(TXT) View source
# 2018-07-05 - Focusing by Eugene Gendlin
(IMG) Tightrope Walk
I found this book fascinating because it has so many connections to
other recent interests such as Inner Dialogue and NVC. Focusing came
out of the Human Potential Movement.
(TXT) Human Potential Movement @Wikipedia
My notes are longer than usual because i have included four related
sections at the bottom:
* FOCUSING MANUAL
* FOCUSING HANDOUT
* LISTENING MANUAL
* HISTORY OF CHANGES 1970-2016
# Introduction
Of course they [normal people] are not "therapists" or "doctors" or
"authorities" with each other, but the authority aspect of the
medical doctor never has really fitted the human process of personal
change at all. Human problems are by their very nature such that we
are each inherently in charge of ourselves. No authority can resolve
our problems or tell us how to live. Therefore I and others have
been teaching more and more people to help themselves and each other.
...
At the University of Chicago and elsewhere in the past fifteen years,
a group of colleagues and I have been studying some questions that
most psychotherapists don't like to ask out loud. Why doesn't
therapy succeed more often? Why does it so often fail to make a real
difference in people's lives? In the rarer cases when it does
succeed, what is it that those patients and therapists do? What is
it that the majority fail to do?
Seeking answers, we studied many forms of therapy from classical
approaches to recent ones. We analysed literally thousands of
therapist-patient sessions recorded on tape. Our series of studies
has led to several findings, some very different from what we and
most other professional therapists expected.
First, we found that the successful patient--the one who shows real
and tangible change on psychological tests and in life--can be picked
out fairly easily from recorded therapy sessions. What these rare
patients do in their therapy hours is different from the others. The
difference is so easy to spot that, once we had defined it, we were
able to explain it to inexperienced young undergraduates, and they
too were able to sort out the successful patients from the others.
What is this crucial difference? We found that it is not the
therapist's technique--differences in methods of therapy seem to mean
surprisingly little. Nor does the difference lie in what the
patients talk about. The difference is in how they talk. And that
is only an outward sign of the real difference: what the successful
patients do inside themselves.
(TXT) Equality of outcome
# Chapter 1, The Inner Act
Of course they [normal people] are not "therapists" or "doctors" or
"authorities" with each other, but the authority aspect of the
medical doctor never has really fitted the human process of personal
change at all. Human problems are by their very nature such that we
are each inherently in charge of ourselves. No authority can resolve
our problems or tell us how to live. Therefore I and others have
been teaching more and more people to help themselves and each other.
This book will let you experience and recognize when actual change is
happening in you, and when it's not.
Another major discovery is that the process of actually changing
feels good. Effective working on one's problems is not self-torture.
Some learn this inner way fairly fast, while others need weeks or
months of patient inner listening and tinkering.
# Chapter 2, Change
Focusing is a process in which you make contact with a special kind
of internal bodily awareness. I call this awareness a felt sense. A
felt sense takes time to form and come into focus. It is not an
emotion. It is the body's sense of a part, problem, or situation.
One effect of the focusing process is to bring hidden bits of
personal knowledge up to the level of conscious awareness. This
isn't the most important effect. The body shift, the change in a
felt sense, is the heart of the process. But the bringing up of
bodily sensed knowledge--the transfer of this knowledge, in effect,
from body to mind--is something that every focuser experiences.
Often this transformed knowledge seems to be part of a tough problem,
and it might be expected that this would make you feel worse. After
all, you now know something bad that you didn't know before.
Logically, you should feel worse. Yet you don't. You feel better.
You feel better mainly because your body feels better, more free,
released. The whole body is alive in a less constricted way. You
have localized a problem that had previously made your whole body
feel bad. An immediate freeing feeling lets you know there is a body
shift. It is the body having moved toward a solution.
There is also another reason. No matter how frightening or
intractable a problem looks when it first comes to light, a focuser
becomes used to the fact that at the very next shift it may be quite
different. Nothing that feels bad is ever the last step.
Just [only] getting in touch with one's feelings often brings no
change, just the same feeling over and over. One must let a larger,
wider, unclear felt sense form.
George was analyzing now--in effect creating an intellectual
rationalization to explain what his body had already solved. The
analysis wasn't necessary. But intellectuals like to figure things
out, and done _in retrospect_, that's alright. What was important
was that his body took its own steps first. Before these steps, his
analysis wasn't effective.
# Chapter 3, What The Body Knows
The stories in the previous chapter illustrate the two main
discoveries on which this book is based. First, there is a kind of
bodily awareness that profoundly influences our lives and that can
help us reach personal goals. A felt sense. Second, that a felt
sense will shift if you approach it in the right way. It will change
even as you are making contact with it. When your felt sense of a
situation changes, _you change_--and, therefore, so does your life.
A felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one.
There are no words in the language to describe the felt sense and its
physical shifts! Therefore, I must give a name to that feeling of
coming unstuck inside. I call it the _body shift_. I call it body
shift mainly to suggest that it doesn't happen in the mind. It is
always, in some way, a physical sensation.
# Chapter 4, The Focusing Manual
The inner act of focusing can be broken down into six main subacts or
movements. As you gain more practice, you won't need to think of
these as six separate parts of the process. To think of them as
separate movements makes the process seem more mechanical than it
is--or will be, for you, later. I have sub-divided the process in
this way because I've learned from years of experimenting that this
is an effective way to teach focusing to people who have never tried
it before.
[See also the section at the bottom titled FOCUSING MANUAL.]
# Chapter 5, The Six Focusing Movements and What They Mean
## Preparation:
Try to find a time and place to sit quietly for a while. Try to find
a sense of general physical comfort, if not total well-being. If
small physical irritations are plaguing you, they will obscure other
things your body is trying to tell you. [Do what you need to do to
make yourself comfortable.]
## First movement: Clearing a Space
Do not try to list every problem you can think of, but only what has
you tense now. Keep going until you feel a small increase of
well-bring in you and hear something say, "Yes, except for those I'm
fine."
## Second movement: Felt Sense of the Problem
Ask which problem feels worst right now. Somehow you must get down
past all that intellectual noise to the felt sense underneath. Be
patient and keep sensing until you feel the single great aura that
encloses all of it. Once you have the feel of the whole problem,
stay with it for a while. Just let it be, and be felt.
## Third movement: Finding a Handle
Find a word, phrase, or picture that is the core or crux of the felt
sense. When it's right, we call it a "handle." As you say the words
(or as you picture the image), the whole felt sense stirs just
slightly and eases a little.
## Fourth movement: Resonating a Handle and Felt Sense
Spend a minute checking the handle against the felt sense. The sense
of rightness is not only a check of the handle. It is your body just
now changing. As long as it is still changing, releasing,
processing, moving, let it do that. Give it the minute or two that
it needs to get all it wants to have at this point. Don't rush on.
## Fifth movement: Asking
... usually a well-fitting handle gives you a tiny bit of a shift,
just enough to know it is quite right. You use the handle to make
the felt sense vividly present again and again. Now you can ask _it_
what it is.
The [merely] mental answers come very fast, and they are rapid trains
of thought. The mind rushes in and leaves no space for you to
contact the felt sense directly. You can let all that go by, and
then recontact the felt sense using the handle again. [Keep asking.]
Asking a felt sense is very much like asking another person a
question. You ask the question, and then you wait.
* What is the worst of this?
* What does the felt sense need?
Focusing is not work. It is a friendly time within your body. [You
may not succeed instantly.] Approach the problem freshly later, or
tomorrow.
## Sixth movement: Receiving
Whatever comes in focusing, welcome it. Take the attitude that you
are glad your body spoke to you, whatever it said. You need not
believe, agree with, or do what the felt sense just now says. You
need only receive it.
Sense if your body wants to stop focusing or to continue. There may
be many cycles [rounds of focusing] before a given problem feels
resolved. It often isn't possible to deal fully with a given problem
in one focusing session. The process may take many months.
Like any other skill it requires practice. Also, it requires you to
overcome certain deeply ingrained habits...
# Chapter 6, What Focusing Is Not
* Focusing is not a process of talking at oneself. [It is more
like listening.]
* Focusing is not an analytical process.
* Focusing is not a mere body sensation.
* Focusing is not just getting in touch with gut feelings.
# Chapter 7, Clearing A Space For Yourself
In seeking this first-movement state of tranquility, you will find it
helps to trust your body. Your body always tends in the direction of
feeling better. Your body is a complex, life-maintaining system.
Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of
being if you give it space to move toward its rightness. The body's
holistic sensing of what is [life-affirming] indicates much more than
a thought or emotion can. All the values we try to formulate are
relative to the living process in us and should be measured against
it. Under all the packages each of us carries, a different self can
be discovered.
If you are like most, you have treated yourself less like a friend
than like a roommate you don't like. Society mostly gives you the
same unfriendly hearing you probably give yourself. I am not
suggesting that you can be self-accepting and self-loving just by
reading these pages. Rather, it is an attitude you can take for this
special time of focusing.
# Chapter 8, If You Can't Find A Felt Sense
A felt sense is made of many interwoven strands like a carpet. But
it is felt as one.
Only rarely, in very formal occasions, do we prepare word for word.
Usually, when we are about to say something, we have the felt sense
of what we want to put across, and the right words come as we speak.
The felt sense includes dozens of component parts, perhaps
hundreds... but there are not yet any specific words.
Focusing is very much like that. One must go to that place where
there are not words but only feeling. At first there may be nothing
there until a felt sense forms. When it forms, it feels pregnant.
The felt sense has in it a meaning you can feel, but usually it is
not immediately open. Usually you will have to stay with a felt
sense for some seconds before it opens. The forming and then the
opening of a felt sense, usually takes about thirty seconds, and it
may take you three or four minutes, counting distractions, to give it
the thirty seconds of attention it needs.
Practice in getting a felt sense:
* Silently, to yourself, pick something you love or think is
beautiful. It could be an object, a pet, a place, or whatever.
Something very special to you in some way. Take from one to two
minutes.
* Settle on something. Ask yourself "Why do I love _____, or why
do I think it's beautiful?"
* Let yourself feel the whole specialness or loving. See if you
can find one or two words that get at what it is.
* Let yourself feel what those words refer to, to the whole felt
sense, and see if new words and feelings come up.
This exercise is to help you get experience attending to a felt
sense, something large and definitely felt, but that you are not able
to verbalize. Notice how little of your love-feeling the words
actually say. Yet the words are somehow right in relation to the
felt sense (if you succeed in finding such words).
Strange as it sounds, focusing is lighter than heavy emotions.
Sometimes heavy emotions to come in focusing, but a felt sense is
always easier on the body than emotions.
Focusing takes a few minutes, 10, 15, let's say even half an hour.
But not more. Then it's time to talk, rest, do something else. Do
not grind away at things. You will return later. Meanwhile, the
body will process it.
# Chapter 9, If You Can't Make Anything Shift
In the spectrum of peoples attitudes towards their feelings, there
are two opposite extremes that don't often produce useful results.
One is the attitude of strict control. The other extreme is that of
never wanting to direct or control feelings. Either extreme can
prevent you from getting a body shift. Focusing is a deliberate,
controlled process up to a certain point, and then there is an
equally deliberate relaxation of control, a letting go, a dropping of
the reins.
The very word "focusing" suggests that you are trying to make sharp
what is at first vague. Once you have made contact with a felt sense
clearly and strongly, you drop the reins.
When you have made contact with a felt sense but can't make it move,
the problem may be only that you haven't asked yourself the right
open-ended question. Sometimes feelings will respond to a question
that is phrased in a certain way, but not to virtually the same
question phrased another way. Thus it may help you to experiment
with various phrasings until you find one(s) that work for you.
Listed below are the triggering questions that seem to work most
often in most people.
* What is the crux of this?
* What is the worst of it?
* What are the two or three things about it that trouble me the
most?
* What is the center of it?
* What is doing it?
* What needs to happen for me with this?
* What would it take to feel better?
* What would it feel like, in my body, if this difficulty somehow
got completely resolved?
Make it [the stuck felt sense] a "place" you can leave and come back
to. A painful place may not shift immediately. You may have to
check in with its felt edge, a number of times during the rest of the
day, and perhaps for several days. Eventually you will find a step
or a shift there.
# Chapter 10, Finding Richness In Others
We find that if listening and if focusing are shared, people can come
to know each other more deeply in a few hours than most do in years.
Authentic seeing and knowing each other comes with focusing and
listening; inward experience opens up to ourselves.
Most people live without expressing their inner richness. Much of
what people do is canned routines, "roles." Sometimes they are alive
in their roles, but more often not. Most people have to keep
themselves down, put themselves away, hold their breath till later.
For many people there isn't much of a "later" either--and their inner
selves become silent and almost disappear. They wonder if, inside,
there is anything to them.
A surprising fact: Focusing is easier with another person present,
even though the focuser and listener say nothing at all.
# Chapter 11, The Listening Manual
* Helping another person focus while talking.
* Absolute listening [AKA reflective listening]. The method of
"saying back" was discovered by Carl Rogers and training in its use
is available in P.E.T. by Thomas Gordon.
* Helping a felt sense form [AKA active listening].
* Using your own feelings and reactions about the other person.
* Interaction
* Interacting in a group
[See also the section at the bottom titled LISTENING MANUAL]
# Chapter 12, New Relationships
Focusing can help free stuck relationships [and help reduce wasted
energy].
If you want to meet someone more personally (in a way that is more
alive and authentic) with continuing social structure, one answer is
a "Changes" group. Changes was started by Kristin Glaser. It is a
place you can go when you need to focus and need someone to listen to
you.
Self-help skill training is essential for such a network, and
Focusing and listening involve specific steps in which anyone can be
trained.
# Chapter 13, Experience Beyond Roles
Human experience, we now understand, does not really consist of
pieces or contents that have a static shape. As one senses the
exact, finely complex shape at a given moment, it also changes this
very sensing. A person's experience cannot be _figured out_ by
others, or even by the person [who is] experiencing it. It cannot be
expressed in common labels. It has to be met, found, felt, attended
to, and allowed to show itself. No, a person's experience is not a
pattern. It might seem to fit a pattern just now, but moments later
it will fit another or none. In any case, the seeming fit will never
be exact, for experience is richer than patterns. Moreover, it is
changing. It is a new step in human development when people can not
only get in touch with their feelings but then also move through
steps of unfolding and change. We are moving beyond conformity
patterns. Focusing replaces those [traditional] patterns with a way
of making new patterns.
-----
# FOCUSING MANUAL
## 1. Clearing a space
What I will ask you to do will be silent, just to yourself. Take a
moment just to relax... All right--now, inside you, I would like you
to pay attention inwardly, in your body, perhaps in your stomach or
chest. Now see what comes there when you ask, "How is my life going?
What is the main thing for me right now?" Sense within your body.
Let the answers come slowly from this sensing. When some concern
comes, DO NOT GO INSIDE IT. Stand back, say "Yes, that's there. I
can feel that, there." Let there be a little space between you and
that. Then ask what else you feel. Wait again, and sense. Usually
there are several things.
## 2. Felt sense
From among what came, select one personal problem to focus on. DO
NOT GO INSIDE IT. Stand back from it.
Of course, there are many parts to that one thing you are thinking
about--too many things to think of each one alone. But you can
*feel* all of these things together. Pay attention there where you
usually feel things, and in there you can get a sense of what *all of
the problem* feels like. Let yourself feel the unclear sense of *all
of that*.
## 3. Handle
What is the quality of this unclear felt sense? Let a word, a
phrase, or an image come up from the felt sense itself. It might be
a quality-word, like *tight*, *sticky*, *scary*, *stuck*, *heavy*,
*jumpy*, or a phrase, or an image. Stay with the quality of the felt
sense till something fits it just right.
## 4. Resonating
Go back and forth between the felt sense and the word (phrase, or
image). Check how they resonate with each other. See if there is a
little bodily signal that lets you know there is a fit. To do it,
you have to have the felt sense there again, as well as the word.
Let the felt sense change, if it does, and also the word or picture,
until they feel just right in capturing the quality of the felt sense.
## 5. Asking
Now ask: What is it, about this whole problem, that makes this
quality (which you have just named or pictured)?
Make sure the quality is sensed again, freshly, vividly (not just
remembered from before). When it is here again, tap it, touch it, be
with it, asking "What makes the whole problem so _____?" Or you ask
"What is in *this* sense?"
If you get a quick answer without a shift in the felt sense, just let
that kind of answer go by. Return your attention to your body and
freshly find the felt sense again. Then ask it again.
Be with the felt sense till something comes along with a shift, a
slight "give" or release.
## 6. Receiving
Receive whatever comes with a shift in a friendly way. Stay with it
a while, even if it is only a slight release. Whatever comes, this
is only one shift; there will be others. You will probably continue
after a little while, but stay here for a few moments.
IF DURING THESE INSTRUCTIONS SOMEWHERE YOU HAVE SPENT A LITTLE WHILE
SENSING AND TOUCHING AN UNCLEAR HOLISTIC BODY SENSE OF THIS PROBLEM,
THEN YOU HAVE FOCUSED. It doesn't matter whether the body-shift came
or not. It comes on its own. We don't control that.
-----
# FOCUSING HANDOUT
## 1. Clear a space
How are you? What's between you and feeling fine? Don't answer; let
what comes in your body do the answering. Don't go into anything.
Greet each concern that comes. Put each aside for awhile, next to
you. Except for that, are you fine?
## 2. Felt sense
Pick one problem to focus on. Don't go into the problem. What do
you sense in your body when you recall the whole of that problem?
Sense all of that, the sense of the whole thing, the murky discomfort
or the unclear body-sense of it.
## 3. Get a handle
What is the quality of the felt sense? What one word, phrase, or
image comes out of this felt sense? What quality-word would fit
better?
## 4. Resonate
Go back and forth between word (or image) and the felt sense. Is
that right? If they match, have the sensation of matching several
times. If the felt sense changes, follow it with your attention.
When you get a perfect match, the words (images) being just right for
this feeling, let yourself feel that for a minute.
## 5. Ask
"What is it, about the whole problem, that makes me so _____?"
When stuck, ask questions:
* What is the worst of this feeling?
* What's really so bad about this?
* What does it need?
* What should happen?
Don't answer; wait for the feeling to stir and give you an answer.
What would it feel like if it was all OK?
Let the body answer:
What is in the way of that?
## 6. Receive
Welcome what came. Be glad it spoke. It is only one step on this
problem, not the last. Now that you know where it is, you can leave
it and come back to it later. Protect it from critical voices that
interrupt.
Does your body want another round of focusing, or is this a good
stopping place?
-----
# LISTENING MANUAL
Four kinds of helping are discussed here, used at different times for
different purposes. Be sure to become competent with the first before
you try the others. Once you learn them and they become part of your
way of dealing with people, you will find yourself using each of them
in situations that are appropriate to each.
# The first kind of helping: helping another person focus while
# talking
## A. Absolute listening
If you set aside a period of time when you only listen, and indicate
only whether you follow or not, you will discover a surprising fact.
People can tell you much more and also find more inside themselves,
than can ever happen in ordinary interchanges.
If you use only expressions such as "yes," or "I see," or "oh yes, I
can sure see how you feel," or "I lost you, can you say that again,
please?" You will see a deep process unfold.
In ordinary social interchange we nearly always stop each other from
getting very far inside. Our advice, reactions, encouragement's,
reassurances, and well-intentioned comments actually prevent people
from feeling understood. Try following someone carefully without
putting anything of your own in. You will be amazed. Give the speaker
a truthful sense of when you follow, and when not. Immediately you
will be a good listener. But you must be truthful and indicate when
you fail to follow. ("Can you say that another way? I didn't get it")
However, it helps much more if you the listener will say back the
other person's points, step by step, as you understand them. I call
that absolute listening.
Never introduce topics that the other person didn't express. Never
push your own interpretations. Never mix in your own ideas.
There are only two reasons for speaking while listening: to show that
you understand exactly by saying back what the other person has said
or meant, or to ask for repetition or clarification.
## To show that you understand exactly
Make a sentence or two that gets at the personal meaning this person
wanted to put across. This will usually be in your own words, but use
that person's own words for the touchy main things.
People need to hear you speak. They need to hear that you got each
step. Make a sentence or two for every main point they make, for each
thing they are trying to get across. (Usually, this will be for about
every five or ten sentences of theirs.) Don't just "let them talk,"
but relate to each thing that they feel, whether it's good or bad.
Don't try to fix or change or improve it. Try to get the crux of it
exactly the way they mean it and feel it.
Sometimes what people say is complicated. You can't get what they
say, nor what it means to them, all at once. First, make a sentence
or two about the crux of what they said. Check that out with them.
Let them correct it and add to it if they want to. Take in, and say
back, what they have changed or added, until they agree that you have
it just as they feel it. Then make another sentence to say what it
means to them, or how they feel it.
Example: suppose a woman has been telling you about some intricate
set of events, what some people did to her and how and when, to "put
her down."
First, you would say one or more sentences to state in words the crux
of what she said as she sees it. Then she corrects some of how you
said it, to get it more exactly. You then say back her corrections:
"Oh, so it wasn't that they all did that, but all of them agreed to
it." Then she might add a few more things, which you again take in
and say back more or less as she said them. Then, when you have it
just right, you make another sentence for the personal meaning or
feeling that whole thing has: "And what's really bad about it is that
it's made you feel put down."
If you don't understand what the person is saying, or you get mixed
up or lost There is a way to ask for repetition or clarification.
Don't say, "I didn't understand any of it." Rather, take whatever
bits you did understand, even if it was very vague, or only the
beginning, and use it to ask for more:
"I do get that this is important to you, but I don't get what it is
yet..."
Don't say a lot of things you aren't sure the person meant. The
person will have to waste lots of time explaining to you why what you
said doesn't fit. Instead, just say what you are sure you heard and
ask them to repeat the rest.
Say back bit by bit what the person tells you. Don't let the person
say more than you can take in and say back. Interrupt, say back, and
let the person go on.
How you know when you are doing it right You know this when people
go further into their problems. For example, the person may say, "No,
it's not like that, it's more like--uh--" and then may feel further
into it to see how it actually feels. You have done it right. Your
words may have been wrong, or may now sound wrong to the person even
though they were very close to what the person said a moment before.
But what matters is that your words led the person to feel further
into the problem so your words had the right result. Whatever the
person then says, take that in and say it back. It's a step further.
Or the person may sit silently, satisfied that you get everything up
to now.
Or the person may show you a release, a relaxing, a whole-bodied
"Yes, that's what it is," a deep breath, a sigh. Such moments occur
now and then, and after them new or further steps come.
You may also tell that it is going right by more subtle signs of the
relaxation that comes from being heard well -the feeling we all get
when we have been trying to say something and have finally put it
across: the feeling that we don't have to say that any more. While a
person is laying out an idea, or part of one, there is a tension, a
holding of breath, which may remain for several interchanges. When
the crux is finally both said and exactly understood and responded
to, there is relaxation, like an exhaling of breath. The person
doesn't have to hold the thing in the body any more. Then something
further can come in. (It's important to accept the silence that can
come here for what seems like a long time, even a minute or so. The
focuser now has the inner body peace to let another thing come up.
Don't destroy the peace by speaking needlessly.)
## How you know when you did it wrong, and what to do about that
If nearly the same thing is said over again, it means the person feels
you haven't got it yet. See how the focuser's words differ from what
you said. If nothing feels different, then say it again and add to it
"But that's not all, or that's not right, in some way?"
As you respond, the focuser's face may get tight, tense, confused.
This shows that the focuser is trying to understand what you are
saying. So you must be doing it wrong, adding something or not
getting it. Stop and ask the person again to say how it is.
If the focuser changes the subject (especially to something less
meaningful or less personal), it means he or she gave up on getting
the more personal thing across right. You can interrupt and say
something like, "I'm still with what you were just trying to say
about... I know I didn't understand it right, but I want to." Then
say only the part of it you're sure of, and ask the person to go on
from there.
You will get it right sooner or later. It doesn't matter when. It can
be the third or fourth try. People can get further into their
feelings best when another person is receiving or trying to receive
each bit exactly as they have it, without additions or elaborations.
There is a centeredness that is easy to recognise after a while. Like
a train on a track. It's easy to know when you're off. Everything
stops. If that happens, go back to the last point that was on a solid
track inside, and ask the person to go on from there.
If you find it hard to accept someone with unlovely qualities, think
of the person as being up against these qualities inside. It is
usually easy to accept the person inside who is struggling against
these very qualities. As you listen, you will then discover that
person.
When you first practice listening, be sure to repeat almost word for
word what people say. This helps you see how hard it is to get what a
person is trying to say without adding to it, fixing it, putting
yourself into it.
When you are able to do that, then feed back only the crux, the point
being made, and the feeling words.
To make it easier, stop for a second and sense your own tangle of
feelings, tensions, and expectations. Then clear this space. Out of
this open space you can listen. You will feel alert and probably
slightly excited. What will the other person say into this waiting
space that exists for nothing except to be spoken into?
Very rarely is anyone offered such a space by another person. People
hardly ever move over in themselves enough to really hear another.
## B. Helping a felt sense form
It is possible for a person to focus a little between one
communication and the next. Having made a point, and being
understood, the person can focus before saying the next thing.
Most people don't do that. They run on from point to point, only
talking.
How can you help people stop, and get the felt sense of what they
have just said?
This is the second focusing movement. Finding the felt sense is like
saying to oneself, "That, right there, that's what's confused," and
then feeling it there.
The focuser must keep quiet, not only outwardly but also inside, so
that a felt sense can form. It takes as long as a minute.
Some people talk all the time, either out loud or at themselves
inside. Then nothing directly felt can form, and everything stays a
painful mass of confusion and tightness.
When a felt sense forms, the focuser feels relief. It's as if all the
bad feeling goes into one spot, right there, and the rest of the body
feels freer.
Once a felt sense forms, people can relate to it. They can wonder
what's in it, can feel around it and into it.
## When to help people let a felt sense form
When people have said all that they can say clearly, and from there
on it is confusing, or a tight unresolved mess, and they don't know
how to go on.
When there is a certain spot that you sense could be gone into
further.
When people talk round and round a subject and never go down into
their feelings of it. They may start to say things that are obviously
personal and meaningful, but then go on to something else. They tell
you nothing meaningful, but seem to want to. In this very common
situation, you can interrupt the focuser and gently point out the way
into deeper levels of feeling.
FOCUSER: "I've been doing nothing but taking care of Karen since
she's back from the hospital. I haven't been with me at all. And when
I do get time now, I just want to run out and do another chore."
LISTENER: "You haven't been able to be with yourself for so long, and
even when you can now, you don't."
FOCUSER: "She needs this and she needs that and no matter what I do
for her it isn't enough. All her family are like that. It makes me
angry. Her father was like that, too, when he was sick, which went on
for years. They're always negative and grumpy and down on each other."
LISTENER: "It makes you angry the way she is, the way they are."
FOCUSER: "Yes. I'm angry. Darn right. It's a poor climate. Living in
a poor climate. Always gray. Always down on something. The other day,
when I -"
LISTENER (interrupts): "Wait. Be a minute with your angry feeling.
Just feel it for a minute. See what more is in it. Don't think
anything..."
How to help a felt sense form There is a gradation of how much help
people need to contact a felt sense. Always do the least amount
first, and more only if that doesn't work.
Some people won't need any help except your willingness to be silent.
If you don't talk all the time, and if you don't stop them or get
them off the track, they will feel into what they need to feel into.
Don't interrupt a silence for at least a minute. Once you have
responded and checked out what you said and gotten it exactly right,
be quiet.
The person may need one sentence or so from you, to make the pause in
which a felt sense could form. Such a sentence might simply repeat
slowly the last important word or phrase you already said. It might
just point again to that spot. For instance, in the previous example
you might have said slowly and emphatically: "Really angry." Then you
would stay quiet. The person's whole sense of all that goes with
being angry should form.
Whatever people say after your attempt to help them find a felt
sense, say the crux of it back. Don't worry if you cant immediately
create the silent deeper period you feel is needed. You can try it
again soon. Go along with whatever comes up, even if the focuser has
wandered off the track momentarily.
If after many tries the people still aren't feeling into anything,
then you can tell them to do so more directly. Say explicitly, "Sit
with it a minute and feel into it further?" you can also give all or
some of the focusing instructions.
You can form a question for people. Tell them to ask this question
inwardly, to ask not the head but the gut. "Stay quiet and don't
answer the question in words. Just wait with the question till
something comes from your feeling."
Questions like that are usually best open-ended. "What really is
this?" "What's keeping this the way it is?"
Another type of question applies to the "whole thing." "Where am I
really hung up in this whole thing?" Use it when everything is
confused or when the focuser doesn't know how to begin.
If the focuser has let a felt sense form but is still stuck, it may
help to ask, "How would it be different if it were all OK? What ought
it to be like?" Tell the person to feel that ideal state for a while
and then ask, "What's in the way of that." The focuser shouldn't try
to answer the question but should get the feel of what's in the way.
All these ways require that the focuser stop talking, both out loud
and inside. One lets what is there come instead of doing it oneself.
Just ask, "Where's my life still hung up?" this will give you the
felt sense of the problems fast, if you don't answer with words.
Another approach: pick the two or three most important things the
focuser has said if you feel they go together into one idea. Then
tell the person, "When I say what I'm going to say, don't you say
anything to me or to yourself. Just feel what comes there." Then say
the two or three things, each in one or two words.
These ways can also help when a person doesn't want to say some
private or painful thing. The focuser can work on it without actually
telling you what it is. You can listen and help without knowing what
it is about beyond the fact that it hurts or puzzles in some way.
## How you can tell when it isn't working
When people look you straight in the eyes, then they aren't yet
focusing inside themselves. Say, "you can't get into it while you're
looking at me. Let me just sit here while you go into yourself."
If people speak immediately after you get through asking them to be
quiet, they haven't focused yet. First, say back the crux of what was
said and then ask the focuser to contact the felt sense of it. If
you've worked hard on it and nothing useful has happened, let it go
fifteen minutes or so and try again.
If, after a silence, the person comes up with explanations and
speculations, ask how that problem feels. Don't criticize the person
for analyzing. Pick up on what the person does say and keep pointing
into a felt sense of it.
If people say they can't let feeling come because they are too
restless or tense, feel empty or discouraged, or are trying too hard,
ask them to focus on that. They can ask themselves (and not answer in
words), "what is this rattled feeling?" "... Or tense feeling?" "Or
empty feeling" "... Or `trying too hard' thing?"
## How to tell when a person has a felt sense
One has a felt sense when one can, feel more than one understands,
when what is there is more than words and thoughts, when something is
quite definitely experienced but is not yet clear, hasn't opened up
or released yet.
You will know your focuser has a felt sense and is referring to it
when that person gropes for words and evidently has something that is
not yet in words.
Anything that comes in this way should be welcomed. It is the
organism's next step. Take it and say it back just the way the person
tells it.
It feels good to have something come directly from one's felt sense.
It shifts the feelings, releases the body slightly. Even if one
doesn't like what has come, it feels good- it is encouraging when
more is happening than just talk. It gives one a sense of process,
freeing from stuck places.
This is the key concept in this process of listening, responding, and
referring to people's feelings just as they feel them. It is based on
the fact that feelings and troubles are not just concepts or ideas:
they are bodily. Therefore the point of helping is never just to
speculate, to explain. There has to be a physical process, of steps
into where the trouble is felt in the body. Such a process gets going
when a good listener responds to the personal, felt side of anything
said, just as the person feels it without adding anything. Felt
movement and change happen when a person is given the peace to allow
the bodily sense of a trouble to be, to be felt, and to move to its
own next step.
A focuser can do this alone, but the presence and response of another
person has a powerful helping effect.
# The second kind of helping: Using your own feelings and reactions
# about the other person
There are ways of doing more than listening, but they aren't 'more'
if you do them without listening.
In this section I will show you how to try out many other things, but
in a way that always keeps listening as basic.
Try some of them, one at a time, and then go right back to listening
for a while.
## How to say your reaction
Whatever you say or do, watch the person's face and respond to how
your input affects the person. If you cant see that, ask. Even if
what you say or do is stupid and hurtful, it will work out well if
you then ask about and say back whatever the person's reaction to it
is. Switch back to listening right after saying your own reaction.
Make your statements questions, not conclusions and direct your
questions to people's feelings, not just their ideas. Invite people
to go into themselves and see whether they feel something like what
you say---or something else. You don't ever know what they feel. You
only wonder and help them to ask themselves. You might say, "I don't
mean that I would know. Feel it out and see. Is it like that, or just
how is it?"
Note that the person must feel what is there, to answer your
question, if you put it this way.
Let go of your idea easily as soon as you see that it leads into
arguments or speculation, or just doesn't get further into anything
directly felt. If you think it's good you can say it twice, but after
that, abandon it. You can bring it up later. (You could be right but
something else might have to come first.)
Make sure that there are stretches of time when you do total
listening. If you interrupt with your ideas and reactions constantly,
the basic focusing process cant get going. There should be ten or
fifteen minutes at a time when you should only listen. If the person
is feeling into his or her problem, do less talking; if the person is
stuck, do more.
Let the persons process go ahead if it seems to want to move a
certain way. Don't insist that it move into what you sense should be
next.
If the person tries to teach you to be a certain way, be that way for
a while. For instance, some people might express a need to have you
more quiet or more talkative, or to work with them in some definite
way. Do it. You can always go back to your preferred way later.
People often teach us how to help them.
If you find you have gotten, things off a good track and into
confusion, bring the process back to the last point where the focuser
was in touch with feelings. Say, "You were telling me... go on from
there."
Watch your person's face and body, and if you see something
happening, ask about it. Non verbal reactions are often good signals
to ask people to get them into a felt sense.
For instance, the focuser might say, "That happened but I feel OK
about it." You respond, "You feel OK about it in some way. But I see
from the way your foot is tapping, and the way you look, that
something might not be OK, too. Is that right?"
You don't need to get hung up on whether you're right or not when you
sense something. If you sense something, then there is something, but
you may not be right about what it is. So ask.
You will often see the focuser's face reacting to whatever you are
saying or doing. Ask about that, too.
Feel easy about it if the person doesn't like what you're doing. You
can change it, or you might not need to. Give the person room to have
negative reactions to you, and listen and say back what they are.
Don't always stay with the words the person is saying. Does the voice
sound angry? Discouraged? Insistent? Is there a sudden break in it?
What way were the words said? Ask: "You sound angry. Are you?" And if
the answer is yes, ask what that is about. If the focuser gets no
further, ask: "Can you sense what the anger is?"
You can use your own felt reactions to what's going on to help you
sense more clearly what is going on with the other person or with
both of you. If you feel bored, annoyed, impatient, angry,
embarrassed, excited, or any way that stands out, it indicates
something. Focus on what it is in you. If you are bored, you might
find that it is because the person isn't getting into anything
meaningful. Then you can ask: "Are you getting into what you really
want to get into?" If you are angry, what is the person doing to make
you angry? When you find that, you can say it. For instance: "Are you
maybe shutting me out because you gave up on my helping you. Did you?"
Let yourself have any feelings at all while working with someone. Let
them be as unlovely and as honest as they can be. That way you can be
free inside to attend to what's happening in you. That often points
to what's happening with the other person or between the two of you.
If you get an idea as to what someone is feeling by putting together
a lot of theoretical reasoning or a long set of hints, don't take up
time explaining all this to the other person. Just ask whether the
person can find the feeling you inferred.
You can express any hunch or idea as a question. Sometimes you might
add another possibility to insure that the focuser knows it's not a
conclusion but an invitation to look within at the feeling itself.
"Is it like you're scared... or maybe ashamed? How does it feel?"
Then listen.
In the rest of this second section on helping I offer many
reactions-that you might say to help someone. You needn't read and
grasp these all right now. You can look these up when you have become
competent in listening and want more ideas to try. For now, you
should probably move on to the third kind of helping.
Some questions to create movement It is often worthwhile (though not
always feasible) to ask if the focusers sex life is good. If it is
not, it may help to see if sexual needs are felt as frightening or
bad. It may also help to talk about what's standing in the way of a
good sex life, as well as how to change situations or get into new
ones. (Some people may find such questions nosy or silly. Don't ask
unless you are sure that your focuser will accept your asking.)
"Crazy" conditions are often related to one's life situation. If your
rapport with the person is such that a question about private matters
doesn't seem shocking or nosy, or if the person mostly speaks of
strange or hallucinatory stuff, try asking if the person has friends,
work, places to go, sexuality. The person can focus on these with or
without telling you all the details.
Feelings are inside and "relationships" are outside. But inside and
outside are always related, and a good listener can help a troubled
focuser find steps to change the outside, too.
You can ask people, referring to any bad thing they are fighting or
puzzling over inside: "How is this bad thing in some way good, or
useful, or sensible?" This is a complex, profound question, and you
might precede it with something like this: "No bad thing that's in a
person is all bad. If it's there, it has or might have some right or
useful aspect that we have to listen, for. If we find what the thing
is good for, then it can let go. So give it a friendly hearing and
see what it says, why it's right." The point is to help the focuser
stop fighting the undesired ways long enough to allow them to open,
so the positive aspect in them can come out.
Often a troubled inner state protects us from other painful problems.
If we can see what a painful thing protects us from, we can
sometimes protect ourselves much better than the thing itself can.
Sometimes a person's trouble lies in the fighting against the way the
body feels. If you let how you feel simply be, a positive next step
can then come out of it -one that you couldn't make up and force.
Sometimes it helps to ask a suicidal person: "Are you thinking about
committing suicide at somebody? At whom?" (By this I mean attempting
to hurt someone by committing suicide.) The focuser may know right
away, and the focus may then shift to where it needs to-that
relationship. It may help also to say that the other person in that
relationship probably won't understand the focuser's suicide attempt
any better than the person ever understood anything else.
Sometimes, if a person is angry, it pays to ask: "Are you hurt about
something."
Sometimes you can ask: "Do you feel that you can't ever get what you
need?" (If so, let the focuser feel into what that is.) Some people's
most frantic, seemingly destructive reactions are really a
life-affirming fight against some part in them that forbids what they
need ever to come about. The point then is to shift the focus to this
assumption or prohibition, which has to be false in some way. What
does it say, and why?
If a feeling keeps being there, over and over, you can ask the person
to "switch roles"' with the feeling. The person stands up, loosens
the body, and prepares as if to act a role on stage. The role is to
be the feeling.
"Wait... sense it in your body, what would this feeling do to you,
how would it act, what would it say, how would it stand or move? Wait
and see what comes in your body."
Sometimes body expressions, crying, or yelling certain words arise
spontaneously. When that has finished happening, it is important to
find and focus on the felt sense that these expressive "discharges"
come out of.
## Some suggestions to point people in a forward direction
It helps to assure people that it's OK to have their feelings-at
least long enough to feel what they are. The same is true of needs,
desires, ways of seeing things. There are various reasons people stay
clear of their feelings, as we've seen. Among the reasons: the fear
that bad feelings will lead to destructive actions.
If someone is afraid of feelings, you might say:
"Feelings and actions aren't the same thing. You can let yourself
feel whatever you do feel. Then you can still decide what you choose
to do."
"It's OK to need. Trying not to have a need that you do in fact have
makes a lot of trouble. Even if you can't get it, don't fight needing
it."
"Focusing isn't like just wallowing around in what you feel. Don't
sink into it, stay next to it. Let yourself feel whatever is there
and expect it to open up."
"Weird states are different from feelings. It helps to move out of
them toward life and ordinary situations. Weird states may not ease
by getting further into them. What in your life is making things bad?
What happens if you lean forward into living, instead of lying back?"
If the person suddenly feels weird or unreal, slow down. Take a short
break. Ask the person to look around the room, recall the ordinary to
the persons attention. Then continue.
But you shouldn't decide whether the focuser should go into, or out
of, anything. The focuser should decide. Your company may be wanted
in probing some weird thoughts-or may not.
"To change something or do something that's been too hard, we have to
find a small first step you can actually do. What would that be?"
Suggest small first steps if the focuser has none, but don't settle
on anything unless it is received with some elation that that first
step is possible. "Can you make a list of places to go meet new
people? As a first step, make a list?"
Some people are so concerned with what somebody else thinks that they
need help getting to what they themselves think and feel.
"Put away for a minute what they think and what they said, and let's
see what you feel about it, how you see it."
## Dealing with very troubled people
You can talk about yourself, your day-anything you feel like saying.
You need not always try to get into the other person's problems. Of
course, if the focuser is in the midst of talking about them or seems
to want to, you should not then refuse to listen. The person should
know you would listen. But there will be times when it will be a
relief to a troubled person to find that you can just talk of other
things.
Silent, peaceful times are also useful. It is good to lie on the
grass, go for a walk, without any tension of waiting for something to
be said.
You can even get very troubled people to talk about (or do) something
they happen to be competent in for example, sewing or music. This
helps them feel OK for a while and lets you respond to a competent
person -respond positively and for good reason.
It is often after such times, after having been able to just be with
you, that a person might feel like taking you into some areas that
are disturbing.
If the person talks a lot about strange material you can't understand
and then says one or two things that make sense, stick with those and
repeat them many times. They are your point of contact. It is all
right to keep returning to these phrases, with silence or other
topics in between, for as long as an hour.
If the person says things that can't be true, respond to the feeling
rather than to the distorted facts or untruths. For example, "The
martians took everything I had away from me..." You can get the
feeling here. Say, "Somebody took what was yours?"
## Other ways to be helpful
Let's say a man asks you for something you can't give. You may have
to refuse the request itself, but you can tell him you're glad he's
in touch with what he needs. Tell him you're glad he felt free to
ask. This is especially so if the need is in the direction of life
and growth for the person, if for the first time he can allow himself
to want or ask for closeness or time with you.
When a person acts toward you in a way that is obviously destructive
or self-defeating (and you think, no wonder lots of people dislike
this person), there are several things you can do:
* You can say how it makes you feel.
* You can point to what the person is doing and ask what that feels
like inside. Leave it vague, not defined. If you call it
"attacking," "manipulating," "lazy," "whining," "controlling," or
any such condemning label, you give only the external view. Inside
the focuser it's something more complex. So be puzzled about what
this is, even if you can give it a clear disapproving name from
your outside perspective.
* If you sense what a good life-thrust might be in this bad way of
acting, then respond to that life-thrust. A lot of bad ways are bad
only because the right thing is being half done, instead of being
done fully and freely. If you respond to the half of it that is
happening, that lets it happen more. Responding to the half that's
missing isn't as helpful.
Example: Someone is whiningly complaining. It would not be helpful to
say, "Why do you always whine and come on so weak? Why don't you
stand up for yourself and say what you want?" It is more helpful to
respond to the positive half of this that's trying to happen, and
say, "You're saying what you need from people, and calling a halt to
what they've been doing."
Some healthy life-enhancing processes are: taking up for yourself,
defending the way you see it, allowing yourself to be free to feel as
you do, reaching out for someone, trying to do something that you
haven't been able to for some time, exploring, wondering about
yourself, trying to meet people, sexuality, a sense of cosmic
significance or mystery, seeking peace, letting someone see you,
trying something new, taking charge of a situation, telling people
how you need them to be, being honest, hoping, refusing to give up,
being able to ask for help. These are all good life-thrusts.
No one should depend on just you alone. Let the person meet other
people you know, or call someone else in to help, if the person lacks
others.
The person should be present when being discussed by people trying to
help. It's hard to be straight in front of someone you're trying to
help, but we've already seen why you must.
A person's needs for help with a job, a place to live, and so on,
should be part of what help is about. Help is about needs, whatever
they may be. It's not useful to separate "psychological" problems
from the rest. They aren't separate in a person's life.
# The third kind of helping: Interaction
Until now you were either saying back the other person's feelings
(the first kind) or giving your feelings and ideas about the other
person's feelings (the second). Up to now it was all about helping
the other person. Now we come to your feelings. This section is as
much for you as for helping the other person. Ideally, both can
profit equally.
Our feelings, when we are with others, are often about those others.
And yet they are our own feelings. We often feel like blaming the
other person for our feelings:
* "I feel that you're very defensive."
* "I feel that you're manipulating me."
* "I feel angry because you always interrupt me."
* "I feel disappointed because you don't feel any better."
In these examples we express our feelings by saying that the other
person is no good, behaves badly, or is the reason for our feelings.
To express our feelings in a more useful way we must focus into them
and get in touch with what's in us. These feelings will still relate
to what the other person did, but they will be strictly our feelings
and not the other person's burden. For example:
"It's always hard for me to keep a train of thought, or keep feeling
it's worth saying. So when you interrupt me, it hits my weak spot.
I get so I can't make room for myself to say things to you. That's
why it makes me angry."
"I have a sort of stake in being a big help to people. I guess I'm
disappointed that you're not feeling better. I do care about you
too, but I see that my disappointment is my own thing. I need to be
Big Helper."
## How to express yourself
From a given moment of interaction you can move either into the other
person or into yourself. For example, let's say you are with a woman
who has done something to upset you. You can go from this into what
she did and what she is like and why she did it. Or you can go into
what you are like and how it upsets you.
Don't do the first. Leave that to the other person. Do the second:
move from the bit of interaction into your own feelings. See why it
affected you and share this.
It is hard for people to hear you say what's wrong with them. It is
easy to listen to you saying what's wrong with you, or what is at any
rate vulnerable or upsettable or shaky in you. Avoid making comments
that start, "I feel that you..." You're invading the other's
territory and protecting yours.
Sharing what is happening in you makes the interaction more open and
personal. The other person can then feel comfortable about sharing
inner things with you.
Don't say:
"I have to express my feelings. Can I trust you with it? I feel you
bully me."
Do say:
"I get angry and upset when I can't get to finish what I started to
say. I lose track. I get insecure about whether I have any real
ideas."
It is essential to be specific in expressing yourself. Avoid
generalities. It is still a rebuke to a person to be told he or she
made you upset. It is not real sharing when you share only a
generality. But if you share some of the specifics actually going on
in you--your unique felt sense of the situation--you share yourself.
You can find these specifics by focusing at that moment.
Be ready to stand it if what you shared is ignored. The other person
may not be able to meet you immediately, may still be in some private
anger or withdrawal, and may lag behind you in being open. The
person may have to say angry things once or twice more, or laugh
derisively. Your openness will be apparent, but the person may be
unable to meet it. So don't expect immediate warm receptiveness as
feedback. If you feel shaky, wait until what you say can stand on
its own, whatever the other's reaction.
It is better to say, "I'm mad," than to say angry things and let your
anger be seen indirectly. Saying your feeling directly lets it be
shared.
If the first words that come to you feel hard to say, don't fight
with yourself. Wait a few moments and let another string of words
form. Do this till you get words that feel OK to say. Don't give up
whatever needs expressing.
Focus directly on what you most fear, or what you find yourself
struggling with. If what the other person says makes you uptight, pay
attention to what you've afraid is being said and what you're afraid
that means then say the crux of what you find inside.
We often work desperately on the surface of what we feel, or how
we've just reacted, trying to fix it or make it be something else.
But it is easy to let the real feeling speak directly.
Examples:
* "That hurts my feelings."
* "I'm hurt that you're angry."
* "That makes me feel pushed away."
* "I feel outmaneuvered."
* "I'm stuck."
Say explicitly the covert things that go on in interaction, and say
how you feel about them. Often things are happening that both of you
can feel, but that both hope aren't being noticed.
For example, the other person might be pressuring you, and you might
be trying to avoid being pushed into something while trying not to
let on that you are resisting. Or you might have done something
stupid or wrong, and you might be trying to recoup without that error
being acknowledged, trying to make it be something other than it was.
When things like this, have really occurred, saying them gets things
unstuck. Not saying them keeps the interaction stuck.
Talk about it if you did something and now wish you hadn't. It may
seem too late, but it's never too late to get the interaction unstuck.
Examples:
* "I feel stupid about getting mad and yelling."
* "Back a while ago, you said... and I said yes. I was too chicken
to say no. I was afraid of fighting it out with you."
What feels impossible to face up to often provides a special
opportunity to become closer to someone.
If nothing is happening and you wish something would-even if it seems
that not much is going on in you-focus. There are always many things
going on there, and some of them belong with the interaction with
this person. Express them.
When you are being pushed too far, call a halt, set a limit. Do this
before you blow up or get mad. Protect the other person from what
happens when you don't take care of your needs. Say what you want or
don't want, while you still have the time and concern, to stay and
hear what it means to the other person.
For example:
"I like it that I'm helpful when you call me up, but now it's
happening too often. So instead of feeling good about it, like I used
to, I feel pushed. I'd like to feel good about your calling. If I
knew you'd call only twice a week, I know I'd like it again."
You are not trying to get rid of the person. You make the limits
firm, so that within those limits you can feel good about the person
again.
Having set these limits, you would stay to hear how the other person
feels about them.
If you are sitting with a silent person, say something like, "Let me
just sit here and keep you company." Relax. Show that you can
maintain yourself on your own without needing to be dealt with. In
such a silence, if it's long, you will have many chains of feelings,
some of which you can express (every few minutes, perhaps).
Do not tell feelings you haven't got and only wish you had. Tell
anything valuable you do have. If you find it painful to be honest,
realize that other people don't care how good or wise or beautiful
you are. Only you care all that much. It is not harmful to the other
person if you look stupid or imperfect.
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's
true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue
isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are
already enduring it.
## When not to express yourself
Be silent when people are focusing or talking about their concerns,
or might if you made room. Delay articulating your side. People can
almost always hear you better if they are heard first and get in
touch with where they are first. Also, as the other person does
this, it may change what you feel without your saying anything. It
might be hard to let the other person go first. But if the other
person is full of unclear and upsetting feelings, you might not be
heard unless you wait.
If you are very upset, and if the interaction isn't already a
trusting one, wait a few moments before expressing yourself. As you
calm down you can sift your feelings better. Also they are easier for
the other person to experience if it seems clear that you aren't
being wiped out by what you feel.
Don't express yourself immediately if you are confused about what you
feel and will only skirt your deepest feelings. Focus to learn what
they are.
## When to express yourself
Express yourself when you want to make a relationship closer.
Or when you are being "twisted out of your own shape" in some way.
For instance, speak up if the person is implying that you feel some
way you don't really feel. Then listen again. It is all right if the
person doesn't believe you if you have been heard. Don't argue.
Also express yourself when the other person needs to hear more from
you to feel at ease about you, or has misconstrued one of your
reactions. Say openly how it is with you. Don't let the other try to
relate to what you really were not feeling. Even though it may be
easier for you to remain unseen, misunderstood, and unapproachable,
no interaction is possible if you do.
When you are in a group and nothing is happening, express something
about yourself. This opens things up for others to express
themselves. Give them something personal and meaningful from within
you.
When the other person isn't up to relating with you, it may help if
you just freely express anything about yourself. This way you don't
have to be carried by the other's energy.
Express yourself when you are being idealised. Share some personal
trouble or not-so-nice feeling you find in yourself.
Express yourself when the other person worries about having wounded
or destroyed you. Give the specifics of how you do feel. Let it be
seen that, although hurt or upset, you are not destroyed.
Express yourself when you just feel like it. There are two people
here. You have equal rights. You may not always need to know why you
feel like expressing yourself.
# The fourth kind of helping: Interacting in a group
What follows concerns any group. It might be a staff meeting or your
family. It might be a social group or a task group. It might be a
group set up specifically for focusing--something I will discuss in a
later chapter.
We have all heard that groups should "process," take up openly bad
feelings. Usually that doesn't work very well. People hurt each
others feelings and don't really resolve them. Everyone gets a say,
but no one can go very many steps. No one is really listened to, or
focuses, so that the feelings can change. Yet this is what is needed,
and can happen. But it usually happens only with listening and
focusing.
Focusing can happen in a group, however large. Someone reads the
instructions and everyone focuses within the silences between.
Afterwards there should be a time when each person can say something.
If the group is large, it can divide into small groups. Divide the
available time, and have someone with a watch call time for each
person. Say you have half an hour and ten people. Each person gets
two and a half minutes (leaving time lost in between). When people
ramble, two and a half minutes is nothing, but if they know the time
in advance, and have focused, it may be more time than some people
will use. Take a minute or two in silence to let people decide
approximately what they will say.
A warm group climate exists when people are free to say only what
they wish, and no one criticises, edits, or adds anything whatsoever
to it. If people are skilled in listening, or listening is being
taught, the person on the right can respond listeningly. If people
are not skilled or learning listening, then no one should say
anything except the person whose turn it is.
When the group is having trouble with someone, or you are having
trouble with someone, set aside a separate time and arrange for a few
people to talk with the person. With just a few people meeting, each
can be fully heard and be given enough time. Let the purpose be
everybody's growth and straightness. Difficulties between people and
within people don't impede the work and dynamics of the group, if
they're dealt with in this way, they make a group better. When
problems get resolved, and any person in the group experiences
growth, the others feel the excitement.
If several people talk with someone who is upset or upsetting, at
least one should be designated to insure that the person gets really
listened to. This helps the person cope with disturbing feedback from
other group members.
Credit another person with some good or seemingly good reasons for
whatever is psychologically upsetting or harmful, even if you feel
angry or find the person unreasonable.
When an interaction is bad and continues to be bad, say you've been
talking for ten minutes and it's getting worse-stop. Go to the first
and second stages of listening. Assume the other person is trying to
do some good thing. Say that. Try to find what this good thing is and
say it. (If you don't like it, you can say that you don't agree but
that you do understand.) Then, when the other person's side is
cleared or heard, say you, now want to do your side, and do it. Even
if the person doesn't want to hear it, say your side before it's
over, or sometime soon. Perhaps bring in someone who can help you be
heard.
Why give your life and work to a group and then not invest the few
hours it takes to work things through with a person? People often
keep quiet out of consideration for someone until they get so angry
they want to throw the person out altogether.
At one time or another you, too, may have felt discouraged about the
group, unwilling to do the work, anxious you weren't doing it right.
Help hear the person who is having these feelings today, even if
today you don't feel that way.
It helps, in a group, to invite a person to speak who has just made
motions or grunts and didn't get a chance to express anything.
If a person says something meaningful and then a lot of trivial
things are said by others or irrelevant questions are asked, return
to the first person with an invitation to say more.
When all are down on one person, there has to be someone who is more
interested in letting that person get heard than in joining the
attack. Even if you feel insecure or an outsider in the group, you
can always express your wish to hear more from any person, or to have
that person repeat something to which the group didn't respond.
There are ways to help with an interaction between two other people.
If two or more are having trouble, and you are not too upset
yourself, you can help each person get heard. In a bad interaction,
usually neither person can hear the other very well. If you respond
to one person, as in the first stage of listening, the other can hear
you and see the good results of the process. Then turn and respond to
the second person's feelings. That lets the first one listen. (Don't
mediate and decide who's right about what. Keep your view for later,
or maybe say it fast and get back to them.)
Most of what we've said about listening can help in interactions with
the people close to you. The difference is that you aren't trying
only to help; you're also trying to live and work; so expect it to be
harder and slower. Accept it if you can't do as well when you
personally are involved. Don't be surprised if you can't listen well
when you're being attacked. Even just trying these approaches-no
matter how slow or hard it seems sometimes gets people out of a stuck
atmosphere.
A big difference can be made in a group if you listen, if you focus
and say some of what you find, and if you ask others sometimes to
sense and say more of what they are feeling.
-----
# HISTORY OF CHANGES 1970-2016
by Kathy McGuire
I am going to give here my version of the original Changes
Listening/Focusing community in Chicago during the early 1970's. I
will also continue that history with my own lifelong career of
spreading the Changes model. You can read my article outlining the
model, "Changes: Peer Counseling Supportive Communities as a Model
for Community Mental Health," online at
(HTM) Changes
I can only give my own point of view, and I hope that the many others
involved will write their own lived-experience of the early days when
Changes was forming and when the articles in this, The Changes Book:
A Handbook for Empathic Listening. Experiential Focusing and
Therapeutic Community, were written, 1970-1978.
I will hope to encourage others to start their own Changes-like
Listening/Focusing Support Groups, using my manual, Focusing in
Community: How To Start A Listening/Focusing Support Group, available
as a $5 computer download at my website for Creative Edge Focusing,
www.cefocusing.com, in English and Spanish, in The Store.
Year One: Crisis Hotline, organizational struggles
I entered the University of Chicago as a doctoral student in the
Department of Education in Fall of 1967. I transferred to the
clinical psychology Ph.D. program in the Department of Behavioral
Sciences in 1968.
I do not know the history of Eugene Gendlin there before I arrived,
and I do not know if other people involved in the beginning of
Changes, like Mary Hendricks and Linda Olsen and Jill Gardner and
Kristin Glaser, started that year or had already been there for a
year. Jill and Kristin were in the Human Development Department. The
client-centered student counseling center, which Carl Rogers had
founded and Gendlin and others were involved in, was on campus at
that time.
Gendlin had gotten a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Chicago
under Richard McKeon, but then he also came to work with Carl Rogers
as a client-centered therapist, theorist, and researcher. Those two
did extensive research in a psychiatric hospital in Wisconsin where a
lot of the formative work on research in client-centered therapy and
the Experiencing Scale (EXP Scale) was done. It is all summarized in
a book edited by Rogers called The Therapeutic Relationship and Its
Impact: A Study of Psychotherapy With Schizophrenics (University of
Chicago Press, 1967). There are a lot of formative articles by
Gendlin and others in this fat volume.
Mary Hendricks, Linda Olsen, and I were taking classes from Gendlin
as an existential/phenomenological philosopher/psychologist and also
from Israel Goldiamond, a specialist in behavior analysis and
modification. We were also being intuitively involved in the rising
feminist movement and the radical therapy movement. All of this
worked together in defining who we were as women getting Ph.D.'s in
psychology at the time. But that is another story.
This was a time of great turmoil related especially to the Vietnam
war protests and also eventually the murder of Martin Luther King and
many other notables.
There was a sit-in at the administration building at the University
of Chicago, protesting the Vietnam War, that some of us participated
in. It got national attention. We marched in demonstrations on the
streets of Chicago. Our male fellow students struggled with the
threat of the military draft.
There was the Kent State massacre, where The National Guard shot and
killed students protesting at that college against the Vietnam War,
May 4, 1970.
It was in response to this that the first gathering of graduate
students in Behavioral Sciences, including psychology and related
fields, was called, perhaps by Mary Hendricks and some of these
others. Gendlin was present kind of as a faculty advisor. I was not
part of whatever led up to this meeting but only attended the meeting.
As I recall, at this first meeting, we were looking for some form of
response to the Kent State massacre and decided that we would
circulate petitions on the north side of Chicago in favor of the
Hatfield /McGovern amendment to end the war in Vietnam. So, we did
that.
After getting petitions signed, we decided we wanted a response to
the way the Vietnam war was affecting our country that was more
reflective of who we were as graduate students. I do not know whose
idea this was, but it was Mary Hendricks, Jill Gardner, Kristin
Glaser, Hillary ?, and Gendlin who were most formative in these
beginning stages as far as I recall. Linda Olsen and myself joined
soon after. And eventually that is how the idea of Changes was
hatched.
We decided we wanted to aim our response to helping people in our
local area. We came up with the idea of a phone hotline which would
help the people who were struggling with drug overdoses, suicidal
thoughts, and whoever else might benefit from some volunteer
psychological counseling by phone.
I have no idea who actually got us the office and the phone lines in
the upstairs of the church where we eventually had our meetings (and
which church was it that housed us? I remember the name of the coffee
shop, The Blue Gargoyle). I don't know how Bob Whitney got involved,
but I think he was maybe studying divinity through that church.
At some point, someone got us involved as one of the hotlines covered
by a grant from the Playboy foundation, of all places, to help pay
for these phone lines. And at one point we even had a paid staff
coordinator, while the rest of us volunteered to man the crisis line.
Unfortunately, as money can lead to problems in organizations, I
think this paid staffer might have eventually absconded with the
money. You can read about this in the draft history of the first year
by K.G. which follows my history.
The core group of planners had a lot of meetings where we tried to
sort out who we were and what we were really doing. One of the
strands of a kind of wrangling was between being more organic versus
being more structured. I don't even remember exactly what this meant
but we wrangled about it. But K.G.'s paper to follow outlines a year
of such wrangling.
Year Two and beyond: peer counseling community
But Gendlin, who was not fond of decision-making meetings even then,
perhaps because of his experience in the counseling center run by
Carl Rogers, and then in the large research project in Wisconsin,
kept making the very important point that "we should be doing
Listening and Focusing rather than spending our time talking about
doing it." This really was his mantra which I do think kept us on
track and got us into having these weekly peer counseling community
gatherings at the church. We were meant to be doing Listening and
Focusing and never to lose touch with that activity being our
priority. But it took us that first year of wrangling to get to this
point!
Gendlin had seen too many good ideas get swallowed up in contentious
decision-making meetings. After a full year of long meetings with
much wrangling and disagreement about issues like "hierarchy" and
"money" and "structure" vs. "organic growth", and many interesting
experiences as we tried to incorporate ex-convicts and schizophrenics
and all kinds of people in crisis into our group, Eugene Gendlin
finally won his argument that we stop talking about doing something
and just start doing what we cared about. He insisted that
"decision-making" happen at a different time and place, and the group
time be used to actually do community mental health.
We had early on realized we did not just want to offer phone
counseling but to invite people to become part of our supportive
community. We were influenced by people like psychiatrist R.D. Laing
in Scotland who was starting therapeutic communities where
schizophrenics and regular people lived together on the assumption
that everyone was really OK.
We had also realized that we graduate students, "the helpers", where
as much in need of support as the so-called "helpees." So, we started
a peer counseling community where everyone learned the Listening and
Focusing skills, and everyone exchanged turns as equals.
After that year of wrangling and frustrating long "planning"
meetings, we came up with a model where any decision-making meetings
were held an hour before the actual peer counseling meeting started.
Those who wanted to attend that decision-making could and their
decisions would hold. If anyone didn't like their decisions, they
could come to the next decision-making meeting and state their
opinion.
K.G.'s history draft which follows tells of the first year before
Gendlin offered training and we started teaching Listening/Focusing
at our Sunday night meetings. Jean Rickert's short history at the end
tells of this important transition from being a hotline to being our
own peer counseling community and asking everyone to join us.
Eugene Gendlin offered the first 10-week training course in Listening
and Focusing at the church. And I guess he already had quite a
reputation, because around 60 people came. That became the core of
the first Changes Listening/Focusing community.
It was also important to Gendlin that "everyone did not have to do
the same thing or agree to do the same thing." So, at the weekly
meeting, there might be a presentation by Gendlin, the initial
10-week training class, for instance, but there eventually were
presentations by lots of other people. But no-one had to attend the
presentation. They always had the option to just find someone and go
off and start having a Listening/ Focusing turn right away. Or there
might be several different presentations or interest groups in
various rooms. You can see how this basic tenet for Gendlin carried
out when he started his own The Focusing Institute (www.focusing.org)
with a guarantee of diversity of training programs.
For me, personally, the decision-making meetings themselves, one hour
before the peer counseling community meeting, were fascinating. We
used our growing Listening and Focusing skills to try to come to
decisions that were not just a compromise but a brand-new solution
which arose as we listened to each other and spoke from our felt
sensing. I ended up doing my dissertation with Gendlin on this very
thing, how can you incorporate Listening and not interrupting into
decision-making groups in such a way that the participants can speak
from their felt experiencing, instead of arguing, and see a brand-new
solution arise (see my paper,
(HTM) Listening and Interruptions in Task-Oriented Groups,
)
So, Gendlin was offering the I0-week training class at the church
with 60 to 100 people in attendance, and maybe the hotline crisis
line was going on upstairs in an office staffed by us graduate
students as volunteers, and a core community of at least 20 but
sometimes up to 60 people was developing. And this community was
expressing itself in a number of different ways.
We were involved in some action in the community. One story is of
Mary Hendricks seeing someone being shuffled into a police car and
actually stopping and offering instead to get that person a more
appropriate kind of mental health care (which meant at that time
coming to crash with Changes members until they could link her up
with appropriate social services help).
I left for at least six months or more to follow a boyfriend to
Oklahoma and Texas. So, I missed some of the development that first
year.
We had incorporated as I said a number of so-called schizophrenics
etc. into our community. On the one hand, in some amazing cases, we
found that, when in the role of Listener, these people, otherwise
seen as not completely "normal" by society, could set aside
everything just like anyone else and really be there as a Listener.
We learned a lot about everybody's unique world from opening
ourselves to whoever wanted to belong and assuming that we were all
equals in terms of our need for helping and getting help.
But also, out of this, we developed the method of forming "teams"
(Glaser, K., "Suggestions for Working with Heavy Strangers and
Friends," in Part Five of this book) around people who needed a lot
of support, for instance someone who was suicidal or having delusions
or fighting off temptation to addiction, etc. Per usual, as we
realized that we "helpers" were also "helpees", people started asking
for teams around other things for ourselves. Gendlin had a team to
help him get his work out, and I had a team to help me find a
husband. We had a support group for all of us trying to get our
dissertations done, etc. There was a thriving Women's Group which
eventually split into two, and eventually a Men's Group.
Since many of us were doing Ph.D.'s, there was a strong research
component, everyone doing our research on some aspect of Listening
and/or Focusing with Gendlin as our advisor. Jim Iberg, who was in
the business school, did research on Focusing as a way of centering
people before they went to job interviews. Elfie Hinterkopf and Les
Brunswick went out to a local state hospital and taught Listening and
Focusing to psychiatric patients and did research on that. I was
doing my research on Listening in decision-making groups. Mary
Hendricks was developing a version of Klein and Mathieu's
"Experiencing Scale" to be used in analyzing low to high experiencing
in dreams. Linda Olsen and Gendlin worked together on a model for
including Focusing imagery work in psychotherapy. And many more.
And there were other people allying with us, who had discovered
Gendlin and his work on their own, like Nonn Don doing research on
Focusing and brainwave changes, and Ferdinand van der Veen, who
became a central driving force behind this The Changes Book.
Then there was a community of people who might have initially found
us through crisis but went on to become central to our community. So,
they were not graduate students at the time at least. And some of
them actually were the drug addicts or ex-cons or schizophrenics that
we had initially meant to reach out to and include in our peer
counseling community. And others were just everyday people who came
to us through the crisis center advertising and became fascinated
with Listening and Focusing in community. And I would list their
names, but it feels like almost a violation of their privacy since
they were not really graduate students or authors in this book, so I
will not do that.
But some of these combined with us graduate students to build a wider
supportive community consistent with the visions of the time. Some of
us shared communal housing. We had communal meals. We shared
resources like a vacuum or a car or a photography studio. We were
involved in a food co-op. A group of us drove to visit Walden Two, a
self-sustaining commune based upon the principles of positive
reinforcement outlined in B.F. Skinner's novel, Walden Two (1948;
MacMillan, 1976).
And, also consistent with the times, we were involved in a lot of
different kinds of intimate and sexual and love partnership
relationships. Given the free love and open relationship tenets of
the 1970s, you can imagine that there was quite a lot of potential
for conflict.
However, we applied our same Listening and Focusing skills when
conflict arose. I have written a chapter in my manual for starting
Listening/Focusing groups on how to use the skills to resolve
conflict (see "Interpersonal Processing" in Focusing in Community:
How To Start A Listening/Focusing Support Group, my manual available
in English and Spanish, and in a $5 computer download version, in The
Store at www.cefocusing.com).
To me, as with decision-making meetings, it was beautiful and sacred
to see the way in which owning and Focusing upon one's own
reactivity, and really trying to Listen to the other person's point
of view, could lead to deeper sharing. People actually became closer
through conflict resolution. It was really pretty amazing how much
conflict we worked through and how, at least at that point, conflict
did not tear our community apart. From my point of view, it was only
when people refused to engage in Listening/Focusing conflict
resolution that schisms arose and the Changes movement and Gendlin's
separate Focusing Institute took differing paths.
At some point, Mary Hendricks started the first purely Focusing
group. A bunch of us went off to a quiet chapel, lay down and closed
our eyes, and Mary guided us through the Focusing process. And then
she Listened to us on our experience. So, this was not a peer
counseling model for exchanging Listening/Focusing turns but a new
model more emphasizing Focusing on its own. Mary's paper on how to
run a Focusing Group is in Part Three of this book.
A number of people became involved in the more eastern spirituality
of Vasavada, who was a Jungian analyst as well as something like a
Zen Master. Out of this interest in Jung and dream analysis, Mary
Hendricks also started a Focusing and dreams group. This interest of
many of us, including Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, in dream work and
Jungian psychology eventually led to Gendlin's book Let Your Body
Interpret Your Dreams (IL, Chiron, 1986).
A lot of us became involved in re-evaluation co-counseling. And
Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of nonviolent communication (NVC),
was a frequent presenter at our Changes meetings. Rosenberg had been
one of the therapists in the huge research project done by Rogers and
Gendlin and others when he was a graduate student in Wisconsin, and
so he and Gendlin had met. Reuben Gold taught us about Gestalt. We
were exposed to yoga, meditation, massage, rolfing, reiki, primal
therapy, whatever was out there.
But it was always important that we held the line at one hour for a
presentation and then everyone splitting up into peer counseling
Listening/Focusing turns as pairs or triads or small groups. We were
there for the primary purpose of Listening and Focusing and were not
to be coopted by someone who said, "Oh let's be a Gestalt group
instead."
Ann Weiser Cornell entered Changes in 1972, and became one of the
foremost teachers, developing her Inner Relationship Focusing model.
She will have to tell that story. Her article in this The Changes
Book is about common problems in a beginning Listening group.
Gendlin used our early Listening/Focusing exchanges to do
phenomenological research, figuring out what we were doing when we
were Focusing by watching us and also asking us what we were doing
inside. So, in this way, I at least came to feel like we had some
ownership in the specification and development of Listening and
Focusing skills as they were defined in those Changes years.
1974-1978: Changes International
Around 1974, Gendlin got a sabbatical to go to New York city as a
visiting professor. I think it was Mary Hendricks, his partner, who
really wanted to live in New York. Kristin Glaser had moved to
Vermont. And I moved to Toronto (with that husband my team had helped
me find!) A lot of the main people were moving away. So, others still
in town kept Changes Chicago alive. Maybe Dave Young and Ann Weiser
Cornell can speak to this, or maybe it was Elfie Hinterkopf and Les
Brunswick.
At this time, a group of people also got together to write this book
about Changes, The Changes Book: A Handbook for Empathic Listening,
Experiential Focusing, and Therapeutic Community, latest version
dated 1978. Gendlin and Kristin Glaser and Mary Hendricks wrote
various things including the "rap manual." Many others wrote about
various other aspects of the Changes experience as well as the basic
philosophy underlying it. As one of the last assigned editors, I have
decided to offer that book online now, in 2016, so that people can
experience Listening and Focusing in supportive community as it was
being developed, freshly, by founders who were impassioned about
these ideas. Changes had also gotten some national recognition and
had been included in books on radical approaches to social support.
Various of us had published papers about Changes in The Radical
Therapist, Communities magazine, Voices, and other journals of the
times.
The Changes Book never got picked up by a mainstream publisher.
Everybody moved to different parts of the country, we had some
conflict about editing issues, and it remained circulated only within
our community. In part, I think Mary Hendricks and Gene Gendlin had
decided to put their energy, and revisions of their chapters, into
Gendlin's Focusing book (Bantam books, 1981, since reprinted and
translated throughout the world).
We did form Changes International at this point, in 1974. Tom
Brouillette started a newsletter called InterChanges, and we had a
number of yearly conferences. Joan Klagsbrun hosted one in New
Hampshire. There was one in New York. There was another outside of
Boston. Kristin Glaser hosted one in Vermont. I hosted one in State
College Pennsylvania around 1976.
1976-1978: From Changes International to The Focusing Institute
To my mind, this conference that Zack Boukydis and I hosted in State
College, Pennsylvania was a turning point in the history of Changes
Listening/Focusing Communities vs. The Focusing Institute emphasizing
Gendlin's Focusing. Because of my great interest in decision-making
and conflict resolution as part of the original Changes model, I
included times for decision-making and conflict resolution, using our
Listening/Focusing skills, as basic parts of the structure of our
gathering. And, saying it in short form, some people rebelled,
especially Gendlin.
To my mind, although The Focusing Institute might have existed in
some way at that point, Gendlin more formally split away from Changes
International and started The Focusing Institute as a separate
entity. Ruth Arkiss and Doralee Grindler played roles in directing
the beginnings of The Focusing Institute (TFI) while Gene and Mary
were still in Chicago.
Gendlin and Mary Hendricks-Gendlin came back to Chicago for a time,
starting The Focusing Institute with the help of Doralee
Grindler-Katonah as the first Director around 1978(?). Ruth Arkiss
helped get out the word about Gendlin's Focusing book, marshalling
forces to get it into bookstores throughout the nation. Bebe Simon
helped with early workshops and training, especially for the first
visitors from Japan and Germany.
Bebe also started a Changes Group in her own apartment on the North
side of Chicago, a group which has met once a week ever since then!
Elfie Hinterkopf went to Germany and Japan to teach workshops. And
the international Focusing movement had begun. But it was a number of
years before The Focusing Institute moved to New York and became a
formal non-profit with Gendlin and Mary Hendricks and Mary McGuire as
the Directors.
At that time, they also set up a method by which all of us were now
to apply to become Certified Focusing Trainers and Focusing
Coordinators and Certifying Coordinators and to sign contracts and
pay dues.
And some of us did not like this transition from being equals in a
peer counseling community to having to pay dues and sign allegiance
to The Focusing Institute in order to continue teaching Listening and
Focusing. In my case, it took a good 10 years before I became willing
to go to The Focusing Institute in Chicago and get formally certified
and become a Certifying Coordinator.
And during that time, I continued to start Changes groups wherever I
lived. In 1981, I had published my manual, now called Focusing in
Community: How To Start A Listening/Focusing Support Group (also
available in Spanish translation for $5 as a computer download from
the store at my website, www.cefocusing.com, or in paperback from the
Focusing Institute store).
1978-present: Publication of Gendlin's Focusing Book and future
history
The hardback edition of Gendlin's Focusing (NY: Everest House, 1978)
and the paperback edition (Bantam, 1981) included a description of
Changes and the Listening Manual for the exchange of
Listening/Focusing turns. The beginnings of the Focusing book and
that Listening Manual can be found in this The Changes Book, with
Gendlin and Mary Hendricks as partners, struggling to find their
first words for the nuances of the Listening and Focusing practices
we were exploring.
Many people who have been central to The Focusing Institute for the
last 30 years began their involvement as members of the first
Changes: Jim Iberg, Doralee Grindler-Katonah, Elfie Hinterkopf,
myself - Kathy McGuire, Ann Weiser Cornell, Dave Young, Mary
Hendricks-Gendlin, Gendlin himself, etc.
The beginnings of Focusing-Oriented Therapy (FOT) also developed as
all of us clinical psychology students honed our therapeutic skills
in our peer-counseling relationships with each other, as well as in
our formal training. See: McGuire, K.
(HTM) Psychotherapy Training Through Peer Counseling, 1985,
;
McGuire, K., The Experiential Dimension in Therapy, 1984, available
to download at www.focusingtherapy.org; Gendlin, E.T.,
Focusing-Oriented Therapy: A Manual of the Experiential Method,
Guilford Press, 1996.
In the 1990s, Mako Hikasa in Japan started a network of Changes
groups as an offshoot of Listening/Focusing classes, and kept them
connected through a newsletter and regional gatherings. Nicoletta
Corsetti in Italy also made the Changes format central to her
approach. Robert Lee, in founding his own approach to teaching
Focusing, kept the peer counseling group model as central. Suzanne
Noel includes group work in her approach using Focusing and Listening
in addiction treatment.
However, the emphasis within The Focusing Institute became more
narrowly defined in terms of Focusing as a self-help skill which a
person could do alone. Ann Weiser Cornell's Inner Relationship model
had the goal of people being able to do Focusing on their own.
Gendlin worked on his philosophy as expressed in The Process Model
and The Philosophy of The Implicit. With the help of Nada Lou and
others, he developed Thinking At The Edge (TAE). TAE is the process
of Focusing as applied to creating one's own theory or ideas. As with
Focusing, Gendlin got help by doing phenomenological research,
demonstrating Focusing- oriented theory building, watching others do
it, and analyzing the step-wise process people were using.
The emphasis on peer counseling, and Listening/Focusing communities,
and interpersonal conflict and collaborative decision-making, went to
the back burner. -----
author: Gendlin, Eugene T., 1926-2017
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Focusing
LOC: BF698.2 .G46
(BIN) source: gopher://tilde.pink/9/~bencollver/books/focusing-by-eugene-gendlin.pdf
(BIN) source2: gopher://tilde.pink/9/~bencollver/books/ofocusing-by-eugene-gendlin.doc
tags: book,health,non-fiction,self-help
title: Focusing
# Tags
(DIR) book
(DIR) health
(DIR) non-fiction
(DIR) self-help