As you may know, Counseling Confidence & the Experience Studio has a podcast, Way Beyond Words. Able Z and I discussed a wide range of topics: autism, parenting, direct care work, relationships, domestic conflict, LGBTQ issues, politics. Between the clinical side getting so busy and Able making some career moves we had to put it on the shelf for a little while.
We are starting up again in a few weeks, with recording starting soon.
I was facing a problem, however, and it is vexing. Not many people know about Focusing, even though it is effective as therapy, influential on psychological theory, and very intuitive.
Research is pretty solid on how therapy that validates the client’s experience is more effective than “training” a person to react in a new way, or teaching them a theory, or just listening. Eugene Gendlin’s rigorous philosophical work on subjective experience is impressive and influential. And Focusing itself is really easy to learn for most people.
It is this last point I would like to develop. While we were thinking through how we’d like to structure the podcast, I kept coming back to the annoying problem that so few people outside of Psychology know about Focusing. Sometimes it seems I need to explain the history of it, its context, every time I write something.
What aspect of Focusing do people most readily relate to, I asked myself. What keeps them interested and what do they learn quickly? I think the most accessible aspect of Focusing is how intuitive it is. In therapy I emphasize trusting one’s intuition, not as a final answer from on high, but as part of a subjective, empirical process where we are open to both intuition and the data we get from experiencing. Focusing allow me, as a therapist, to not just validate my client’s experience, but to learn to trust their intuitive perspectives on that experience.
So often people invalidate their own perspectives. Or stick too rigidly to them, There is a middle way, and Focusing is part of it.
Learning to trust ourselves is an ongoing process. Therapy helps, and so do healthy relationships. Focusing is a good support for this.
What I keep coming back to is the role of intuition, not just in Focusing, but in all fields of human activity… the arts, spirituality and religion, direct care work, family life, health decisions.
So for now, oh so provisionally(!), we are going to use the pod to explore the experience of intuition, and then use that conversation to introduce Focusing to both our guests and their audiences, friends, and larger network. And I will use my page here in the newsletter to develop the ideas that come up a little bit further.
Thanks for reading... look for the pod. And take a look at one of our new groups…
I have just discovered your work at the Focusing Institute and I like what your approach towards language and therapy and trauma in our lives. I would like to find a group like this in Attleboro, MA for my son. Anyway, you mentioned in this piece that not many people know about focusing. After listening to many YouTube discussions on the state of our lives and politics, I came across the mention of Paul Klee’s The Angel of History in Black Milk by Elif Shafak. In this article describing Klee’s work as war repeating itself, Benjamin further discusses the Language of things. The Language that names things does not create but the Language of silence has uninterrupted flow and does not repeat. That is the historical lesson, not to repeat the past. I think that in many of these interviews on You Tube it would be beneficial for humans to learn of this focusing. There are many young men doing interviews with forward thinkers, such as yourself. It would be a good platform to introduce it and to put a pause in the dialogue.
https://bluelabyrinths.com/2020/10/19/angelus-novus-eyesight-on-benjamins-aesthetic-mysticism/