Focusing – finding and feeling your feelings (Eugene Gendlin)

Focusing is the life skill of how to tune into your feelings by tuning into your body and sense how you are feeling. We all do it more or less, but it’s really valuable to develop it as a clearly defined skill. Per research, it is a foundation of all effective psychotherapy.

Focussing – basic to all psychotherapy that works

Life is the life of the body, and feelings are the truth of the body. (Feelings and emotions are not the same.) So as you tune into your bodily feelings, you are tuning into the truth of your life in this moment. And when you attend to feelings respectfully, they automatically flow through in a healing way.

Because of their depth, feelings are naturally diffuse, vague, and unclear. They are often covered over by everyday tensions and superficial verbal thoughts. So it takes time to sit with a feeling and let it emerge, and then more time to wait for words to emerge that give you a handle to hold the feeling with. Focusing teaches you how to achieve those steps.

In fact, all effective therapists who work in any depth work with feelings in this way ie inviting the shift from words about a feeling, or a muffled closed-off sensation of the feeling, to feeling grief, anger, joy, and many subtler things with presence in the body in the moment.. It’s proved by research to be a core part of any transformative process. So it’s not unique. However Focusing is the only therapy school to systematically teach this foundational personal development skill. In addition, focussing and meditation are deeply intertwined.

A classic book is Focusing by Eugene Gendlin.

Weaknesses of focussing as a stand-alone psychotherapy

Not at all action oriented and weak on challenge and honesty. Entirely concerned with the moment-to-moment feeling process to the exclusion of other facets of the transformative process. Lacks a system of wisdom about how emotions interrelate and how they arise from relationships, and no practical psychology for pragmatic change.

“Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise from outward things, whate’er you may believe. There is an inmost centre in us all Where truth abides in fullness…and to know Rather consists in opening out a way Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, Than in effecting entry for a light Supposed to be without. ”
– Robert Browning, Paracelsus

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