The Focusing Process

The Bigger Picture model of clinical consultation + guided self-care is built upon an integrated, robust experiential approach (check out the Overview to learn more). Nothing is more foundational to its structure than the concepts, attitudes, and process steps of Eugene Gendlin’s “Focusing.”

What is Focusing?

As described by the International Focusing Institute:

“With Focusing, we invite ourselves into a certain kind of awareness. In our everyday lives, most of us spend a great deal of our time with our attention on tasks or issues. Many of us ignore or even try to silence our inner, bodily-felt experiencing of all that is happening in our lives.

In contrast, the ‘Focusing attitude’ is an invitation we offer ourselves to be open and centered on the whole of what is happening in the present -- most especially the usually-ignored body’s inner sensations. When doing Focusing, you silently ask, ‘How is the whole of me experiencing all of this?’…

By learning the practice of Focusing, we invite a much richer and more complex sense of our lives than a simple ‘feeling good’ or ‘feeling bad’… Focusing is the ability to stay with the felt sense as it develops, to look at it with curiosity, without judging. It is the ability to welcome what comes, to maintain a friendly attitude to whatever is inside you. Focusing is the ability to listen to that place that is trying to tell you something and being ready to be surprised.”

Where did Focusing come from?

Eugene Gendlin (1926-2017) originated the Focusing process and Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy. He studied under groundbreaking psychologist Carl Rogers and received his Ph.D. in philosophy (1958) at the University of Chicago. Gendlin was Research Director at the Wisconsin Psychiatric Institute of the University of Wisconsin from 1958 to 1963, and was Associate Professor of both Philosophy and Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago from 1964 to 1995.

Gendlin’s theories were influential on the evolution of Rogers’ view of psychotherapy. Under his guidance, Gendlin conducted research demonstrating that clients’ experiences of lasting positive change in psychotherapy corresponded with their ability to access a nonverbal, bodily “felt sense” of their issues. Realizing that people could be taught this skill, Gendlin published his popular book Focusing (1978), which introduced a six-step process for discovering one's felt sense and drawing on it for personal development. In 1985, he founded The Focusing Institute (now The International Focusing Institute) to facilitate training and education in Focusing for academic and professional communities and to share the practice with the public.

Gendlin received recognition from the American Psychological Association multiple times throughout his career, including in 2011 for his distinguished theoretical and philosophical contributions to psychology. He also received lifetime achievement awards from both the World Association for Person Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy and the U.S. Association for Body Psychotherapy. Gendlin’s pioneering work has been foundational to the development and practice of somatic and experiential approaches to therapy around the world.

While Focusing began as a process utilized in the field of psychotherapy, its applications have extended to settings such as healthcare, education, parenting, conflict resolution, business, and more.

What is the Felt Sense?

Gendlin gave the name “felt sense” to this intuitive, informative bodily feel for our issues and experiences. It can be accessed if we know where and how to look. The International Focusing Institute describes the emergence of a felt sense as something like this:

“As you wait attentively, something forms inside you that is vague, indefinite, difficult to put into words. You try to describe this sensation and maybe a sentence comes, or an image, maybe a word or two. These words or images somehow seem to represent this sensation, even if they seem illogical.

It might then become clear that your vague sensations have something to do with specific situations or experiences in your life. For instance, inner sensations of ‘I feel heavy,’ or ‘It’s like an empty cave inside’ might be related to a depressing situation you're facing. An exciting opportunity, on the other hand, might bring up words or images such as, ‘My whole being feels like it is expanding, getting larger,’ or, ‘I feel like a jaguar inside, ready to sprint.’ Such seemingly opposite sensations can even be present at the very same time.

This vague, not-yet-fully-articulated experiencing is called a ‘felt sense.’ It is more than simply a gut feeling or an intuition, and it is more than thoughts or feelings. The felt sense is, rather, the sense of the whole of a situation. The felt sense can include thoughts, feelings and intuitions, but a felt sense is somehow more than all that.

Many times, if we don't know how to listen to our felt senses, we might find ourselves asking, ‘Should I follow my heart or my head? My gut or my logical mind?’ In any given moment, our gut can say one thing, while our mind insists on something else entirely. The value of Focusing is that we learn to open up ourselves to the whole of our body's experiencing. In Focusing, we don't choose between disagreeing parts of ourselves; rather, we ask ourselves what it is like to experience all of it. The felt sense is that fuzzy, unarticulated sense of the whole. Felt senses are full of our felt meaning of a situation.

Learning to listen to the felt sense through Focusing allows us to hear the messages that our bodies are sending us. Recognizing the felt sense is the important first step of Focusing.”

Would you like to explore this process of Focusing-informed clinical consultation? Contact me here.

Would you like to pursue formal “Proficiency in Focusing Partnership” training? Learn more here.