapy. It is the difference between simply speaking, and speaking after pausing to check whether this really is what one wants to say, or is all that one wants to say. Gendlin thinks that in the pause one consults an inner datum, whereas I think Wittgenstein would say that this inner datum is a fabrication, or an illusion. For Gendlin, the inner datum is an “it”, a direct referent, something one can attend to, in there, there where we have our feelings. The job of the therapist is then to respond to the client in a way that helps the client the find the inner datum.
The alternative formulation is that the client is responding to their situation in a way that they can’t yet fully articulate. The job of the therapist is to encourage the client to attend further to their situation, and to articulate further whatever new responses come to them. I would like to end by looking in a bit more detail at how this alternative formulation would work in practice.
Much of the traditional Focusing framework can remain in place, beginning with Clearing a Space. This is not something one always needs to do, but it can be an important way of bringing attention to a specific problem. The point is to attend exclusively to thatproblem, for the moment. How do we do that? Well, by not letting ourselves be distracted by the other problems. We attend to one thing by not allowing ourselves to attend to other things, as we mind our own business by not minding other people’s business (White 1964). It can help if we give some briefattention to the other problems - we are not just ignoring them – and then attend to the problem we wish to work with. Then the next step is to attend to this problem as a whole. Before the session we may have spent some time thinking about the problem or noticing various things that are involved in it. We may need to remind ourselves of what the problem is, and what seems to be upsetting or concerning about it. In other words we bring that whole problem to mind. We are going to Focus on the problem, but we want to go beyond what we already know about it, beyond the familiar difficult feelings that it arouses in us. To get to something new, we need to attend to the whole of the problem. What might help us is not to be found in what we already know, but nor do we know whereit is to be found in the situation. It could be anywhere, or we might need to construct something new. So we need to keep the whole problem in mind.
How do we attend to it as a whole? Well, by not attending to its particular aspects. If we find ourselves attending some particular aspect of the problem, we need to stop doing that, and let our attention come back to the problem as a whole. This is probably the most difficult part of Focusing; we are so used to attending to details, that we find it hard to attend to something as a whole. Yet we cando this: the problem is thereas a whole; we chose it from amongst other problems. All we have to do is to open ourselves to all of that,putting aside any specific aspects that come to mind.
Familiar Focusing questions may now help. As we keep our attention on the problem as a whole, we can gently ask ourselves “What is this really all about?” or “What is the crux of this?” or “What is needed here?” Then we wait, and see if anything comes. Often something does come, and often it is a surprise to us. It could be a word, a bodily sensation, an impulse, a wish, a liking for something, an image, a fragment of music, a memory. It is something that has come from our awareness of the problem as a whole, and is likely therefore to have some relevance to the problem. It is something newin connection with the problem. So now we gently ask “What is it about the problem that brings this?” “What is it about the problem that makes me think of this, or feel that, want to do this, remember that?” And again we wait. Then other feelings, or words and so on, may come, and whatever comes, we may try asking “Is that exactly it?”, and then sense the reply “Yes, it is”, or “No, not exactly; more like this.”or,“No, not justthat; also this”. Finally, if we are fortunate, we may find ourselves saying something like “Oh, so that’swhat it’s about!” or “So there’s a whole new side to this!” or “I never thought of it like that”.
All this can be explained without using the term ‘felt sense’, but it is clear enough where that phrase couldbe brought in. It is at the point where we attend to the problem as a whole. At this point someone might say to themself “I’m feeling the problem as a whole”, and they might picturethis feeling of the problem as a vague, fuzzy thing that they sense in their stomach, but which nevertheless contains within it all the familiar aspects of the problem, together with innumerable other aspects that could be helpful. This picture need not cause trouble, so long as the Focuser remains aware that they need to be attending to the feel of the problemand its unarticulated edges. What wouldcause trouble would be if they started to ask whether this fuzzy image they have really is a felt sense, or whether they should be attending to the tight feeling in their stomach. Then, I think, they would get lost.
As I mentioned earlier, in his very first paper on Focusing in 1969, Gendlin himself did not use the term ‘felt sense’. Instead, he laid out in the following way some guidelines for therapists who would be teaching focusing to patients. He writes (Gendlin 1969, p. 5):
One must explain that it is possible to sense a problem as a whole…People rarely let the crux of the problem come freshly to them from their feel of the problem as a whole. They already know what the crux is, or they decide what it is. Therefore, before we begin, we instruct the patient on this …point: ‘When you have a feel of the whole problem, don’t decide what is important about it. Feel it all and don’t decide anything. Wait and let the main crux come to you freshly’.
I think that way of putting it is much less likely to cause difficulties than the way in which he formulated the Focusing instructions later on.
The crucial point is that one is to attend to the feel of the problem, and then wait to see what morethere is to it, or where the ‘edges’ of the problem are. But ‘Attending to the feel of the problem’ should be understood to mean no more than ‘Attending to the problem’. It is one of those cases where referring to a feeling adds nothing to what can be said without referring to the feeling. For example, to be hopeful, to feel hopeful, to have a feeling of hope are just different ways of saying the same thing, namely, that one will be disappointed if the hoped-for event doesn’t occur. There is nothing wrong with picturing hope as an inner feeling, but this isa picture, or a way of speaking.
As a final analogy, consider the fact that instead of saying that a person has a felt sense of something, we might, in English, say that they have something ‘on the tip of their tongue’. That says the same thing, namely that they can’t yet articulate their response, but it is clearly just a way of speaking. Someone who started to wonder about whatexactly was there on the tip of their tongue when they were trying to articulate their response, would surely be deeply confused. In the same way, I think, a person is confused if they start to wonder about what exactly is there in the centre of their body when they are trying to articulate their response..
Conclusion
This discussion has been quite elaborate, but that is not because Focusing is itself something elaborate. It is the confusions and misunderstandings surrounding Focusing that give rise to the elaborations. In Wittgenstein’s metaphor, the untangling of a knot has to be as complex as the knot itself, but the result of untangling it is something simple.
It seems to me that there doesn’t haveto be any fundamental difficulty in teaching Focusing. I am a bit sceptical about the extract I quoted from Krycka, that “it is simply too difficult to grasp the approach without continued experiential practice with a teacher or therapist”. After all, Gendlin wrote his original Focusing book as a self-help manual, and it has sold over half a million copies. I think that in practice people are able to read past the picture-language that Gendlin often uses in speaking of the felt sense as a murky inner datum, and appreciate that what he really means is that we need to give attention to those places where we are responding to our situation in a way that we can’t yet fully articulate. That may not always be easy to do, but it is not anything complicated or mysterious.
REFERENCES
Canfield, J. (2007a). Becoming Human: The development of Language, Self, and Self-Consciousness. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Canfield, J. (2007b). Wittgenstein on fear. In D. Moyal-Sharrock (Ed.), Perpicuous Presentations: Essays on Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology(pp. 12-27). Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Cornell, Ann Weiser (1996) The Power of Focusing. Oakland: New Harbinger.
Cornell, Ann Weiser (2005) The Radical Acceptance of Everything. Berkeley: Calluna
Press
Gendlin, Eugene (1969) Focusing. In the Gendlin On-line Library
Gendlin, Eugene (1984) The client’s client: the edge of awareness. In the Gendlin On-line
Library
Gendlin, Eugene (1996) Focusing-oriented Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press.
Jolley, Kelly Dean (2010) Wittgenstein: Key Concepts. Durham: Acumen.
Krycka, Kevin (2014) Thinking and practicing FOT in the twenty-first century. In: Greg
Madison (ed.) Theory and Practice of Focusing-Oriented Therapy: Beyond the
Talking Cure. London: Jessica Kingsley
Levine, Peter (1997) Waking the Tiger. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books
Moyal-Sharrock, D. (2000). ‘Words as deeds’: Wittgenstein's 'spontaneous utterances' and
the dissolution of the explanatory gap. Philosophical Psychology, 13(3), 355-372.
ter Hark, M. (1990). Beyond the Inner and the Outer: Wittgenstein's Philosophy of
Psychology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Vesey, G. (1991). Inner and Outer: Essays on a Philosophical Myth. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
White, A. (1964). Attention. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1963). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell
(Revised edition (2009). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1992). Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. 2:The Inner and the Outer. Oxford: Blackwell
#
[Footnote] It is hard to give brief references for relevant material in Wittgenstein’s writings. Within his major work Philosophical Investigations (1963) one could begin with what he says on pages 4-6, 89-92, 97-104, 178-80, 187-9 (in the revised edition (Wittgenstein 2009) the corresponding pages are 7-10, 95-98, 103-111, 187-9, 196-8). Wittgenstein (1992) is also especially relevant. For those unfamiliar with his work, it might be better to start with secondary sources such as Jolley (2010) or Canfield (2007b). Other especially relevant secondary sources include ter Hark (1990), Vesey (1991), Moyal-Sharrock (2000); Canfield (2007a, ).
Living forward.
The challenge of carrying forward Gendlin’s legacy.
by Mia Leijssen PhD
The challenge of carrying forward Gendlin’s legacy.
by Mia Leijssen PhD
Powerpoint - Manuscript
A process theory of physical illness:
medicine and psychotherapy
by Frans Depestele
medicine and psychotherapy
by Frans Depestele
MANUSCRIPT
a_process_theory_of_physical_illness.pdf | |
File Size: | 183 kb |
File Type: |
πάθη λόγοι ἔνυλοί εἰσιν
Aristotle, De Anima I,1,10, 403a, 25
A possible translation could be: Experiences are ‘words’-in-matter.
Or: Sufferings (the word ‘pathos’ is in ‘patho-logy’) are ‘words’-in-matter, in the body.
Sufferings are not just in the body, they are ‘words’-in-the-body. #
A possible translation could be: Experiences are ‘words’-in-matter.
Or: Sufferings (the word ‘pathos’ is in ‘patho-logy’) are ‘words’-in-matter, in the body.
Sufferings are not just in the body, they are ‘words’-in-the-body. #
The establishment of HAPCEA in Greece;
the contribution to the Greek society
by Elli Avgerinou
the contribution to the Greek society
by Elli Avgerinou
ABSTRACT
Abstract: The main reason for this presentation is to introduce the establishment of the Hellenic Association for Person-centered and Experiential Approach (HAPCEA) in Greece. This not-for-profit association aims to offer an umbrella for all Person-centered and Experiential counselors and psychotherapists in Greece, promoting their interaction, support, continuing education, ethical practice etc. Furthermore, one of its goals is to spread Rogers’ and Gendlin’s theory among people in the humanistic professions in Greece, and to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. # The foundation of HAPCEA is very important at this period for Greek society, being in the middle of a financial and social crisis, not only for PCEA therapists to have an association, but because we need hope as a society. And there is enormous hope in Rogers’ theory. # The philosophical basis of the PCEA is the faith in the person’s actualizing tendency, the tendency to differentiate, progress, and fulfill all his/her potential. For the actualizing tendency to be liberated, the person has to be in a state of congruence, at least to some extent. # The change in society can be achieved by the change in individuals, in other words by the emergence of a new person. This new person will be a person involved in life, with creativity, freedom of choice, interactive and caring. This will promote personal progress and consequently progress for society, coming from the emergence of new ideas, and their activation in new fields. As a society we need to find a new balance under our new circumstances, as the rule of homeostasis governs every aspect of the human existence.
Eigentlichkeit (owned-ness/authenticity)
and therapy with an uninvited guest
by Alan Tidmarsh PhD
and therapy with an uninvited guest
by Alan Tidmarsh PhD
Handout
tidmarsh-eigentlichkeit_and_therapy_with_an_uninvited_guest.pdf | |
File Size: | 812 kb |
File Type: |
Working with clients, supervisees and myself I notice a particular quality of felt sense that can arrive. I have found concepts from Heidegger help me to understand it - the moment when a step beyond just being-in-the-world (Befindlichkeit) is possible/necessary, when the unpalatable must be 'owned'-up to (Eigentlichkeit). # In this session I will invite you to sample these felt senses, to notice resonances from several contexts and to consider ways a therapist may be helpful when it is encountered. #
Alan Tidmarsh is a focusing-oriented therapist who has worked substantially with drug and alcohol clients. He now offers therapy and clinical supervision in private practice and also works with a charity which provides support for survivors of sexual abuse. Alan is a founder member of Norwich Focusing. # e-mail: [email protected] web: www.norwichfocusing.com
The challenge of Eigentlichkeit
In this session I will set out a concept from Heidegger – Eigentlichkeit, illustrate some felt senses where it has been meaningful for me and then draw out four themes from that experience and their relevance in therapy. My aim is to stimulate crossings with your own experience. Therefore whilst I hope that what I say will make sense to you, it is more important that you take time to notice where my experience crosses with yours – resonating and maybe opening up new perspectives. Please don’t expect too much of my Heidegger scholarship, I have been inspired by his ideas but don’t claim
to be an expert.
Let me begin with a poem - Talking In Bed by Philip Larkin
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
(read more in the downloadable pdf file)
(Larkin, P. (1988). Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber. Talking in Bed was first published in
The Whitsun Weddings and is dated 10th August 1960.)
Alan Tidmarsh is a focusing-oriented therapist who has worked substantially with drug and alcohol clients. He now offers therapy and clinical supervision in private practice and also works with a charity which provides support for survivors of sexual abuse. Alan is a founder member of Norwich Focusing. # e-mail: [email protected] web: www.norwichfocusing.com
The challenge of Eigentlichkeit
In this session I will set out a concept from Heidegger – Eigentlichkeit, illustrate some felt senses where it has been meaningful for me and then draw out four themes from that experience and their relevance in therapy. My aim is to stimulate crossings with your own experience. Therefore whilst I hope that what I say will make sense to you, it is more important that you take time to notice where my experience crosses with yours – resonating and maybe opening up new perspectives. Please don’t expect too much of my Heidegger scholarship, I have been inspired by his ideas but don’t claim
to be an expert.
Let me begin with a poem - Talking In Bed by Philip Larkin
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
(read more in the downloadable pdf file)
(Larkin, P. (1988). Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber. Talking in Bed was first published in
The Whitsun Weddings and is dated 10th August 1960.)
Focusing and the Duck Shuffle
by Michael D. Callifronas
by Michael D. Callifronas
ABSTRACT
Abstract: Thirty five years ago Goodyear and Bradley* (1983) studied supervisory models from five therapeutic approaches. They found that these models had more similarities than differences and concluded that psychotherapy supervision can and needs to be based in common models which can work and be functional in more than one therapeutic approache(s). # Up to date a series of supervisory models have been published been based in two main axons: On the one hand we have the developmental models focusing the supervisor’s attention on characteristics related to the degree of the supervisee’s professional and personal development (Skovholt & Rønnestad, 1995; Stoltenberg et al., 1998). On the other hand the process models propose the procedure which needs to be followed in a supervisory session (Hawkins & Shohet, 2000; Page & Wosket, 2001). # We propose a combined model which includes both the developmental and the process character of supervision. In this model the Focusing experiential supervisor can approach with a duck shuffle mode when processing the supervisee’s blind spots, nuclear beliefs and psychological resistance, thus protecting from compassion fatigue, stress and burnout. This model can work with more experienced supervisees of quite any therapeutic modality (Callifronas et al., 2017).
* Due to limited electronic space all references are included in the downloadable paper below:
Callifronas M. Montaiuti, C. and Nina, E. (2017) A Common Approach for Clinical Supervision in Psychotherapy and Medicine. The Person-Centred and Experiential Model. Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy, 7:6. DOI: 10.4172/2161-0487.1000332.
* Due to limited electronic space all references are included in the downloadable paper below:
Callifronas M. Montaiuti, C. and Nina, E. (2017) A Common Approach for Clinical Supervision in Psychotherapy and Medicine. The Person-Centred and Experiential Model. Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy, 7:6. DOI: 10.4172/2161-0487.1000332.
Research Implications from Focusing With Music
by Jenny White
by Jenny White
Presentation-music-videos
Sound 1 is to begin the presentation with...
The use of the media above is only for educational reasons, and not for commercial use.
Here are the same links on YouTube #
The use of the media above is only for educational reasons, and not for commercial use.
Here are the same links on YouTube #
Hungarian Rhapsody: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdH1hSWGFGU
Close Encounters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AphKxQ2NsQo
Curwen Hand signals, Close Encounters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubmcr5FmkRU
Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals, Aquarium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sN3Xmnd5cs
Sufjan Stevens Casimir Pulaski Day (Paradox): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EzeW5KoPUI
Close Encounters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AphKxQ2NsQo
Curwen Hand signals, Close Encounters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubmcr5FmkRU
Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals, Aquarium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sN3Xmnd5cs
Sufjan Stevens Casimir Pulaski Day (Paradox): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EzeW5KoPUI
Beyond Rogers, beyond Gendlin:
widening our understanding of the theory
by Christiane Geiser & Judy Moore
widening our understanding of the theory
by Christiane Geiser & Judy Moore
MANUSCRIPT - Presentation
|
The haystacks (see below)
Presentation
CHRISTIANE
General introduction
It has been an interesting and inspiring experience to prepare this presentation together during the last weeks. It was not only an intellectual pleasure, but also surprisingly moving. For both of us it meant to revisit our past – in terms of long ago memories about our own beginnings as trainees and afterwards as assistants, as trainers, as psychotherapists and supervisors, as readers and writers, as members of associations and groups of colleagues– which meant re-visiting “the whole” of our professional identity.
Judy and I got to know each other rather late in our careers, and we immediately shared a deep understanding of our work and our values. We became friends, started to travel together, spent time at each other`s houses, discussed and exchanged a lot. After a while, we began to teach together.
When we - as preparation for this conference - began to tell each other in more detail where we came from and where we are now, it was a real eye opener to realise how differently we experienced and lived forward the person-centred and the Focusing-oriented approach.
In our presentation we will take you with us on this journey and will show you, where our revisiting process had led us.
JUDY
The Haystacks
Back in February I went to Boston, US, and, on the last day of my visit, I spent several hours going round the Museum of Fine Art. By the end of the visit I was completely ‘saturated’ with amazing art works.
But, of all the wonderful paintings that I saw I kept being drawn back to two images of a haystack, hung side by side. One was painted in summer at sunset and the other ‘snow effect’.
I loved the fact that Monet had re-visited these images in different seasons and given such attention to re-creating the colours of the sunset, the pinks and the oranges in ‘sunset’, the blues and yellow of ‘snow effect’. One evokes warmth and the other cold. I found myself looking at them again and again- and I couldn’t tear myself away from them.
Rogers/ Gendlin
For me, this is similar to how I feel about the Person-Centred Approach. I am drawn over and over again to try to understand why it matters so much to me- why can’t I let go of it? Having been ‘classically trained’ in the PCA where I simply knew Focusing as a taught procedure, I have spent the past 15 years or so reading Gendlin and coming to terms with how hugely significant his contribution to the PCA has been, something that is not fully appreciated in ‘classical’ Person-Centred circles in the UK.
Reading Gendlin has deepened my understanding of the PCA, which I feel I’m coming to understand more and more.
But the more I understand the more questions come to me.
So what is the ‘edge’ in all of this that makes this search so meaningful, even after 30 years?
As I look again at the Haystacks, I can realise that there is an ‘edge’ of ‘wonder’ of ‘not understanding’ that makes this for me deeperthan a purely ‘intellectual’ quest.
The approach brings us to the ‘edge’ of our understanding of what it means to be a human being. It also re-connects us with the ‘idealism’ of early Rogers and early Gendlin, which somehow feels even more vital today than it did back in the 1960s and 70s.
PCA/ Focusing Background
In the mid-1980s I read Carl Rogers’ On Becoming a Person which asked many of the ‘who am I?’ questions that seem to be my lifelong obsession. Something inspired me to change direction from my original academic field of English Literature- and I decided to train in the Person-Centred Approach (together with my friend and colleague, Campbell Purton) on the first professional training that was run by Brian Thorne and Dave Mearns.
From the beginning of my training I worked as a Person-Centred counsellor at the University Counselling Service at the University of East Anglia, first as a trainee, then as a counsellor and eventually I succeeded Brian Thorne as Director of the Service in 1998. I didn’t leave full-time employment at UEA until the end of 2013.
In the early 1990s I joined with Brian Thorne in launching the first professional training in the Person-Centred Approach at UEA. For most of the 1990s we delivered a one-year ‘intensive’ version of the training that I’d received myself, which is why I know ‘classical’ PCA like ‘the back of my hand’.
In order to prepare for this presentation I re-read the first edition of Person-Centred Counselling in Action written by Brian and Dave during the period of our initial training and published in 1988. It re-created perfectly for me the ‘atmosphere’ and the thinking that underpinned our training- and I found myself very moved.
It was almost like reading an autobiography of a very significant part of my life. It actually felt like ‘coming home’ to an incredibly trustworthy base.
I stopped working on the training course when I became Director of the Counselling Service, but, having gone through basic the Person-Centred training material 7 or 8 times I was both ‘indoctrinated’ and increasingly frustrated. Things didn’t quite add up- but, while I was teaching what I can now see as a rather ‘limited’ version of the Approach, it was difficult for me to conceptualise the discomfort I had increasingly begun to experience.
Basically, there were too many ‘static’ concepts. Why should ‘empathy’ be a ‘process’, but not ‘congruence’, for example?
Somewhere around 2000 Campbell Purton had trained in Focusing and introduced Focusing to UEA. The only way of us being able to launch this was for me also to undertake different Focusing trainings and join him on the training course.
Although my time and space were very limited- because by this time I was primarily ‘a manager’- my reading of Gendlin- especially his 1964 Theory- began to broaden my understanding.
More recently, reading the early Gendlin papers in the Gendlin online library has made it clear to me that, had Gendlin and Rogers continued to work together, it is most likely that the theory of the PCA would have integrated (for example) Gendlin’s ‘process’ view of congruence and would actually have made a lot more sense.
What Gendlin perceived and expressed very clearly back in 1959 was that ‘the theory…is formulated in static terms while it implies a dynamic process. I call this dynamic process “experiencing”’ (1959: 3)
As it is, Gendlin’s thinking was only integrated into what became known as ‘the Person-Centred Experiential’ arm of the PCA in the US and the UK which adopts Focusing as a taught procedure as one of its ‘techniques’ to work directly with the client’s experiencing process. My early memory of PCE conferences is of furious battles between ‘classical’ PCA practitioners and the ‘experiential’ camp whom we regarded as ‘the enemy’.
The subtlety and depth of Gendlin’s contribution to our understanding of Rogers’ work I think has never been fully integrated into Person-Centred trainings in the UK, including our own at UEA. Although the concepts are less ‘static’ in the 4thedition of PCCA, I think the understanding of ‘experiencing’ remains limited in PCA circles in both the UK and the US.
CHRISTIANE
General introduction
It has been an interesting and inspiring experience to prepare this presentation together during the last weeks. It was not only an intellectual pleasure, but also surprisingly moving. For both of us it meant to revisit our past – in terms of long ago memories about our own beginnings as trainees and afterwards as assistants, as trainers, as psychotherapists and supervisors, as readers and writers, as members of associations and groups of colleagues– which meant re-visiting “the whole” of our professional identity.
Judy and I got to know each other rather late in our careers, and we immediately shared a deep understanding of our work and our values. We became friends, started to travel together, spent time at each other`s houses, discussed and exchanged a lot. After a while, we began to teach together.
When we - as preparation for this conference - began to tell each other in more detail where we came from and where we are now, it was a real eye opener to realise how differently we experienced and lived forward the person-centred and the Focusing-oriented approach.
In our presentation we will take you with us on this journey and will show you, where our revisiting process had led us.
JUDY
The Haystacks
Back in February I went to Boston, US, and, on the last day of my visit, I spent several hours going round the Museum of Fine Art. By the end of the visit I was completely ‘saturated’ with amazing art works.
But, of all the wonderful paintings that I saw I kept being drawn back to two images of a haystack, hung side by side. One was painted in summer at sunset and the other ‘snow effect’.
I loved the fact that Monet had re-visited these images in different seasons and given such attention to re-creating the colours of the sunset, the pinks and the oranges in ‘sunset’, the blues and yellow of ‘snow effect’. One evokes warmth and the other cold. I found myself looking at them again and again- and I couldn’t tear myself away from them.
Rogers/ Gendlin
For me, this is similar to how I feel about the Person-Centred Approach. I am drawn over and over again to try to understand why it matters so much to me- why can’t I let go of it? Having been ‘classically trained’ in the PCA where I simply knew Focusing as a taught procedure, I have spent the past 15 years or so reading Gendlin and coming to terms with how hugely significant his contribution to the PCA has been, something that is not fully appreciated in ‘classical’ Person-Centred circles in the UK.
Reading Gendlin has deepened my understanding of the PCA, which I feel I’m coming to understand more and more.
But the more I understand the more questions come to me.
So what is the ‘edge’ in all of this that makes this search so meaningful, even after 30 years?
As I look again at the Haystacks, I can realise that there is an ‘edge’ of ‘wonder’ of ‘not understanding’ that makes this for me deeperthan a purely ‘intellectual’ quest.
The approach brings us to the ‘edge’ of our understanding of what it means to be a human being. It also re-connects us with the ‘idealism’ of early Rogers and early Gendlin, which somehow feels even more vital today than it did back in the 1960s and 70s.
PCA/ Focusing Background
In the mid-1980s I read Carl Rogers’ On Becoming a Person which asked many of the ‘who am I?’ questions that seem to be my lifelong obsession. Something inspired me to change direction from my original academic field of English Literature- and I decided to train in the Person-Centred Approach (together with my friend and colleague, Campbell Purton) on the first professional training that was run by Brian Thorne and Dave Mearns.
From the beginning of my training I worked as a Person-Centred counsellor at the University Counselling Service at the University of East Anglia, first as a trainee, then as a counsellor and eventually I succeeded Brian Thorne as Director of the Service in 1998. I didn’t leave full-time employment at UEA until the end of 2013.
In the early 1990s I joined with Brian Thorne in launching the first professional training in the Person-Centred Approach at UEA. For most of the 1990s we delivered a one-year ‘intensive’ version of the training that I’d received myself, which is why I know ‘classical’ PCA like ‘the back of my hand’.
In order to prepare for this presentation I re-read the first edition of Person-Centred Counselling in Action written by Brian and Dave during the period of our initial training and published in 1988. It re-created perfectly for me the ‘atmosphere’ and the thinking that underpinned our training- and I found myself very moved.
It was almost like reading an autobiography of a very significant part of my life. It actually felt like ‘coming home’ to an incredibly trustworthy base.
I stopped working on the training course when I became Director of the Counselling Service, but, having gone through basic the Person-Centred training material 7 or 8 times I was both ‘indoctrinated’ and increasingly frustrated. Things didn’t quite add up- but, while I was teaching what I can now see as a rather ‘limited’ version of the Approach, it was difficult for me to conceptualise the discomfort I had increasingly begun to experience.
Basically, there were too many ‘static’ concepts. Why should ‘empathy’ be a ‘process’, but not ‘congruence’, for example?
Somewhere around 2000 Campbell Purton had trained in Focusing and introduced Focusing to UEA. The only way of us being able to launch this was for me also to undertake different Focusing trainings and join him on the training course.
Although my time and space were very limited- because by this time I was primarily ‘a manager’- my reading of Gendlin- especially his 1964 Theory- began to broaden my understanding.
More recently, reading the early Gendlin papers in the Gendlin online library has made it clear to me that, had Gendlin and Rogers continued to work together, it is most likely that the theory of the PCA would have integrated (for example) Gendlin’s ‘process’ view of congruence and would actually have made a lot more sense.
What Gendlin perceived and expressed very clearly back in 1959 was that ‘the theory…is formulated in static terms while it implies a dynamic process. I call this dynamic process “experiencing”’ (1959: 3)
As it is, Gendlin’s thinking was only integrated into what became known as ‘the Person-Centred Experiential’ arm of the PCA in the US and the UK which adopts Focusing as a taught procedure as one of its ‘techniques’ to work directly with the client’s experiencing process. My early memory of PCE conferences is of furious battles between ‘classical’ PCA practitioners and the ‘experiential’ camp whom we regarded as ‘the enemy’.
The subtlety and depth of Gendlin’s contribution to our understanding of Rogers’ work I think has never been fully integrated into Person-Centred trainings in the UK, including our own at UEA. Although the concepts are less ‘static’ in the 4thedition of PCCA, I think the understanding of ‘experiencing’ remains limited in PCA circles in both the UK and the US.
CHRISTIANE
By contrast with Judy I belonged to the few people of my generation who learned the person-centred approach at the same time as the experiential point of view in one training. Only later did I realise the huge difference to those people who learned the PCA first and then “added” Focusing/FOT to it and integrated it – or, as others did, refused to do so and fought against the “technique”, which they condemned not being “genuine client centred”. When I look at my professional situations, colleagues, who knew the experiential approach as well, had always inspired me. I echo Judy in her memories of the frustrating “battlefields” – and it is not over yet: I just left a situation at home where our institute has to prove whether it could be accepted as a “right” Person-Centred Training…. and immediately the old struggles began…
Personal remarks
The therapeutic approach one chooses often has to do with a very personal predisposition, question or fascination.
I live in Switzerland now, but was born in Germany in the post-2nd-world-war-period. My father was a soldier in Russia; he was wounded and spent some years in a Russian prison camp. My mother worked as an employee of her company in Russia as well and spent the many months of the 2ndWorld war in her bombed hometown, in Essen. Her younger brother was a soldier too and never came back.
After the war, my parents met each other and married 1948. On the photos of this time they look thin and fragile and smile the cautious smile of people who escaped.
I was born a year later.
Why do I tell this?
Until a few years ago I wouldn`t have dreamt of connecting aspects of my biography to the 2ndWorld War. Of course, there have been some stories told in my family again and again. Normally harmless ones, told incidentally. How my father promised my mother on the day of their marriage that she should never again suffer from cold and hunger. How it was to eat the first banana. How skilful my mother has been putting together clothes for us children from old rags. But between the lines of these light-hearted stories there were memories we only could sense from the atmosphere in the room. Asking for more details always provoked this specific gesture: my mother brushing non-existent crumbs from the tablecloth, murmuring “Oh, this is all long ago…. Let’s look forward.” My father remained silent, hidden behind his newspaper.
It was only after my parents’ death that I found pictures of my uncle. My mother never spoke a word about her brother with whom she lived together for 16 years. My grandparents, who lost their only son, had turned to stone; they never shared a word about him.
As a child I read books about ancient times and wanted to be an archaeologist, digging for buried things. When I visited Athens for the first time, I remember vividly the night when Pavlos Zarogiannis took me for a walk and showed me the acropolis by night. It had a quality that made me speechless. I visited the hill and the new museum at its feet the next day and was spellbound. Later on I went to another museum, and there I saw by chance a little video about an archaeological excavation on some of the little Greek islands. I was, to my astonishment, moved to tears. How carefully, how gently they treated each little broken fragment, cleaned it and laid it each to the other ones. And afterwards, they slowly connected them to the history of this little island, to long ago buildings, to the art … so that these little fragments became meaningful and showed a part of the bigger picture.
Later on in my own therapy I found words, my own words, for the atmosphere I lived in, I found meaning and answers in myself, in my own experiencing, instead of waiting for a “truth” coming from the outside…. And I realised that many things would forever stay unspoken, unprocessed, a shadow hanging over the next generations.
All this belongs to my personal history, to the MORE: to re-connect with something, which was lost, to make meaning. As long as I remember I have been obsessed with the issue of communication, with understanding and misunderstanding. I always wanted to find out about reality. I always wanted to support people to find their own voice. And I passionately spoke up (this would be another personal thread!) for diversity, for something I experienced over and over again in my life and in my work: that people think and feel and live differently, and that generalizations always miss out something crucial.
Professional background
Later on, when I chose my psychotherapy training, it was clear that I would not be happy with a theory consisting of fixed and unchangeable assumptions. Living in a rather floating world myself, I felt no need for reifications and for fixed knowledge.
So I was at ease with the attitude of really being open, to live with the unknown and to trust in something unfolding in a process, unpredictably.
I was happy with Rogers, with the challenge of empathy from moment to moment, always listening to clients fromtheir frame of reference, with trying to be true to myself and to my clients, with the craft and art to “dip from the pool of implicit meanings just at the edge of the client’s awareness.”
And I loved Gendlin for his experiential approach, hisbody-in-situation,the not yet but more thanwhen we refer to our felt sensing, his interaction first, his speaking from, not about.I studied Gendlin`s philosophy and recently translated his “A Process Model” together with Donata Schoeller into German.
After having completed my trainings and having worked as a therapist for some years, I founded together with my husband Ernst Juchli and some colleagues our own training institute, the GFK. We trained psychotherapists and counsellors in our own method, which was an integration of the person-centred and experiential approach and a person-centred body psychotherapy we developed. I do not lead the institute any more, but still work part time as supervisor and trainer.
JUDY
The Spiritual/ Mystical/ That, which is beyond words…
My understanding of the PCA has always included the spiritual dimension of the person, right from the outset, and for this I am very much indebted to Brian Thorne, who is very open to his own mystical/ spiritual side and always highlighted Rogers’ emphasis towards the end of his life on what he calls the quality of ‘presence’:
…when I am closest to my inner, intuitive self, when I am somehow in touch with the unknown in me, when perhaps I am in a slightly altered state of consciousness, then whatever I do seems to be full of healing. Then simply my presence is releasing and helpful to the other. (1980: 129; Rogers’ italics)
We were encouraged as trainees to develop this kind of open-ness. I remember during one of our training weeks being in an outdoor encounter group. Suddenly, in the distance, I saw a clump of trees shift from one place to another. With it came a corresponding ‘inner’ movement. It felt very meaningful. I remember Brian responding to me with great attentiveness, really encouraging me to stay with something that was totally incomprehensible to me- and also his ‘protecting’ me by holding up his hand to ward off intrusive comments from other trainees (and, indeed, from the other facilitator) so that I could allow myself to simply be with the sense of ‘wonder’ that had come to me in that moment.
Such acknowledgement of the ‘mysterious’, the ‘incomprehensible’, that which cannot be expressed in words, has always been a part of my experience and understanding of the PCA so that my trust in what is going on ‘inside’ me- even when it makes no immediate sense- has always been very strong and grows stronger now that I don’t have to protect myself as carefully as I did when I was at the university.
Probably the most meaningful statement to me in the whole of Rogers is this:
Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me.
Neither the Bible nor the prophets- neither Freud nor research- neither the revelations of God nor man- can take precedence over my own direct experience. (Rogers, 1961:23-24)
Were I to replace the more static term ‘experience’ with the more fluid ‘experiencing’ and add to the list of authorities then it becomes even more meaningful:
Experiencingis, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my ownexperiencing. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experiencing. It is toexperiencingthat I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me.
Neither the Bible nor the prophets- neither Freud nor research- neither the revelations of God nor man- not Rogers not Gendlin- can take precedence over my own direct experiencing.
The concept of ‘experiencing’ allows us to know ourselves as ‘process’, not as a sequence of separate ‘experiences’, but as a continuous ‘inner flow’. As for the ‘authority’, while I know that I have learnt vast amounts from different teachers and writers and colleagues, I can only really deepen my understanding if I can accept the truth of my own experiencing as I know it in my own body. Authorities simply point the way.
But being with a sense of ‘inner flow’ is extremely hard to achieve because we keep coming up against our ‘selves’ in different shapes and forms that block the ‘flow’- at any moment something happens that upsets us: we might feel hurt or angry and we need either to let it go or take time to process it. There are simply not enough hours in the day to process all that goes on in us.
Underneath it all there is a flow of pure experiencing which takes us beyond the narrowed confines of our separate selves.
But, as the Buddhist saying goes, ‘to lose the self you first have to find the self’.
The process of how to move from ‘finding the self’ (through the pain of our existence and how we deal with it) to ‘losing the self’ is actually made explicit in the work of Edwin McMahon, co-founder of the Bio-Spiritual (Focusing) Institute, and one of the few people to have been taught in person by both Rogers and Gendlin.
McMahon puts forward the view that each time we are able to stay with the truth of our experiencing by giving attention to it in a Focusing way we not only release meaning, but also can experience the ‘movement’ that comes as a result of the interaction between ‘symbol and felt meaning’:
The emphasis in this experiencing is not upon informationbut on forward movement in the body’s knowing. Felt-meaning (or felt-sensing) represents an organismic step not simply toward some new ‘content’ of knowledge but into an actual experiencing of the ‘process’ of wholeness itself. (McMahon, 1993: 238; McMahon’s emphasis)
McMahon, as a theologian and a former Jesuit priest, regarded this living out of a ‘bodily felt process of congruence’, whereby we come to know ourselves more and more deeply through genuinely staying with and allowing some of the many manifestations of our individual ‘stuckness’ to dissolve, as expressing ‘what we have heretofore called “Spirit”’ (1993: 241).
This, for me, is a hugely important revelation and challenges me to live in a new way.
A part of this new understanding is accepting the limits of ‘words’. Words hold us back.
One of the ways in which we might move ‘beyond’ to new understanding is perhaps to acknowledge and develop ourselves to listen more and more to that which is beyond or beneath articulation- beyond words. Just as poetry can access deeper truths by ‘circling’ a symbol or a referent, so staying with the felt sense of an image or a situation without striving for it to yield particular meaning leaves things open for the possibility that further ‘truths’ may be revealed, resisting their articulation as part of a fixed and linear narrative.
It was after discussion with one of my PhD students about how poetry works that I realised that when I was in Boston I had in fact been ‘circling’ Monet’s haystacks in this way, waiting for ‘something more’ to come that may never come, but there is nevertheless something very ‘alive’ and compelling and meaningful in the ‘circling’, in the ‘waiting’ in itself.
And over these past few weeks I have been consciously trying to ‘open’ myself to felt senses that have been incomprehensible to me, where any ‘shift’ seems simply to have led to a stronger sense of what’s there already rather than a ‘resolution’ or a ‘dissolving’.
It feels like something more is opening up in me as a result of this- and this is one of my own particular ‘edges’ that feels very meaningful.
I’d like to conclude this section by quoting again from Rogers, who, despite never accepting a process view of congruence, completely understood the potential of this way of living:
Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed…When I am thus able to be in process, it is clear that there can be no closed system of beliefs, no unchanging set of principles which I hold. Life is guided by a changing understanding of and interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming.
CHRISTIANE
Beyond:
I will tell you something about one of the further developments in our work during the last 35 years, starting with one of my favourite quotes by Rogers, written down in 1980:
“It appears to me that the way of the future must be to base our lives and our education on the assumption that there are as many realities as there are persons, and that our highest priority is to accept that hypothesis and proceed from there”. (Rogers 1980, A Way of Being)
I am always delighted when I revisit these few lines. The ways in which people live their life differently has been a never-ending source of wonder and fascination in my life and my professional contexts.
But when I look back at the approaches I was socialized in during my trainings I realise that I had learnt a lot of general assumptions about helpful conditions, which enable people to grow. But the interesting question for me is: All people? And all people in the same way?
So the sentence “as many realities as there are people” remains rather vague. There is no attempt in the PCA, not even tentatively, to systematize the very different realities of people and our very different resonances and responses to them - maybe out of fear of “diagnosing” them?
We tried to stay near our wonder and our fascination by gathering experiences: for example the different ways people “did” focusing. Our amazingly different responses to so called “difficult” clients. The discovering of recurring, persisting and often astonishingly change-resistant patterns in us, our clients, and our therapeutic relationship.
We tried to “collect” these experiences in a person-centred and experiential way by asking our trainees and supervisees precisely about their inner world. We listened respectfully, because to open up about these often rather difficult parts of their persons needed trust and courage. We offered our honest response. We learned from each other and felt deeply grateful. For our trainees it was a revelation and a big surprise to detect how different the worlds are we live in. They were puzzled: Oh really, this is not the way all people think? Or: Oh, there are others who react like I do? They began to look closer and found out personal patterns: Are they always the ones who immediately feel afraid? Or get angry? Is it typical for them to think of difficulties first? Do they search for intensity in their lives? Is there a tendency to immediately have a plan, a strategy? Or do they struggle with questions of worth and values (which not all people do!)?
We found out that all of us have special aspects and ways of relating that are one-sided. We called them “sensitivities”. They are always both: talents and limitations, strengths and weaknesses. And we realised that all of us, especially we as professionals, need to be aware of these parts, because they influence how we feel and think and act in our situations.
We found names for these patterns; we tried to do some theory building around our experiences that was compatible with our approach – which was not at all easy.
Gendlin didn`t seem to be interested in exploring the various kinds of patterns, he wrote in his 1964 article “No one is greatly changed by responses and analyses of how he does not function.” I am not so sure!
Rogers’ model about the development of “disturbances” out of the “conditions of worth” did not match our experiences with all our clients and was far too one-sided.
Body therapists at that time worked within a psychoanalytical framework.
And we were dedicated to not using medical or psychiatric terms and thinking.
So- what to do?
But then we re-visited the early Gendlin articles, mainly the one written in 1964 - and we were fascinated by his way of describing process-blocking or process-skipping patterns.
He writes in “A Theory of Personality Change”:
We often speak of contents or ”experiences“ as if they were set, shaped units with their own set structure. But this is the case only to the extent that my experience is structure bound in its manner…. Insofar as my experiencing is structure bound, it does not implicitly function. It is not “seamlessly“ felt by me with its thousands of implicit aspects functioning. …Rather, in this regard, my experience is a “frozen whole“ and will not give up its structure. …. (it) is not modified by the present. Hence, it remains the same; it repeats itself in many situations without ever changing. So long as the manner of experience remains structure bound, the structures themselves are not modifiable by present occurrences…structure-bound aspects are not in process.
We immediately liked the term “structure bound”, which Gendlin used from the beginning of working together with Rogers. It was a neutral one; it said nothing about illness or disorder, but about one-sidedness, about frozenness; about not being in process.
When we find ourselves in a stuck state, a “frozen whole”, parts of us do not answer to fresh and new inputs, we meet life with stereotypical reactions, turning around in never-ending circles, there is no ability any more to respond from that inner experiencing place from where new meaning could arise.
If these patterns are strong and the narrowing is almost complete, you may have experienced that even the first movement of a focusing process is almost impossible.
And above all such a well known “always the same”-structure is more than a “part”, it has become a lifestyle, a habit, a way of being.
Using this term, we were able to talk about “normality”, not about pathology. It is a process-specificity, which - as Gendlin says 2008 in a letter to his Japanese colleague Suetake -
.... may require interaction to stop structure-bound repetition.
What we realised over time is that there is an active part in ourselves that stabilizes this structure bound feeling and thinking anew every day. It does not feel like it, but try this little exercise:
Tomorrow morning, you can observe how you usually start the day: What precisely do you do first after waking up? What do you think? What do you feel? Listen to your inner sentences; look at your inner pictures. What comes up? Do you recognize a pattern? Something that you always do or think or feel? It is like tuning your instrument for the day – it is very interesting to find out how you do it. Do you create a narrow world with one or two themes that is your well-known music for the day? Or do you open up to the richness of life?
Try the same thing in the evening before you go to sleep: how do you “remember” your day? Of all the hundreds of events and issues that happened: which ones do you choose to be with you again, to colour your memory?
When I use the word “choose” you may notice that I prefer not to think that it is only the environment, which causes pain or limitations and that I only have to free myself from these biographical or cultural restrictions. It is an important part of therapy to learn to step back and recognize my own activity, which sustains a habit, and to be aware how my specific way of being influences my inner world and has an impact on the world around me.
JUDY
A World Gone Mad
The PCA and Focusing as a taught procedure grew up during a time of great idealism. Both Rogers and Gendlin may be seen as part of the Human Potential Movement, which flourished in the 1960s and 70s. The Human Potential Movement made explicit links between human development- such as can be achieved through therapy, participation in groups, self-help, etc.- and the world becoming a better place. These are the words of Abraham Maslow, one of the major influences on the Human Potential Movement:
The empirical fact is that self-actualizing people, our best experiencers, are also our most compassionate, our great improvers and reformers of society, our most effective fighters against injustice, inequality, slavery, cruelty, exploitation (and our best fighters for excellence, effectiveness, competence). (Maslow 1964; 1970, p. 86)
Gendlin and Rogers wrote their own separate ‘visions’ of what the world might come to look like if the values of humanistic psychology could prevail.
In a rather strange and combative paper, entitled ‘A Short Summary and Some Long Predictions’, published in 1970, Gendlin presents some wonderful ideas about how to change society:
The troubled person is all one; he doesn’t have one set of psychological and another set of situational problems, especially if he is poor… The masses of troubled people need help with their total situation, not just with some separate psychological part. Furthermore, while they remain in an institution they cannot get fully well, and when they go home to the original sick making situation which hasn’t changed, they get sick again, and return. A few years ago, if we arrived at this realization, we would say “to get this one patient well you’d have to change the whole system” and we meant, sadly, that of course you couldn’t. But now we are setting about to do just that. (1970:7)
Gendlin proposed that Focusing (which was then being developed as a taught procedure) be taught in hospitals, in schools, in different social environments- something that can be carried out by ordinary people for ordinary people.
What I find very moving about this article is Gendlin’s recognition that each individual needs another individual to take time to be with them, to listen to them- and that everyone needs a group where they can be with themselves and each other at depth. He writes:
The day is fast waning when one must plead “sick” to get a sensitive and impartial listener and willing interactor. Consider how foolish it has really been, that we have given this only to people who were under sufficient pressure to plead “sick” and incapable of helping themselves… In fact, there is plenty of evidence that everyone needs someone, that humans are interaction processes in their very nature. (1970:9)
Reading this nearly 50 years on, it seems, from my own very direct experience in the world of mental health, as if something of this thinking wastaken on board- certainly in the UK. In the 1990s our University Counselling Service was sufficiently well-resourced to offer unlimited counselling to all students.
But today at the University counselling is valued less and less as a ‘preventive’ intervention, the number of counselling sessions on offer is now very limited and students are indeed driven to label themselves as ‘sick’ in order to ‘make the case’ for some kind of therapeutic help. There has been a complete reversal.
In terms of the broader picture of how society will work, Gendlin argues that individuals need to proceed in their living not through what is socially pre-defined, but ‘from our own implicitly meaningful experiencing, which we always have as we say or do anything’ (p.12).
Ten years later, in 1980, Rogers makes his own statement about ‘The World of Tomorrow, and the Person of Tomorrow’ in the final chapter of A Way of Being. His vision does not contain Gendlin’s very practicalsteps for making the world a better place, but he, like Gendlin believed that we are on the edge of a ‘paradigm shift’ which will be brought about by a ‘critical mass’ of individuals who have an openness, a longing for authenticity, who feel a closeness to nature, have a sense of inner authority and a yearning for the spiritual as their key characteristics. He concludes:
The striking thing is that persons with these characteristics will be at home in a world that consists only of vibrating energy, a world with no solid base, a world of process and change, a world in which the mind, in its larger sense, is both aware of, and creates, the new reality. They will be able to make the paradigm shift. (Rogers, 1980: 352)
Rogers follows this statement with a section on ‘Can the Person of Tomorrow Survive?’- and many of the things that he predicts have actually happened over the past forty years- the rise of the conservative right, a trend towards greater fundamentalism, a general ‘hardening’ of attitudes, etc.
But there is something in the vision that is put forward by Rogers and Gendlin that remains radical and very inspiring- very much in keeping with what Mia put forward in her lecture yesterday. How can we look more attentively at what prevents us from being at home in ‘a world that consists only of vibrating energy’ so that we can allow ourselves to be the critical mass that can create ‘the new reality’?
CHRISTIANE
Society/Politics
I want to outline two “crossings”, as Gendlin would call it, where our “thinking beyond” might be fruitful:
1. The area of structure-boundness and theory building,
2. The impact of structure-boundness on the field of professional collegiality.
Just in a nutshell: Rogers always tended to put into the foreground questions of worth, of value, of judgement (see “On Becoming a Person”)– whereas Gendlin always was protesting against authorities and rules and passionately spoke up for freedom (see his “instructions for not following instructions” in his dream book and his 1970 article). It is more than an intellectually amusing hobby to study patterns in concepts. Each theory is shaped by the person who created it, and we have to look at it with critical eyes to not take it for granted as something which should be true for all persons.
Of course our own models have a structure bound aspect as well!
I know that in contexts of collegiality in the political area (which means: how we talk and write about each other in public- how we discuss - how we work together in an association….) being together like this is not at all familiar – it would be an irritation of old patterns, but on the other hand would encourage a new organisation of complexity. I am deeply convinced that it really would make a difference.
I hope that the new generation of person-centred and experiential therapists, our young colleagues, will not lose so much energy in collegial struggles as some of us did in the past and are still doing it.
Maybe this is the umpteenth version of “making the world a better place” people of my generation are committed to.
But perhaps this kind of communication could be of use for the on-going problems and challengesin our world as well?
JUDY
Conclusion
Where did our revisiting process lead us?
It led us to reach these conclusions:
We have the potential to:
REFERENCES
Geiser, Christiane/Moore, Judy (2014) New Ways of Processing Experience. How to Work with Structure-Bound Processes. In Greg Madison (ed.), Theory and Practice of Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy. Beyond the Talking Cure. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, p. 130-145. From https://christianegeiser.ch/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/New-Ways-of-Processing-Experience.pdf
Gendlin, E. T. (1964) A Theory of Personality Change. In Worchel, P. & Byrne, D. (eds.) Personality Change. New York, Wiley. 100-148. From http://www.focusing.org/personality_change.html
Gendlin, E.T. (1970) A short summary and some long predictions. In J.T. Hart & T.M. Tomlinson (Eds.), New directions in client-centered therapy, pp. 544-562 Boston: Houghton Mifflin. From http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2130.html
Gendlin, E. (1986), Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams. Illinois: Chiron Publications
Gendlin, E. (1997) A Process Model. New York: The Focusing Institute
Gendlin, E. (1997/2015) Ein Prozess-Modell. Translated by Donata Schoeller und Christiane Geiser with a first time introduction to Gendlin’s main work by D. Schoeller. Freiburg/Br.: Alber (3rd edition coming up 2018)
Gendlin, E. (2008) Letter to Y. Suetake. In Suetake, Y., Some Odd Concepts in Gendlin’s Process Model and their Clinical Implications. Unpublished paper presented at Philosophy of Psychotherapy Conference, UEA, Norwich , U.K., 2011
Maslow, A. (1964) Religions, Values and Peak Experiences. Ohio: State University Press
McMahon, E. (1993) Beyond the Myth of Dominance: An Alternative to a Violent Society. Kansas City: Sheed and Ward
Mearns, D. and Thorne, B. (1988) Person-Centred Counselling in Action. London: Sage
Rogers, Carl R. (1961) On Becoming a Person. A Therapist`s View of Psychotherapy. London: Constable
Rogers, Carl R. (1966) Client-Centered Therapy. In S. Arieti (Ed.), American handbook of psychiatry(Vol. 3, pp. 183-200). New York: Basic Books.
Rogers, Carl R. (1980) A Way of Being. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
The Spiritual/ Mystical/ That, which is beyond words…
My understanding of the PCA has always included the spiritual dimension of the person, right from the outset, and for this I am very much indebted to Brian Thorne, who is very open to his own mystical/ spiritual side and always highlighted Rogers’ emphasis towards the end of his life on what he calls the quality of ‘presence’:
…when I am closest to my inner, intuitive self, when I am somehow in touch with the unknown in me, when perhaps I am in a slightly altered state of consciousness, then whatever I do seems to be full of healing. Then simply my presence is releasing and helpful to the other. (1980: 129; Rogers’ italics)
We were encouraged as trainees to develop this kind of open-ness. I remember during one of our training weeks being in an outdoor encounter group. Suddenly, in the distance, I saw a clump of trees shift from one place to another. With it came a corresponding ‘inner’ movement. It felt very meaningful. I remember Brian responding to me with great attentiveness, really encouraging me to stay with something that was totally incomprehensible to me- and also his ‘protecting’ me by holding up his hand to ward off intrusive comments from other trainees (and, indeed, from the other facilitator) so that I could allow myself to simply be with the sense of ‘wonder’ that had come to me in that moment.
Such acknowledgement of the ‘mysterious’, the ‘incomprehensible’, that which cannot be expressed in words, has always been a part of my experience and understanding of the PCA so that my trust in what is going on ‘inside’ me- even when it makes no immediate sense- has always been very strong and grows stronger now that I don’t have to protect myself as carefully as I did when I was at the university.
Probably the most meaningful statement to me in the whole of Rogers is this:
Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me.
Neither the Bible nor the prophets- neither Freud nor research- neither the revelations of God nor man- can take precedence over my own direct experience. (Rogers, 1961:23-24)
Were I to replace the more static term ‘experience’ with the more fluid ‘experiencing’ and add to the list of authorities then it becomes even more meaningful:
Experiencingis, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my ownexperiencing. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experiencing. It is toexperiencingthat I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me.
Neither the Bible nor the prophets- neither Freud nor research- neither the revelations of God nor man- not Rogers not Gendlin- can take precedence over my own direct experiencing.
The concept of ‘experiencing’ allows us to know ourselves as ‘process’, not as a sequence of separate ‘experiences’, but as a continuous ‘inner flow’. As for the ‘authority’, while I know that I have learnt vast amounts from different teachers and writers and colleagues, I can only really deepen my understanding if I can accept the truth of my own experiencing as I know it in my own body. Authorities simply point the way.
But being with a sense of ‘inner flow’ is extremely hard to achieve because we keep coming up against our ‘selves’ in different shapes and forms that block the ‘flow’- at any moment something happens that upsets us: we might feel hurt or angry and we need either to let it go or take time to process it. There are simply not enough hours in the day to process all that goes on in us.
Underneath it all there is a flow of pure experiencing which takes us beyond the narrowed confines of our separate selves.
But, as the Buddhist saying goes, ‘to lose the self you first have to find the self’.
The process of how to move from ‘finding the self’ (through the pain of our existence and how we deal with it) to ‘losing the self’ is actually made explicit in the work of Edwin McMahon, co-founder of the Bio-Spiritual (Focusing) Institute, and one of the few people to have been taught in person by both Rogers and Gendlin.
McMahon puts forward the view that each time we are able to stay with the truth of our experiencing by giving attention to it in a Focusing way we not only release meaning, but also can experience the ‘movement’ that comes as a result of the interaction between ‘symbol and felt meaning’:
The emphasis in this experiencing is not upon informationbut on forward movement in the body’s knowing. Felt-meaning (or felt-sensing) represents an organismic step not simply toward some new ‘content’ of knowledge but into an actual experiencing of the ‘process’ of wholeness itself. (McMahon, 1993: 238; McMahon’s emphasis)
McMahon, as a theologian and a former Jesuit priest, regarded this living out of a ‘bodily felt process of congruence’, whereby we come to know ourselves more and more deeply through genuinely staying with and allowing some of the many manifestations of our individual ‘stuckness’ to dissolve, as expressing ‘what we have heretofore called “Spirit”’ (1993: 241).
This, for me, is a hugely important revelation and challenges me to live in a new way.
A part of this new understanding is accepting the limits of ‘words’. Words hold us back.
One of the ways in which we might move ‘beyond’ to new understanding is perhaps to acknowledge and develop ourselves to listen more and more to that which is beyond or beneath articulation- beyond words. Just as poetry can access deeper truths by ‘circling’ a symbol or a referent, so staying with the felt sense of an image or a situation without striving for it to yield particular meaning leaves things open for the possibility that further ‘truths’ may be revealed, resisting their articulation as part of a fixed and linear narrative.
It was after discussion with one of my PhD students about how poetry works that I realised that when I was in Boston I had in fact been ‘circling’ Monet’s haystacks in this way, waiting for ‘something more’ to come that may never come, but there is nevertheless something very ‘alive’ and compelling and meaningful in the ‘circling’, in the ‘waiting’ in itself.
And over these past few weeks I have been consciously trying to ‘open’ myself to felt senses that have been incomprehensible to me, where any ‘shift’ seems simply to have led to a stronger sense of what’s there already rather than a ‘resolution’ or a ‘dissolving’.
It feels like something more is opening up in me as a result of this- and this is one of my own particular ‘edges’ that feels very meaningful.
I’d like to conclude this section by quoting again from Rogers, who, despite never accepting a process view of congruence, completely understood the potential of this way of living:
Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed…When I am thus able to be in process, it is clear that there can be no closed system of beliefs, no unchanging set of principles which I hold. Life is guided by a changing understanding of and interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming.
CHRISTIANE
Beyond:
I will tell you something about one of the further developments in our work during the last 35 years, starting with one of my favourite quotes by Rogers, written down in 1980:
“It appears to me that the way of the future must be to base our lives and our education on the assumption that there are as many realities as there are persons, and that our highest priority is to accept that hypothesis and proceed from there”. (Rogers 1980, A Way of Being)
I am always delighted when I revisit these few lines. The ways in which people live their life differently has been a never-ending source of wonder and fascination in my life and my professional contexts.
But when I look back at the approaches I was socialized in during my trainings I realise that I had learnt a lot of general assumptions about helpful conditions, which enable people to grow. But the interesting question for me is: All people? And all people in the same way?
So the sentence “as many realities as there are people” remains rather vague. There is no attempt in the PCA, not even tentatively, to systematize the very different realities of people and our very different resonances and responses to them - maybe out of fear of “diagnosing” them?
We tried to stay near our wonder and our fascination by gathering experiences: for example the different ways people “did” focusing. Our amazingly different responses to so called “difficult” clients. The discovering of recurring, persisting and often astonishingly change-resistant patterns in us, our clients, and our therapeutic relationship.
We tried to “collect” these experiences in a person-centred and experiential way by asking our trainees and supervisees precisely about their inner world. We listened respectfully, because to open up about these often rather difficult parts of their persons needed trust and courage. We offered our honest response. We learned from each other and felt deeply grateful. For our trainees it was a revelation and a big surprise to detect how different the worlds are we live in. They were puzzled: Oh really, this is not the way all people think? Or: Oh, there are others who react like I do? They began to look closer and found out personal patterns: Are they always the ones who immediately feel afraid? Or get angry? Is it typical for them to think of difficulties first? Do they search for intensity in their lives? Is there a tendency to immediately have a plan, a strategy? Or do they struggle with questions of worth and values (which not all people do!)?
We found out that all of us have special aspects and ways of relating that are one-sided. We called them “sensitivities”. They are always both: talents and limitations, strengths and weaknesses. And we realised that all of us, especially we as professionals, need to be aware of these parts, because they influence how we feel and think and act in our situations.
We found names for these patterns; we tried to do some theory building around our experiences that was compatible with our approach – which was not at all easy.
Gendlin didn`t seem to be interested in exploring the various kinds of patterns, he wrote in his 1964 article “No one is greatly changed by responses and analyses of how he does not function.” I am not so sure!
Rogers’ model about the development of “disturbances” out of the “conditions of worth” did not match our experiences with all our clients and was far too one-sided.
Body therapists at that time worked within a psychoanalytical framework.
And we were dedicated to not using medical or psychiatric terms and thinking.
So- what to do?
But then we re-visited the early Gendlin articles, mainly the one written in 1964 - and we were fascinated by his way of describing process-blocking or process-skipping patterns.
He writes in “A Theory of Personality Change”:
We often speak of contents or ”experiences“ as if they were set, shaped units with their own set structure. But this is the case only to the extent that my experience is structure bound in its manner…. Insofar as my experiencing is structure bound, it does not implicitly function. It is not “seamlessly“ felt by me with its thousands of implicit aspects functioning. …Rather, in this regard, my experience is a “frozen whole“ and will not give up its structure. …. (it) is not modified by the present. Hence, it remains the same; it repeats itself in many situations without ever changing. So long as the manner of experience remains structure bound, the structures themselves are not modifiable by present occurrences…structure-bound aspects are not in process.
We immediately liked the term “structure bound”, which Gendlin used from the beginning of working together with Rogers. It was a neutral one; it said nothing about illness or disorder, but about one-sidedness, about frozenness; about not being in process.
When we find ourselves in a stuck state, a “frozen whole”, parts of us do not answer to fresh and new inputs, we meet life with stereotypical reactions, turning around in never-ending circles, there is no ability any more to respond from that inner experiencing place from where new meaning could arise.
If these patterns are strong and the narrowing is almost complete, you may have experienced that even the first movement of a focusing process is almost impossible.
And above all such a well known “always the same”-structure is more than a “part”, it has become a lifestyle, a habit, a way of being.
Using this term, we were able to talk about “normality”, not about pathology. It is a process-specificity, which - as Gendlin says 2008 in a letter to his Japanese colleague Suetake -
.... may require interaction to stop structure-bound repetition.
What we realised over time is that there is an active part in ourselves that stabilizes this structure bound feeling and thinking anew every day. It does not feel like it, but try this little exercise:
Tomorrow morning, you can observe how you usually start the day: What precisely do you do first after waking up? What do you think? What do you feel? Listen to your inner sentences; look at your inner pictures. What comes up? Do you recognize a pattern? Something that you always do or think or feel? It is like tuning your instrument for the day – it is very interesting to find out how you do it. Do you create a narrow world with one or two themes that is your well-known music for the day? Or do you open up to the richness of life?
Try the same thing in the evening before you go to sleep: how do you “remember” your day? Of all the hundreds of events and issues that happened: which ones do you choose to be with you again, to colour your memory?
When I use the word “choose” you may notice that I prefer not to think that it is only the environment, which causes pain or limitations and that I only have to free myself from these biographical or cultural restrictions. It is an important part of therapy to learn to step back and recognize my own activity, which sustains a habit, and to be aware how my specific way of being influences my inner world and has an impact on the world around me.
JUDY
A World Gone Mad
The PCA and Focusing as a taught procedure grew up during a time of great idealism. Both Rogers and Gendlin may be seen as part of the Human Potential Movement, which flourished in the 1960s and 70s. The Human Potential Movement made explicit links between human development- such as can be achieved through therapy, participation in groups, self-help, etc.- and the world becoming a better place. These are the words of Abraham Maslow, one of the major influences on the Human Potential Movement:
The empirical fact is that self-actualizing people, our best experiencers, are also our most compassionate, our great improvers and reformers of society, our most effective fighters against injustice, inequality, slavery, cruelty, exploitation (and our best fighters for excellence, effectiveness, competence). (Maslow 1964; 1970, p. 86)
Gendlin and Rogers wrote their own separate ‘visions’ of what the world might come to look like if the values of humanistic psychology could prevail.
In a rather strange and combative paper, entitled ‘A Short Summary and Some Long Predictions’, published in 1970, Gendlin presents some wonderful ideas about how to change society:
The troubled person is all one; he doesn’t have one set of psychological and another set of situational problems, especially if he is poor… The masses of troubled people need help with their total situation, not just with some separate psychological part. Furthermore, while they remain in an institution they cannot get fully well, and when they go home to the original sick making situation which hasn’t changed, they get sick again, and return. A few years ago, if we arrived at this realization, we would say “to get this one patient well you’d have to change the whole system” and we meant, sadly, that of course you couldn’t. But now we are setting about to do just that. (1970:7)
Gendlin proposed that Focusing (which was then being developed as a taught procedure) be taught in hospitals, in schools, in different social environments- something that can be carried out by ordinary people for ordinary people.
What I find very moving about this article is Gendlin’s recognition that each individual needs another individual to take time to be with them, to listen to them- and that everyone needs a group where they can be with themselves and each other at depth. He writes:
The day is fast waning when one must plead “sick” to get a sensitive and impartial listener and willing interactor. Consider how foolish it has really been, that we have given this only to people who were under sufficient pressure to plead “sick” and incapable of helping themselves… In fact, there is plenty of evidence that everyone needs someone, that humans are interaction processes in their very nature. (1970:9)
Reading this nearly 50 years on, it seems, from my own very direct experience in the world of mental health, as if something of this thinking wastaken on board- certainly in the UK. In the 1990s our University Counselling Service was sufficiently well-resourced to offer unlimited counselling to all students.
But today at the University counselling is valued less and less as a ‘preventive’ intervention, the number of counselling sessions on offer is now very limited and students are indeed driven to label themselves as ‘sick’ in order to ‘make the case’ for some kind of therapeutic help. There has been a complete reversal.
In terms of the broader picture of how society will work, Gendlin argues that individuals need to proceed in their living not through what is socially pre-defined, but ‘from our own implicitly meaningful experiencing, which we always have as we say or do anything’ (p.12).
Ten years later, in 1980, Rogers makes his own statement about ‘The World of Tomorrow, and the Person of Tomorrow’ in the final chapter of A Way of Being. His vision does not contain Gendlin’s very practicalsteps for making the world a better place, but he, like Gendlin believed that we are on the edge of a ‘paradigm shift’ which will be brought about by a ‘critical mass’ of individuals who have an openness, a longing for authenticity, who feel a closeness to nature, have a sense of inner authority and a yearning for the spiritual as their key characteristics. He concludes:
The striking thing is that persons with these characteristics will be at home in a world that consists only of vibrating energy, a world with no solid base, a world of process and change, a world in which the mind, in its larger sense, is both aware of, and creates, the new reality. They will be able to make the paradigm shift. (Rogers, 1980: 352)
Rogers follows this statement with a section on ‘Can the Person of Tomorrow Survive?’- and many of the things that he predicts have actually happened over the past forty years- the rise of the conservative right, a trend towards greater fundamentalism, a general ‘hardening’ of attitudes, etc.
But there is something in the vision that is put forward by Rogers and Gendlin that remains radical and very inspiring- very much in keeping with what Mia put forward in her lecture yesterday. How can we look more attentively at what prevents us from being at home in ‘a world that consists only of vibrating energy’ so that we can allow ourselves to be the critical mass that can create ‘the new reality’?
CHRISTIANE
Society/Politics
I want to outline two “crossings”, as Gendlin would call it, where our “thinking beyond” might be fruitful:
1. The area of structure-boundness and theory building,
2. The impact of structure-boundness on the field of professional collegiality.
- It has been a fascinating part of our research to study creative processes including theory building from this point of view. Looking at concepts and models, I am convinced that allof them have partly structure-bound aspects. This is completely “normal”. We all think in the framework of our culture, our time, of our own development and history- and we all are influenced by the assumptions we foreground in our individual way of being. But the important point is to not mistake our findings for “the truth” and as something, which should be valid for all people.
Just in a nutshell: Rogers always tended to put into the foreground questions of worth, of value, of judgement (see “On Becoming a Person”)– whereas Gendlin always was protesting against authorities and rules and passionately spoke up for freedom (see his “instructions for not following instructions” in his dream book and his 1970 article). It is more than an intellectually amusing hobby to study patterns in concepts. Each theory is shaped by the person who created it, and we have to look at it with critical eyes to not take it for granted as something which should be true for all persons.
Of course our own models have a structure bound aspect as well!
- Rogers and Gendlin were very much in favour of not limiting the approach to psychotherapy, but to all our relationships and living processes – and I want to point to that part of our professional lives where we interact with colleagues. So often we seem to lose all the qualities of interaction and communication we are trained in and become structure-bound as soon as we sit in circles where themes like power, ethics, money or the “rightness” of a theory come up. After years and years of frustrating meetings I want to make a plea for using a disciplined version of our professional skills in these contexts as well.
I know that in contexts of collegiality in the political area (which means: how we talk and write about each other in public- how we discuss - how we work together in an association….) being together like this is not at all familiar – it would be an irritation of old patterns, but on the other hand would encourage a new organisation of complexity. I am deeply convinced that it really would make a difference.
I hope that the new generation of person-centred and experiential therapists, our young colleagues, will not lose so much energy in collegial struggles as some of us did in the past and are still doing it.
Maybe this is the umpteenth version of “making the world a better place” people of my generation are committed to.
But perhaps this kind of communication could be of use for the on-going problems and challengesin our world as well?
JUDY
Conclusion
Where did our revisiting process lead us?
It led us to reach these conclusions:
We have the potential to:
- Recognise that we are all different/ unique
- Understand that it is possible to stay with a ‘wordless’ flow of experiencing and feel more at ease in a ‘world that consists only of vibrating energy’
- Become part of a ‘paradigm shift’ that can create a ‘new reality’ (which also has social implications)
- Get to know our own structure-bound patterns and how to get back to ‘process’
- Take care that communication in our collegial groups embraces the essence of our approach
REFERENCES
Geiser, Christiane/Moore, Judy (2014) New Ways of Processing Experience. How to Work with Structure-Bound Processes. In Greg Madison (ed.), Theory and Practice of Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy. Beyond the Talking Cure. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, p. 130-145. From https://christianegeiser.ch/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/New-Ways-of-Processing-Experience.pdf
Gendlin, E. T. (1964) A Theory of Personality Change. In Worchel, P. & Byrne, D. (eds.) Personality Change. New York, Wiley. 100-148. From http://www.focusing.org/personality_change.html
Gendlin, E.T. (1970) A short summary and some long predictions. In J.T. Hart & T.M. Tomlinson (Eds.), New directions in client-centered therapy, pp. 544-562 Boston: Houghton Mifflin. From http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2130.html
Gendlin, E. (1986), Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams. Illinois: Chiron Publications
Gendlin, E. (1997) A Process Model. New York: The Focusing Institute
Gendlin, E. (1997/2015) Ein Prozess-Modell. Translated by Donata Schoeller und Christiane Geiser with a first time introduction to Gendlin’s main work by D. Schoeller. Freiburg/Br.: Alber (3rd edition coming up 2018)
Gendlin, E. (2008) Letter to Y. Suetake. In Suetake, Y., Some Odd Concepts in Gendlin’s Process Model and their Clinical Implications. Unpublished paper presented at Philosophy of Psychotherapy Conference, UEA, Norwich , U.K., 2011
Maslow, A. (1964) Religions, Values and Peak Experiences. Ohio: State University Press
McMahon, E. (1993) Beyond the Myth of Dominance: An Alternative to a Violent Society. Kansas City: Sheed and Ward
Mearns, D. and Thorne, B. (1988) Person-Centred Counselling in Action. London: Sage
Rogers, Carl R. (1961) On Becoming a Person. A Therapist`s View of Psychotherapy. London: Constable
Rogers, Carl R. (1966) Client-Centered Therapy. In S. Arieti (Ed.), American handbook of psychiatry(Vol. 3, pp. 183-200). New York: Basic Books.
Rogers, Carl R. (1980) A Way of Being. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Workshops
A Process Model
by Donata Schoeller
by Donata Schoeller
ABSTRACT
Abstract: In this workshop I introduce some basic concepts of A Process Model in experiential exercises. # What I want to convey is how these concepts “open up” the intricacy of our experiential process, instead of “determining” or reducing it. Gendlin speaks of functional concepts. They allow us to think and experience deeper the way we think and experience. We will read short passages from A Process Model, speak about them, and then exercise and share.
THINK DIFFERENT (TAE)
by Nada Lou
by Nada Lou
ABSTRACT
Abstract: Thinking at the Edge (TAE) is a practice created from Gendlin’s Philosophy. In this course you will learn how to find your growing edge of awareness; how to think and use language from your felt sensing; how to write for yourself and how to write for the public. You will delight in having tools to enable your passions and interests to become reality. # Thinking in a Focusing way opens a whole new awareness of hidden gifts you’ve been holding inside for years. During the Focusing process something in you changes and that shift becomes a new doorway into your inner world. Thinking takes the shift to its exciting next step. In a step-by-step process you will learn how to say more about what you know inside but cannot yet fully articulate. You will learn how to take your ideas into action. # If you ask yourself:
Am I full of information, but often feel that I lack clarity? Do I find that often I have things I want to say, but I'm not always able to express myself fully?
Do I find that writing is too often a struggle?
Do I sometimes feel stuck and don't know how to find the next right step? # If you have answered yes to any of these questions, then THINK DIFFERENT (TAE) is for you.
FACING YOUR EXISTENTIAL DEMONS:
Experiential workshop on focusing from your safe place
by Claude Missiaen
Experiential workshop on focusing from your safe place
by Claude Missiaen
PRESENTATION
Upscaling Focusing: Can we take an individual practice as a template for social and community organising?
by Greg Madison
by Greg Madison
Workshop Notes - ABSTRACT
Abstract: Together we will outline some aspects of what we know from Focusing and discuss what, if anything, these aspects could offer to group processes and community organising. # Rather than leaving behind what we have learned from Focusing and defaulting to conventional formats of organising, what would it look like if we 'upscaled' Focusing to inform all our organising so that it is consistent with our Focusing practice? Can we have Focusing-oriented Democracy, Focusing-oriented Communities & Organisations, Focusing-oriented Politics...? Would we want to 'trust the process' in groups like we do in our own Focusing? Treat every 'voice' equally? # Greg will present a few of his own ideas and then facilitate a discussion about 'social Focusing', whether it is possible and if so, whether we would want it.....
Interactive Focusing as an Instance of ReLiFo
by Tine Swyngedouw
by Tine Swyngedouw
ABSTRACT
Abstract: Interactive Focusing was developed by Janet Klein & Mary McGuire. # You can use Interactive Focusing to get in touch with your inner world, to improve your empathic skills, to strengthen your relationship with someone and to work on relational problems. # Janet hoped it would contribute to more peace in the world. It can help people who are very different from each other to get into a safe conversation and it helps to grow more understanding and connection between them. # When Eugene Gendlin was looking for a name for what it was he was doing in therapy, one of the ideas he had was: ReLiFo which means Relating, Listening and Focusing. I would like to use these words to describe Interactive Focusing. # Janet Klein & Mary McGuire added 3 steps to focusing partnerships: 1. Double empathic moment, 2. Interactive response and 3. Relationship check. I will explain these briefly. # We will do a paired exercise so you can have a first-hand experience of what it is like to do Interactive Focusing. # I learned Interactive Focusing from Janet Klein, Mary McGuire and Masumi Maeda.
Presence In-Action through Focusing as a Life Skill
by Patricia Foster & Eirini Davleri
by Patricia Foster & Eirini Davleri
ABSTRACT
Abstract: A 1½ hour advanced experiential workshop on how the self-perpetuating process of Presence, both in the Philosophical and Spiritual context, can be realised as a practical life skill. An inter-relating multifaceted tool for everyday living situations. # Recommendation: For Focusers who are comfortable with clearing a space, inner dialogue with the felt sense and embodied listening. # Experiential Workshop presented by Focusing as a Life Skill: www.focusinglifeskill.com & [email protected]
Deep Connection... Touch of Shiatsu, Focusing and Body-Mind
by Antigoni Tsegeli
by Antigoni Tsegeli
ABSTRACT
Abstract: I am practicing “ Focusing as Life Skill”, which has inspired me to integrate Focusing, together with Clean Language, into my Shiatsu Practice. The positive feedback received from clients, when using Focusing in my sessions, greatly encourages me to continue to explore even more ways to introduce Focusing into my Shiatsu practice. # Shiatsu is a physical therapy that supports and strengthens the body’s natural ability to heal and balance itself. It works on the whole person - not just with the physical body, but also with the psychological, emotional and spiritual aspects of being. In the practice of Shiatsu, a practitioner uses touch, comfortable pressure and manipulative techniques to adjust the body’s physical structure and balance its energy flow. It is a deeply relaxing experience and regular treatments can alleviate stress and illness and maintain health and wellbeing. I am currently exploring the deep connection through Touch of Shiatsu, Focusing and Body-mind. The feedback I have received from tuning the process’s of Shiatsu and Focusing together, has motivated me to want to demonstrate my experience so far, and has created a further intention to connect the focusing process with other body modalities. I sense that resonance happens on a multidimensional level in the entire body and that is healing… # In my workshop I will demonstrate how this occurs by guiding the attendees in pairs through some simple Shiatsu techniques by using the hands on the body together with Focusing to experience how the interaction is between them. Duration 1 ½ hours – no more than 20 participants.
The Art of Feeling Whole
by Ifat Eckstein
by Ifat Eckstein
Short description - handout
the_art_of_feeling_whole-paper_for_the_efa_conference.pdf | |
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Short Description
The Art of Feeling Whole
Experiential workshop given by Ifat Eckstein at the EFA Conference, Greece 2018
The Art of Feeling Whole
Experiential workshop given by Ifat Eckstein at the EFA Conference, Greece 2018
The workshop, The Art of Feeling whole, is part of WIDEFULNESS, a multidimensional approach integrating Focusing, contemporary psychotherapy and ancient healing practices, which I am developing and leading in Israel.
The vision of WIDEFULNESS is to enable us to sense ourselves and our lives in a holographic way, to sense from inside our inseparable connection to a wider whole, to see ourselves as whole.
In order to create an experiential journey towards this, The Art of Feeling Whole workshop began with a transpersonal meditation. This gave us the opportunity to experience how our consciousness can rise beyond ‘the regular perception of things’ to ‘pure qualities’ like freedom, peace, resilience, joy and more. Much healing energy is held in these qualities and we can be nourished and healed by them.
Using the ancient Chakra Map, we paved a way to hold the many levels of consciousness within us, exploring and acknowledging the role and importance of each level. We can see it in a metaphoric way as a building with several floors where each floor brings a new perspective of our lives. From the highest floor, we can sense our inseparable connection to a wider whole.
Through guided meditation, working with colors and the Focusing process, we met ourselves from this wider perspective and sensed how it is manifested in our lives at this precise moment.
Rising beyond the individual, the workshop created a shared space of intimacy and connection. Expressed through words and the organic movement of the participants to sit in a close, intimate circle at the end of the workshop, we could feel our human wholeness and connection. The content of the workshop had become our experience in the here and now.
You are invited to learn more about WIDEFULNESS on www.widefulness.com.
The following link holds the paper which the participants received in the workshop: http://www.widefulness.com/en/the-art-of-feeling-whole/
#
The vision of WIDEFULNESS is to enable us to sense ourselves and our lives in a holographic way, to sense from inside our inseparable connection to a wider whole, to see ourselves as whole.
In order to create an experiential journey towards this, The Art of Feeling Whole workshop began with a transpersonal meditation. This gave us the opportunity to experience how our consciousness can rise beyond ‘the regular perception of things’ to ‘pure qualities’ like freedom, peace, resilience, joy and more. Much healing energy is held in these qualities and we can be nourished and healed by them.
Using the ancient Chakra Map, we paved a way to hold the many levels of consciousness within us, exploring and acknowledging the role and importance of each level. We can see it in a metaphoric way as a building with several floors where each floor brings a new perspective of our lives. From the highest floor, we can sense our inseparable connection to a wider whole.
Through guided meditation, working with colors and the Focusing process, we met ourselves from this wider perspective and sensed how it is manifested in our lives at this precise moment.
Rising beyond the individual, the workshop created a shared space of intimacy and connection. Expressed through words and the organic movement of the participants to sit in a close, intimate circle at the end of the workshop, we could feel our human wholeness and connection. The content of the workshop had become our experience in the here and now.
You are invited to learn more about WIDEFULNESS on www.widefulness.com.
The following link holds the paper which the participants received in the workshop: http://www.widefulness.com/en/the-art-of-feeling-whole/
#
Focusing and Movement. Feeling Safe.
by Gerd Parquin
by Gerd Parquin
ABSTRACT
Abstract: The aim of this workshop is to feel safe and comfortable in our body. # We focus on the safe place in ourselves. Sometimes we explore our movement alone, sometimes with a partner, but always we create a safe environment. In this ‘Authentic Movement’ we get the experience of ‘being moved’ instead of ‘I move’.
Born in One Land And Living in Another:
Carrying “it” forward creatively.
by Marine de Fréminville, Calliope Callias
Carrying “it” forward creatively.
by Marine de Fréminville, Calliope Callias
ABSTRACT
Abstract: Migration and immigration has always been a major global issue with many psychological implications. It is very common for people to compare the two, or more, lands whether their relocation came from an inner choice or external circumstances. These comparisons may lead to many mixed feelings such as rootlessness, strangeness, loneliness…… and/or excitement, a sense of wonder, safety… # In this workshop, we will explore how our bodies experience the different lands and we will invite fresh ways of “dancing” beyond any duality. Through various expressive art forms we will use our felt senses to guide us through our possible challenges and support the unfolding of the "more"...
The Greek myth of "Ariadne’s Thread" as navigator to our implicit labyrinths…
by Anna Karali
by Anna Karali
ABSTRACT
Abstract: The fundamental term of E.T. Gendlin's Phenomenological practice, ‘Interaction First’, echoes the ‘intricate openness’ of the nature of the self that never ends, since the self for Gendlin is not stagnant or unchanged but evolves as a living process. This interaction is found in plants, animals, and humans and embodies self-organizing living processes with the environment. Therefore, one cannot encounter something that is exactly the same, akin to machine-produced artifacts. This pre-reflexive self-organizing living process is underlying the Focusing-oriented psychotherapy (E. Gendlin, 1999) in seeking the ‘implicit’ knowledge through the body. # In this workshop we will initially create ‘space’ both for the introduction of the pertinent theme of the Greek myth about ‘Ariadne’s Thread’, and its broad implications in psychotherapy. Then two of the Sea Interludes, by Benjamin’s Britten, will accompany the process of navigating our felt sense, as another ‘thread’, in the labyrinths of our intricate existence. By the closing of music we will work in couples, exchanging our experiencing process, which, hopefully, might have carried forward a fresh awareness. To conclude, we may share with the whole group, if so desired. # Key words: interaction first, intricate openness, self-organizing living process, implicit, felt sense
Social Oriented Focusing
by Yehudit First
by Yehudit First
S.O.F. - Feedback
Yehudit First, Body Psychotherapist, Focusing Coordinator (in training)
TEL: +972-54-4412512 | EMAIL: [email protected] | WEB: http://www.focusing-first.com
TEL: +972-54-4412512 | EMAIL: [email protected] | WEB: http://www.focusing-first.com
Throughout one's life, interaction with others is an engine for growth and development.
We are born in and from interaction, and within interaction the self is defined and evolves.
In Social Oriented Focusing, we Focus on and in the shared interpersonal space and develop a sense for social interaction.
This social sense enables and empowers many aspects of our life, giving us:
- The space and the freedom to be who we are, to be ourselves in relations with others.
- The ability to be attentive both to ourselves and to others at the same time, without "swallowing" them or "being swallowed".
- To free ourselves of subconscious barriers that limits us and prevents us from fulfilling ourselves in relationships.
- The confidence to give ourselves in to social interaction, to influence and be influenced, to see and be seen, to meet and be met, in a manner that feels right both to ourselves and to others.
- The ability to recognize what awakens within us as well as between us and the other, to find a language that allows sharing, understanding and acceptance in the joined experience.
Thus, we form the ability to gently dance between our various personal needs and desires, within an inclusive space which allows personal and interpersonal growth during life's journey both as ourselves and as a part of a group.
Using simple tools and powerful techniques, we will learn how to free ourselves of unhealthy relationships, how to feel comfortable in social interactions, how to promote important relationships without being disappointed time and again and how to see every interpersonal encounter as an opportunity for discovery, processing and growth.
We are part of a human tapestry, in constant interaction with the environment around us, and we come to know our world from within the complex system of reciprocity among body, mind and the environment. Focusing on a group interpersonal space opens before us the opportunity to observe the ways with which we form relationships and paves the way for change. Social Oriented Focusing is done out of a connection to my felt sense, to your felt sense and to our mutual felt sense.
Some of what we experienced at the work shop:
- Meeting each other while connected to our inner felt sense of the interaction.
- Experiencing the felt sense of having to choose or to be chosen When Pairing into couples here and now in this activity.
About me:
I am a qualified Body Psychotherapist, EABP member, Group facilitator, Focusing Coordinator (in training), specializing in Somatic Experiencing. I have taught basic Focusing and Focusing qualification courses, as well as unique courses I have developed integrating focusing with deep-tissue-bodywork, and Social Oriented Focusing. #
As a Body Psychotherapist integrating emotional work and bodywork, I have also created a course that combines Focusing with bodywork. This integration facilitates healing, promoting vitality in arrested processes and during physical pains that carry within thememotional personal pains. #
I believe that within every human being there is an inner personal essence that knows the path to a better life. It is a life of love, growth and fulfillment, a path that is accessible once and again via the body-mind-sprit integration. #
Building Inner Strengths to Heal Your Inner Critic
by Ruth Hircsh
by Ruth Hircsh
IC Handout
ic_handout.pdf | |
File Size: | 148 kb |
File Type: |
Building Inner Strengths to Heal Your Inner Critic
EFA 2018 1st European Focusing Conference
Loutraki, Greece May 10 – 14
Ruth Hirsch MSW, MPH, CMT
Supplemental Exercises& Resources
EFA 2018 1st European Focusing Conference
Loutraki, Greece May 10 – 14
Ruth Hirsch MSW, MPH, CMT
Supplemental Exercises& Resources
Part One: Getting Acquainted Exercises
1. By yourself
By yourself: To be more aware of how the IC manifests in your life: Notice when/where/how your IC shows up. What is it saying to you? How does it feel inside when IC is present?
Write out what your inner critic says to you at different times of the day, in different situations, and with different people and notice whether there are patterns to it’s showing up. For example, does your inner critic get stronger when you’re tired, hungry, or stressed? If so, taking breaks, unwinding, having snacks, and relaxing can all reduce the power of your inner critic.
Later, ask yourself, “Do these voices remind you of someone in your life?” Notice how you feel when you think of this person. Could you have adopted someone else’s critical messages as your own? If so, you may be able to separate from the inner critic by saying to yourself, something like “Ah, yes, that’s what my (mother/father, etc.) would have said.”
If at some point you feel as though you are having trouble separating from the IC (i.e. you are identifying with the critic, rather than being able to see it simply as a part within you) it can help to take steps to ground yourself. To do this, imagine yourself stepping back from the inner critic. Get in touch with your body, the feel of your feet on the floor, other sensations in/around your body. Then become aware that there is a part of you that thinks this way, and that there are other parts that are very different (for example, the part that signed up for this workshop!)
Remember that we don’t need to argue with the inner critic, but rather just be aware of it.
2. With a partner
Choose one instance of an appearance of an inner critic part in your life today or yesterday, and use this as a starting point to begin a Focusing session with your partner.
Plan on Focusing for a minimum of 20 minutes each, and then spend a few minutes sharing with your partner how the session went for you. The listener can then share how the session was for him/her. Be careful, though, to not give advice, sympathy, or to add anything other than your own experience.
"So be careful what you let in the door, is my advice.
It should not make you feel numb or bored, or demeaned, or less than human."
Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tuscon
Part Two: Approaches to Working with the Inner CriSc Exercises
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
Albert Einstein
1. By yourself
• Mantras on acceptance:
"The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life
simply by altering his attitude of mind." – William James
"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” – Carl Rogers
• The next time you hear a voice inside of you putting you down, take a deep breath, remind yourself it’s your inner critic speaking, take a step back, and observe it in action. That may be all you need to do to reduce its impact.
• Listen for potential disowned parts, and then acknowledge them. Keep in mind that the more we can acknowledge all of who we are, and how we can behave, the less powerful the inner critic will be.
• Listening to the IC and its target (aware, curious, separation) Write out a conversation between an inner critic and another part of yourself where you simply listen, ask clarifying questions, understand the inner critic’s deeper concerns, offer reflection, and whatever else might feel right. This can often soften the IC more and has longer lasting results.
2. With a partner
Choose one instance of the appearance of an IC part in your life today, and use this to begin a Focusing session with your partner. Plan on Focusing for a minimum of 20 minutes each, and then spending at least a few minutes sharing with your partner how the session went for you.
"You can have anything you want if you are willing to give up the belief that you can’t have it."
Robert Anthony
RESOURCES
Articles, Recordings & Videos
• Brainpickings.article quoted on p. 2:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/05/23/against-self-criticism-adam-phillips-unforbiddenpleasures/?
mc_cid=5e19106c81&mc_eid=eba706358e
• Hardwiring happiness The Hidden Power of Everyday Experiences on the Modern Brain: How to overcome the Brain's Negativity Bias. Dr. Rick Hanson at TEDxMarin 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpuDyGgIeh0&feature=em-share_video_user
• Link to Guided Forgiveness Meditation (and other resources):
http://www.peterrussell.com/Meditation/Meditations.php
• How to break a bad habit: http://jamesclear.com/how-to-break-a-bad-habit
• A story: The Snow Queen http://hca.gilead.org.il/snow_que.html
Books
• Dweck, Carol S. 2006. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
• Ford, Debbie. The Dark Side of the Light Chasers
• Hanson, Rick. 2013. Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence
• Kashdan, Todd. Curious?: 2009. Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life
• Kashdan, Todd and Biswas-Diener, Robert. 2014. The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self--Not Just Your "Good" Self--Drives Success and Fulfillment
Free Courses & Assessment
• Free 8 week course on The Science of Happiness
https://www.edx.org/course/science-happiness-uc-berkeleyx-gg101x-2
• Existential Well-being Counseling: A Person-centered Experiential Approach
https://www.edx.org/course/existential-well-being-counseling-person-kuleuvenx-ewbcx
Free Assessment to identify your own signature strengths
https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/user/login?destination=node/434
Click Register. Then choose VIA Survey of Character Strengths to access the survey
Connect with Ruth
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.ruthhirsch.com/
YouTube Channel: Short videos on Meaningful Musings related to Focusing and life
https://www.youtube.com/user/ruthhirsch
MORE EXERCISES
Adapted from The Dark Side of the Light Chasers by Debbie Ford
1. For one week, observe the judgments you have about others. Whenever upset by another’s behavior, write down quality that is most upsetting to you. Write down any opinions you have of the people who are closest to you. Be sure to include your friends, family, co-workers.
2. Make list of the advice you give to others. What are you telling others to do to make their lives better? Reflect on whether the advice isn’t just advice to yourself.
3. Get feedback from others about yourself- positive and negative. Then, make list of three people you love, three you hate. Then three qualities you wish to emulate, three that get you really angry or upset.
These lists are good places to find disowned parts of yourself.
a. Look at list of negative words and identify the ones that have an emotional charge for you, when you say “I am…..”
b. Write down the judgments you have about each of these words.
c. See if you can identify when you first made that judgment or whom you took the judgment from. Was it your mother, father, or someone else?
4. What story have you created about who you really are that explains your current life circumstances?
5. What resentments, old wounds, anger, or regrets do you carry in your heart?
6. What needs to happen for you to forgive yourself and others?
#
1. By yourself
By yourself: To be more aware of how the IC manifests in your life: Notice when/where/how your IC shows up. What is it saying to you? How does it feel inside when IC is present?
Write out what your inner critic says to you at different times of the day, in different situations, and with different people and notice whether there are patterns to it’s showing up. For example, does your inner critic get stronger when you’re tired, hungry, or stressed? If so, taking breaks, unwinding, having snacks, and relaxing can all reduce the power of your inner critic.
Later, ask yourself, “Do these voices remind you of someone in your life?” Notice how you feel when you think of this person. Could you have adopted someone else’s critical messages as your own? If so, you may be able to separate from the inner critic by saying to yourself, something like “Ah, yes, that’s what my (mother/father, etc.) would have said.”
If at some point you feel as though you are having trouble separating from the IC (i.e. you are identifying with the critic, rather than being able to see it simply as a part within you) it can help to take steps to ground yourself. To do this, imagine yourself stepping back from the inner critic. Get in touch with your body, the feel of your feet on the floor, other sensations in/around your body. Then become aware that there is a part of you that thinks this way, and that there are other parts that are very different (for example, the part that signed up for this workshop!)
Remember that we don’t need to argue with the inner critic, but rather just be aware of it.
2. With a partner
Choose one instance of an appearance of an inner critic part in your life today or yesterday, and use this as a starting point to begin a Focusing session with your partner.
Plan on Focusing for a minimum of 20 minutes each, and then spend a few minutes sharing with your partner how the session went for you. The listener can then share how the session was for him/her. Be careful, though, to not give advice, sympathy, or to add anything other than your own experience.
"So be careful what you let in the door, is my advice.
It should not make you feel numb or bored, or demeaned, or less than human."
Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tuscon
Part Two: Approaches to Working with the Inner CriSc Exercises
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
Albert Einstein
1. By yourself
• Mantras on acceptance:
"The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life
simply by altering his attitude of mind." – William James
"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” – Carl Rogers
• The next time you hear a voice inside of you putting you down, take a deep breath, remind yourself it’s your inner critic speaking, take a step back, and observe it in action. That may be all you need to do to reduce its impact.
• Listen for potential disowned parts, and then acknowledge them. Keep in mind that the more we can acknowledge all of who we are, and how we can behave, the less powerful the inner critic will be.
• Listening to the IC and its target (aware, curious, separation) Write out a conversation between an inner critic and another part of yourself where you simply listen, ask clarifying questions, understand the inner critic’s deeper concerns, offer reflection, and whatever else might feel right. This can often soften the IC more and has longer lasting results.
2. With a partner
Choose one instance of the appearance of an IC part in your life today, and use this to begin a Focusing session with your partner. Plan on Focusing for a minimum of 20 minutes each, and then spending at least a few minutes sharing with your partner how the session went for you.
"You can have anything you want if you are willing to give up the belief that you can’t have it."
Robert Anthony
RESOURCES
Articles, Recordings & Videos
• Brainpickings.article quoted on p. 2:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/05/23/against-self-criticism-adam-phillips-unforbiddenpleasures/?
mc_cid=5e19106c81&mc_eid=eba706358e
• Hardwiring happiness The Hidden Power of Everyday Experiences on the Modern Brain: How to overcome the Brain's Negativity Bias. Dr. Rick Hanson at TEDxMarin 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpuDyGgIeh0&feature=em-share_video_user
• Link to Guided Forgiveness Meditation (and other resources):
http://www.peterrussell.com/Meditation/Meditations.php
• How to break a bad habit: http://jamesclear.com/how-to-break-a-bad-habit
• A story: The Snow Queen http://hca.gilead.org.il/snow_que.html
Books
• Dweck, Carol S. 2006. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
• Ford, Debbie. The Dark Side of the Light Chasers
• Hanson, Rick. 2013. Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence
• Kashdan, Todd. Curious?: 2009. Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life
• Kashdan, Todd and Biswas-Diener, Robert. 2014. The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self--Not Just Your "Good" Self--Drives Success and Fulfillment
Free Courses & Assessment
• Free 8 week course on The Science of Happiness
https://www.edx.org/course/science-happiness-uc-berkeleyx-gg101x-2
• Existential Well-being Counseling: A Person-centered Experiential Approach
https://www.edx.org/course/existential-well-being-counseling-person-kuleuvenx-ewbcx
Free Assessment to identify your own signature strengths
https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/user/login?destination=node/434
Click Register. Then choose VIA Survey of Character Strengths to access the survey
Connect with Ruth
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.ruthhirsch.com/
YouTube Channel: Short videos on Meaningful Musings related to Focusing and life
https://www.youtube.com/user/ruthhirsch
MORE EXERCISES
Adapted from The Dark Side of the Light Chasers by Debbie Ford
1. For one week, observe the judgments you have about others. Whenever upset by another’s behavior, write down quality that is most upsetting to you. Write down any opinions you have of the people who are closest to you. Be sure to include your friends, family, co-workers.
2. Make list of the advice you give to others. What are you telling others to do to make their lives better? Reflect on whether the advice isn’t just advice to yourself.
3. Get feedback from others about yourself- positive and negative. Then, make list of three people you love, three you hate. Then three qualities you wish to emulate, three that get you really angry or upset.
These lists are good places to find disowned parts of yourself.
a. Look at list of negative words and identify the ones that have an emotional charge for you, when you say “I am…..”
b. Write down the judgments you have about each of these words.
c. See if you can identify when you first made that judgment or whom you took the judgment from. Was it your mother, father, or someone else?
4. What story have you created about who you really are that explains your current life circumstances?
5. What resentments, old wounds, anger, or regrets do you carry in your heart?
6. What needs to happen for you to forgive yourself and others?
#
Sleeping and Dreaming
by Teresa Dawson
by Teresa Dawson
Abstract
Abstract: Do you care about the quality of your sleep? Your physical body feeling unwell dreams different than a healthy one. If so, before asking about the meaning of a dream, we should be asking about its connection to the body beyond the psychic condition. During sleep our body continues interacting and communicating with the environment, trying to adjust to given circumstances, some of them we cannot avoid, others we could. Therefore, our dreams tell us as much about our sleep as about our psyche (and our soul, but this is another topic). We should consider this whilst trying to let the meaning of a dream unfold, allowing it to bring forth new guiding questions. # In this short workshop we will focus mainly on correlations between physical health, environmental conditions, influences such as electricity, food, soil texture, etc. Also how different your dreams are in your familiar bed in comparison to sleeping in a strange place, or when deviating from your usual or familiar diet. # Through Focusing-oriented exercises you will be able to explore from memory how your sleeping body deals with such difficulties, and how associated dreams can hold and suggest possible improvements. There are many aspects to play with ……..
(Ιφιγένεια εν Σώματι) (Gr: Iphigeneia en Somati)
Iphigenia Embodied or My Iphigenia
by Sofia Papoutsi
Iphigenia Embodied or My Iphigenia
by Sofia Papoutsi
Abstract
Abstract: Greek Ancient Tragedies and Myths are an extraordinary part of our history and a great example of human kind. They express passion, hate, love, war, peace, family relations, conspiracies, gods, semi-gods, sacrifices. But what is the meaning of them, what do they represent? What do they try to tell us? For whom they are talking about? Where do they come from? Is it a trying to understand cultures? Is it a way to feel an entire civilization? Is it the history of man in society or is it something more…something deeper, something that comes from another faraway but so close world. Something that happens in our world…Our inner world…Stories that have not been told…Stories that are not symbolized…yet… # An interpretation of our fundamental beings, a projection of the mysterious powers of who we are, a mirroring of the paths we chose to follow and lives that have been lived or not or maybe or both. # This workshop is an invitation to meet the Greek Ancient Tragedy of Euripides , (Gr) “Iphigeneia en Tauris” and (Gr) “Iphigeneia en Aulidi”, in our inner world in what so called “Body”- “Soma”, (Gr: Iphigeneia en Somati), explore our own adventures and introduce to us the familiar but mostly the unknown heroes that we carry every day, those mythical heroes that we really are.
Focusing in Health
by Irit Tessel
by Irit Tessel
Feedback
Focusing in Health
Focusing in Health connects us to our Life Energy; the source of flow, joy, curiosity, daring, creativity, the way to our inner engine. There are times in life when we feel in flow, connected to that source within us.
At other times we may feel a decline in energy and get the feeling we are stuck.
My approach - Focusing in Health was born while working with people who had a sense of insufficiency in life, despair, great confusion, and frustration, People with dimmed eyes. They all had in common loss of Life Energy. Working with them consisted of a gentle process of looking for these lost fragments and gathering them back home. The results of this process encouraged me to try this approach with patients in a public hospital. While working at Sourasky Medical center I witnessed the favorable results of my approach.
When the container fills up with more Life Force, one can attend to the discomfort more readily.
I believe that in order to cure illness we must heal life – nourish it – because in addition to food, motion, and fitness, our nourishment consists of another important ingredient, which is that sense of vitality we seek. The challenge in my work is to return it to the menu, even if it seems elusive; to acknowledge it as one of the more important "food groups" in facilitating holistic health.
Gendlin wrote that everything contains Life Energy, and that one must simply await for it to appear. So very true. Yet, many people don't have the patience for it to appear, so often they give up. They retreat and quit the process. Ones' belief system, education, hardship, trauma (sometimes cross-generational) – whether conscious or not – impede ones' ability to cope. Research suggests that people who turn down the opportunity to cope gradually lose their coping mechanism – as a skill - and eventually reject the possibility of feeling alive.
One must remember, though, that all is not lost. Nowadays, we know that external change, not to mention energetic changes, influence the functions of the membranes of our very cells. Sparks of that Energy conjoin into a larger flame, a gaze with a shine, whose expression is seen through the health of the body and the spirit – which are, in fact, unified. This shine interweaves all facets of life, including intimate relationships, at work, and in creativity. The interaction that takes place between the inner and the outer, takes one step forward.
This journey of development and growth goes through "locked gates" that were erected in order to keep us away from the pain and discomfort. Nevertheless, in time one may begin to approach a locked gate, sometimes to even summon it, keep listening to it. To start to untangle the pain that lays on the other side. This allows the healing process to begin and allows health to come back home.
#
Professional Portrait: B.A. in Hebrew literature and humanities science, Tel Aviv University, somatic experience studies,in the past spokes-person of an academic college. #
Focusing trainer, for the last nine years directing One on One process in my private clinic, five years of experience working in Sourasky Medical center, Ichilov Hospital, Center for Integrative Medicine. Teaching “Focusing in Health”, lectures and workshop to foundation and medical staff. #
Focusing in Health connects us to our Life Energy; the source of flow, joy, curiosity, daring, creativity, the way to our inner engine. There are times in life when we feel in flow, connected to that source within us.
At other times we may feel a decline in energy and get the feeling we are stuck.
My approach - Focusing in Health was born while working with people who had a sense of insufficiency in life, despair, great confusion, and frustration, People with dimmed eyes. They all had in common loss of Life Energy. Working with them consisted of a gentle process of looking for these lost fragments and gathering them back home. The results of this process encouraged me to try this approach with patients in a public hospital. While working at Sourasky Medical center I witnessed the favorable results of my approach.
When the container fills up with more Life Force, one can attend to the discomfort more readily.
I believe that in order to cure illness we must heal life – nourish it – because in addition to food, motion, and fitness, our nourishment consists of another important ingredient, which is that sense of vitality we seek. The challenge in my work is to return it to the menu, even if it seems elusive; to acknowledge it as one of the more important "food groups" in facilitating holistic health.
Gendlin wrote that everything contains Life Energy, and that one must simply await for it to appear. So very true. Yet, many people don't have the patience for it to appear, so often they give up. They retreat and quit the process. Ones' belief system, education, hardship, trauma (sometimes cross-generational) – whether conscious or not – impede ones' ability to cope. Research suggests that people who turn down the opportunity to cope gradually lose their coping mechanism – as a skill - and eventually reject the possibility of feeling alive.
One must remember, though, that all is not lost. Nowadays, we know that external change, not to mention energetic changes, influence the functions of the membranes of our very cells. Sparks of that Energy conjoin into a larger flame, a gaze with a shine, whose expression is seen through the health of the body and the spirit – which are, in fact, unified. This shine interweaves all facets of life, including intimate relationships, at work, and in creativity. The interaction that takes place between the inner and the outer, takes one step forward.
This journey of development and growth goes through "locked gates" that were erected in order to keep us away from the pain and discomfort. Nevertheless, in time one may begin to approach a locked gate, sometimes to even summon it, keep listening to it. To start to untangle the pain that lays on the other side. This allows the healing process to begin and allows health to come back home.
#
Professional Portrait: B.A. in Hebrew literature and humanities science, Tel Aviv University, somatic experience studies,in the past spokes-person of an academic college. #
Focusing trainer, for the last nine years directing One on One process in my private clinic, five years of experience working in Sourasky Medical center, Ichilov Hospital, Center for Integrative Medicine. Teaching “Focusing in Health”, lectures and workshop to foundation and medical staff. #
How nurturing and practicing resiliency in daily living helps in times of crises?
by Bilha Frolinger
by Bilha Frolinger
Abstract
Abstract: Resilience is the individual's ability to bounce back from a negative experience and successfully adapt to life tasks in highly adverse conditions. Resilient individuals have, through time, developed proper coping techniques that allow them to effectively carry forward their life through crises. # What are those coping techniques? What are the characteristics of a resilient person and how can we nurture resiliency in the therapeutic setting? How can we bring resiliency into our daily living and promote health and wellness? Aside from exploring these important questions we will experience exercises for enhancing resilience in therapy and in everyday life. # The objectives of this workshop are to raise our conscious awareness to the importance of these energy skills, and also to enrich and add on skills to our “tool box” as therapists by using some main ideas and principles from Focusing, Mindfulness and Positive Psychology. This holistic approach is based on the understanding that the body knows "more" and has a built-in natural movement toward health and resilience even in dire situations. # As living in Israel, a conflict zone area, I would also share my experiences as a volunteer in the hotline of The Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War for the past 8 years.
Relational Aspects of Interactive Focusing and Mindfulness: Implications in Couple's and Family Therapy
by Dr. Atsmaout Perlstein
by Dr. Atsmaout Perlstein
Abstract
Abstract: Relationships present us with joys and sorrows and can be our biggest challenge in life. As FOT therapist we want to remember Gendlin's statement that there is always a positive tendency in the negative pattern awaiting to be carried forward, even though it may not be visible at first. The therapist is the spark of genuine, authentic connection that can mobilize the negative pattern into a positive and life-giving experience. # This workshop will present an integration of Mindfulness and Interactive Focusing approaches to relational dilemmas presented by couples and family members. Few difficult cases will be presented as a framework for the participants to learn principles and practice skills to facilitate changes in difficult patterns: creating safety, different ways to experience felt sensing, the double empathic moment, breathing as an anchor to self-management, self-compassion and compassion for the other, using KOL-BE (a human figure with no gender) to facilitate relational issues in couple's and family therapy.
HomeFocusing - Focusing Oriented Relationships
by Annat Gal-on
by Annat Gal-on
Abstract
Abstract: As Focusers, we know how to listen inward, and to our Focusing partners and clients, to be Self in Presence with them. # But what happens to us at home? What happens with those that we love, depend on, worry about? How can we enable ourselves the beneficial interaction that Focusing has to offer with our life-partners, children, parents? # In this workshop we will be familiarizing with HomeFocusing, relationship-oriented Focusing which enables Focusing-oriented relationships, and exploring our own relationships.
Panel / Presentations
Panel 1: Experiential Concepts in professional practice
Eleonore Schudek, Kurt Schley, Hejo Feuerstein
Eleonore Schudek, Kurt Schley, Hejo Feuerstein
#1 Eleonore Schudek: Developing supportive work relationships in stressful social work conditions by collegial Focusing.
Die Entwicklung unterstützender Arbeitsbeziehungen unter sozial belastenden Arbeitsbedingungen durch kollegiales Focusing.
#2 Kurt Schley: Experiential Behavior Therapy for Children and Adolescents - How Focusing can be used within Behavior Therapy.
Experientielle Verhaltenstherapie für Kinder und Jugendliche: wie Focusing in verhaltenstherapeutischen Settings angewandt werden kann.
#3 Hejo Feuerstein (moderator): Experiential concepts for decision making: Some recommendations how to use Focusing and the Felt Sense - and how to not use it.
Erlebensbezogene Konzepte für Entscheidungsfindung: Einige Empfehlungen, Focusing und den Felt Sense einzubeziehen - und wie nicht...
(The presentations are given by PowerPoint charts with bilingual text)
(Die Beiträge werden von zweisprachigen PowerPoint Folien begleitet)
We want to present some new ways to apply Focusing and the Experiential approach to issues and challenges of different professional domains. We developed these concepts in Germany and would like to share these with our European colleagues, also to start an ongoing discussion and collaboration between those who are interested.
Wir stellen Wege vor, wie Focusing und der Erlebensbezogene Ansatz Herausforderungen in verschiedenen beruflichen Bereichen begegnen kann und sind interessiert an weiterer Diskussion und Zusammenarbeit in Europa.
Die Entwicklung unterstützender Arbeitsbeziehungen unter sozial belastenden Arbeitsbedingungen durch kollegiales Focusing.
#2 Kurt Schley: Experiential Behavior Therapy for Children and Adolescents - How Focusing can be used within Behavior Therapy.
Experientielle Verhaltenstherapie für Kinder und Jugendliche: wie Focusing in verhaltenstherapeutischen Settings angewandt werden kann.
#3 Hejo Feuerstein (moderator): Experiential concepts for decision making: Some recommendations how to use Focusing and the Felt Sense - and how to not use it.
Erlebensbezogene Konzepte für Entscheidungsfindung: Einige Empfehlungen, Focusing und den Felt Sense einzubeziehen - und wie nicht...
(The presentations are given by PowerPoint charts with bilingual text)
(Die Beiträge werden von zweisprachigen PowerPoint Folien begleitet)
We want to present some new ways to apply Focusing and the Experiential approach to issues and challenges of different professional domains. We developed these concepts in Germany and would like to share these with our European colleagues, also to start an ongoing discussion and collaboration between those who are interested.
Wir stellen Wege vor, wie Focusing und der Erlebensbezogene Ansatz Herausforderungen in verschiedenen beruflichen Bereichen begegnen kann und sind interessiert an weiterer Diskussion und Zusammenarbeit in Europa.
PANEL 2: Children / parents / Focusing
Challenges and chances to integrate the adults into the work with children and adolescents and how to work with the whole system.
HEIDRUN ESSLER, Maria Kyriakidou, Zoe Voulgaraki, Joke Van Hoeck
Challenges and chances to integrate the adults into the work with children and adolescents and how to work with the whole system.
HEIDRUN ESSLER, Maria Kyriakidou, Zoe Voulgaraki, Joke Van Hoeck
Home / Interest / Working Groups
Groups / Events
In this Conference we tried to make space with our European colleagues for sharing experiences of how Focusing can impact our lives at a personal level and for considering how Focusing, TAE and the Experiential Approach might impact our professional work.
Participants offered their own Interest groups on themes they are interested in.
Feedback from Interest Groups
Feedback from Interest Groups
Marine-what brings us ‘aliveness’? What keeps us young? The group met once, but was deep. Conclusion that life is precious through facing death, finding meaning in life.
People who are interested in this should contact Marine at [email protected].
Ifat- The topic was ‘Spirituality in life through/with Focusing - connecting earth with sky'. During our 3 meetings, we noticed on an experiential level that when we open a shared space and speak from the inside, the wisdom comes, and with time it changes not only us but also our surroundings. We explored how our attention/consciousness can make a difference to spaces, and how it can help when we are in groups, in ‘shared’ space. We explored how this work/practice/intention can not only help us as individuals but can affect the universe on an energetic level, bringing light and hope to difficult places
Patricia from Montreal - Wholebody Focusing and Heartfelt Conversation. The first group established Gounded Presence, formed a ‘We’, shared what came and were inspired to join Greg Madison's group later that evening. A new group of 6 formed on Sunday, following Annat Gal-On’s workshop on Focusing Oriented Relationships. The heartfelt connection was profound, moving from the Greater Space where we are all One to the uniqueness of each individual grounded in the Here & Now, yet still forming this safe interconnected Web. We left knowing that we could draw on this group in the future to move forward our work with the relationships that need our care & attention.
For more on WBF Heartfelt Connection: [email protected] and www.wholebodyfocusing.com.
Hejo-European programme on coaching. Not so many people interested in coaching. So decided to open it to more people for them to bring in existing workshops. People can learn from each other across countries to start this programme.
Hejo-interest group of only himself to consider issues of racism in everyday life. Would like to continue this with colleagues from Europe. How can we make an impact on this very unsettling development in Europe? Proposes meeting by Zoom.
Martina- Laughter and Humour in Focusing. Desire to have more joyfulness in our lives. How come that doesn’t happen as much as we would like? Can we enjoy ourselves and also do something meaningful? Is it ok to be silly for its own sake? Looked at how humour can bring more ease, more vivacity, more aliveness, and can facilitate a “shift”. It can also be manipulative and used to re-direct a conversation. Understanding a joke gives a feeling of belonging, and perhaps in not understanding you feel left out. Joyfulness and sadness are part of life. The Greek word “Charmolipi” encompasses both. Can we make space for both? Contact: Martina Flavin Email: [email protected]
Fiona- Teaching group. What is the crucial, most important thing to teach, when teaching Focusing? 2ndmeeting peer supervision. Continued also with Focusing teachers in Europe group. Anyone who is teaching Focusing is welcome to join. We don’t want to standardise, but we want to create standards that enable Focusing teachers to offer ‘EFA-recognised courses and trainings.’ We are looking at what is needed for courses to be EFA recognised. People should connect with Fiona if they want to be part of this group. [email protected]
Hanspeter- 3 of us met to discuss how we can reach young people for Focusing. We will open this group for everyone via the EFA webpage.
Lucy (for Greg)- A group of us formed an interest group on the ‘subversive potential of Focusing Activism’. This evolved into a discussion about sensitive political conversations that we can’t have: in the broader world and within the Focusing world. This followed from experiences of being aggressively attacked on Facebook by people using ‘identity politics’, accusations of privilege, and tactics of shaming and silencing. We wanted to reintroduce complexity into narratives that have become overly simplistic and divisive, challenging the strategy of categorising people according to broad social-economic-gender-race. We wanted to experience ‘safety’ in open dialogue rather than censorship. Our discussion broadened again to include any conversation that is hard to have within the Focusing world as well as more broadly (questions of power, hierarchy, competition etc in Focusing). We will send an email with a link to a closed Facebook group for Focusers who want support to express their views on any difficult topic about how we gather together and respond to the world.
Meg-wants to see if there is interest in forming a group to explore identity politics- cultural, gender, social identification- through inner relationship focusing. Also interested in using interactive focusing as part of this and to address the imbalance of power within relationships and across cultures. For more details please contact [email protected]
People who are interested in this should contact Marine at [email protected].
Ifat- The topic was ‘Spirituality in life through/with Focusing - connecting earth with sky'. During our 3 meetings, we noticed on an experiential level that when we open a shared space and speak from the inside, the wisdom comes, and with time it changes not only us but also our surroundings. We explored how our attention/consciousness can make a difference to spaces, and how it can help when we are in groups, in ‘shared’ space. We explored how this work/practice/intention can not only help us as individuals but can affect the universe on an energetic level, bringing light and hope to difficult places
Patricia from Montreal - Wholebody Focusing and Heartfelt Conversation. The first group established Gounded Presence, formed a ‘We’, shared what came and were inspired to join Greg Madison's group later that evening. A new group of 6 formed on Sunday, following Annat Gal-On’s workshop on Focusing Oriented Relationships. The heartfelt connection was profound, moving from the Greater Space where we are all One to the uniqueness of each individual grounded in the Here & Now, yet still forming this safe interconnected Web. We left knowing that we could draw on this group in the future to move forward our work with the relationships that need our care & attention.
For more on WBF Heartfelt Connection: [email protected] and www.wholebodyfocusing.com.
Hejo-European programme on coaching. Not so many people interested in coaching. So decided to open it to more people for them to bring in existing workshops. People can learn from each other across countries to start this programme.
Hejo-interest group of only himself to consider issues of racism in everyday life. Would like to continue this with colleagues from Europe. How can we make an impact on this very unsettling development in Europe? Proposes meeting by Zoom.
Martina- Laughter and Humour in Focusing. Desire to have more joyfulness in our lives. How come that doesn’t happen as much as we would like? Can we enjoy ourselves and also do something meaningful? Is it ok to be silly for its own sake? Looked at how humour can bring more ease, more vivacity, more aliveness, and can facilitate a “shift”. It can also be manipulative and used to re-direct a conversation. Understanding a joke gives a feeling of belonging, and perhaps in not understanding you feel left out. Joyfulness and sadness are part of life. The Greek word “Charmolipi” encompasses both. Can we make space for both? Contact: Martina Flavin Email: [email protected]
Fiona- Teaching group. What is the crucial, most important thing to teach, when teaching Focusing? 2ndmeeting peer supervision. Continued also with Focusing teachers in Europe group. Anyone who is teaching Focusing is welcome to join. We don’t want to standardise, but we want to create standards that enable Focusing teachers to offer ‘EFA-recognised courses and trainings.’ We are looking at what is needed for courses to be EFA recognised. People should connect with Fiona if they want to be part of this group. [email protected]
Hanspeter- 3 of us met to discuss how we can reach young people for Focusing. We will open this group for everyone via the EFA webpage.
Lucy (for Greg)- A group of us formed an interest group on the ‘subversive potential of Focusing Activism’. This evolved into a discussion about sensitive political conversations that we can’t have: in the broader world and within the Focusing world. This followed from experiences of being aggressively attacked on Facebook by people using ‘identity politics’, accusations of privilege, and tactics of shaming and silencing. We wanted to reintroduce complexity into narratives that have become overly simplistic and divisive, challenging the strategy of categorising people according to broad social-economic-gender-race. We wanted to experience ‘safety’ in open dialogue rather than censorship. Our discussion broadened again to include any conversation that is hard to have within the Focusing world as well as more broadly (questions of power, hierarchy, competition etc in Focusing). We will send an email with a link to a closed Facebook group for Focusers who want support to express their views on any difficult topic about how we gather together and respond to the world.
Meg-wants to see if there is interest in forming a group to explore identity politics- cultural, gender, social identification- through inner relationship focusing. Also interested in using interactive focusing as part of this and to address the imbalance of power within relationships and across cultures. For more details please contact [email protected]
EFA conference Interest Group ‘The Focusing Activism Group’ - Message from Greg Madison
Dear European Focusers:
Invitation to join THE FACEBOOK GROUP FOR FOCUSERS TO EXPRESS DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS
The idea came from our Interest group, initiated at the First European Focusing Conference, Greece, May 2018. A few of us came together inspired to explore our own response to ‘The subversive potential of Focusing in Activism.’ We asked ourselves "how we could bring the Focusing attitude to contexts where dialogue has become over-simplified and discussions get shut down and silenced". We want to reintroduce complexity and respect for different views. We want to change systems that have become rigid and that discourage open and truly democratic discussions, in the wider world and within the Focusing world. We discussed how ‘identity politics’, and accusations of 'privilege', can be used to serve to shame and silence anyone who questions broad categories of race, gender, sexuality etc as the only accepted form of political analysis. Discussions on Facebook, for example, get ‘hijacked’ by a particular way of thinking about these very delicate and important issues. Some of which are very culturally specific and don’t necessarily apply to all our societies without question. Free-thinking is replaced with a formulaic set of responses that are allowed, other views seem to incur an abusive reaction against the person who has shared a different point of view. Bullying is becoming more common. Individuals can become singled out and attacked for not agreeing with the accepted analysis, making these forums unsafe spaces for many of us. Our group met three times during the conference, and grew in size. We wanted to encourage diversity and social equality but not in this silencing and aggressive way. We acknowledged that people need support to stand up to powerful responses. It feels impossible to stand alone in the face of attacks and accusations. We also wondered whether this brand of identity politics (seeing everyone only in terms of race or class or gender or sexuality etc) will make its way into the Focusing world itself as it has into some parts of the non-violent communication (NVC) world and the Process-Oriented Psychology world, and implicit in this 'wondering' was how we might find ways of facing that if it does happen. By the last day this whole topic had expanded to include ANY conversations that ‘we can’t have’ whether they are within our own Focusing world(s) or beyond. Some participants were more interested in ‘local’ conversations that can’t be had within our Focusing communities (questions of hierarchy, power, competition, who is in control, lack of democracy, poor communication, ways of organising that do not seem consistent with the values of Focusing). We agreed two action steps:
1. Write this email to invite any Focuser to join our Facebook group to discuss these difficult things and to get support.
2. To set up the closed FB group, only for FOCUSERS initially, and provide the link in the email.
The FB group offers an 'open' safe space where we can express views and get a listening response, and explore this whole issue further, including what underpins this simplifying and divisive thinking in society, and how we might find ways to bring back to our Focusing communities the human complexity we know from Focusing.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/FocusingDiscussions/
You need to belong to Facebook to access the group. Then one of the administrators will approve your membership - you must be a ‘member’ of the Focusing community and willing to use a Focusing/Listening approach in the group. Posts within the group will not be moderated.
Greg Madison
on behalf of the EFA conference Interest Group ‘The Focusing Activism Group’.
Invitation to join THE FACEBOOK GROUP FOR FOCUSERS TO EXPRESS DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS
The idea came from our Interest group, initiated at the First European Focusing Conference, Greece, May 2018. A few of us came together inspired to explore our own response to ‘The subversive potential of Focusing in Activism.’ We asked ourselves "how we could bring the Focusing attitude to contexts where dialogue has become over-simplified and discussions get shut down and silenced". We want to reintroduce complexity and respect for different views. We want to change systems that have become rigid and that discourage open and truly democratic discussions, in the wider world and within the Focusing world. We discussed how ‘identity politics’, and accusations of 'privilege', can be used to serve to shame and silence anyone who questions broad categories of race, gender, sexuality etc as the only accepted form of political analysis. Discussions on Facebook, for example, get ‘hijacked’ by a particular way of thinking about these very delicate and important issues. Some of which are very culturally specific and don’t necessarily apply to all our societies without question. Free-thinking is replaced with a formulaic set of responses that are allowed, other views seem to incur an abusive reaction against the person who has shared a different point of view. Bullying is becoming more common. Individuals can become singled out and attacked for not agreeing with the accepted analysis, making these forums unsafe spaces for many of us. Our group met three times during the conference, and grew in size. We wanted to encourage diversity and social equality but not in this silencing and aggressive way. We acknowledged that people need support to stand up to powerful responses. It feels impossible to stand alone in the face of attacks and accusations. We also wondered whether this brand of identity politics (seeing everyone only in terms of race or class or gender or sexuality etc) will make its way into the Focusing world itself as it has into some parts of the non-violent communication (NVC) world and the Process-Oriented Psychology world, and implicit in this 'wondering' was how we might find ways of facing that if it does happen. By the last day this whole topic had expanded to include ANY conversations that ‘we can’t have’ whether they are within our own Focusing world(s) or beyond. Some participants were more interested in ‘local’ conversations that can’t be had within our Focusing communities (questions of hierarchy, power, competition, who is in control, lack of democracy, poor communication, ways of organising that do not seem consistent with the values of Focusing). We agreed two action steps:
1. Write this email to invite any Focuser to join our Facebook group to discuss these difficult things and to get support.
2. To set up the closed FB group, only for FOCUSERS initially, and provide the link in the email.
The FB group offers an 'open' safe space where we can express views and get a listening response, and explore this whole issue further, including what underpins this simplifying and divisive thinking in society, and how we might find ways to bring back to our Focusing communities the human complexity we know from Focusing.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/FocusingDiscussions/
You need to belong to Facebook to access the group. Then one of the administrators will approve your membership - you must be a ‘member’ of the Focusing community and willing to use a Focusing/Listening approach in the group. Posts within the group will not be moderated.
Greg Madison
on behalf of the EFA conference Interest Group ‘The Focusing Activism Group’.
Through an Open Space process,
project/interest groups were created by the participants.