Focusing Orientated Therapy

Focusing Orientated Therapy
Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction    2
Chapter 2 Dead ends    2
Unchanging feelings    3
Conclusion    3
Chapter 3 Experiential process steps    3
The initial lack of clarity    4
Felt sense    4
Chapter 4 What the client does to enable an experiential step to come    5
Chapter 5 What a therapist can do to engender an experiential step    6
Handle    6
Felt sense    6
Chapter 6 The crucial bodily attention    7
Felt sense versus emotion    7
Chapter 7 Focusing    9
Sensing in the body    9
Clearing a space    9
Getting a handle on it    10
Resonating the handle    10
Asking    10
Receiving    10
Chapter 8 Excerpts from teaching focusing    10
Dead end feelings    11
Too much to work with    11
Chapter 9 Problems of teaching focusing    12
Chapter 10 Excerpts from one persons psychotherapy    12
Chapter 11 A Unified View of the Field through Focusing and the Experiential Method    14
Chapter 12 Working with the body    14
Chapter 13 Roleplay    15
Role play instructions    16
Instructions    16
Chapter 14 Experiential dream interpretation    17
Preparatory procedure    17
Reversing unnatural negatives    17
Chapter 15 Imagery    18
Chapter 16 Emotional Catharsis, Reliving    19
Chapter 17 Action steps    19
Chapter 18 Cognitive Therapy    21
Chapter 19 The superego    21
Chapter 20 The life forward direction    23
Chapter 21 Values    23
Chapter 22 It fills itself in    24
Chapter 23 The client therapist relationship    25
Chapter 24 Should we call it therapy    26

 

Chapter 1 Introduction

Focusing exists in the zone between consciousness and unconsciousness. Sensing the body is not a physiological description.

According to experiential approaches theories are neither true nor false, not true as they don’t exist in human experience, not false as they might help see something that otherwise would have been lost.

When we think of theory we also feel experience.

 

Chapter 2 Dead ends

2 kinds of dead end happen in therapy: interpretation with no experience. Repeated experience.

With interpretation then the therapy model is can’t act, substitute with wise words, but they don’t seem to help, you can’t talk your way into delivering a public speech without fear. You can fully believe the reasons that lead you to be nervous with public speech but you still can’t do anything about it.

You can sense inwards to determine if something is a dead end or not.

A client can believe a new interpretation about their problems, a therapist can persuade them of a new interpretation of their problem, but nothing changes: dead end.

If there is a new interpretation, does it have any somatic effect on the problem, if it does not it can be discarded. If it can be directly sensed then it should be pursued.

Interpretation is mere scaffolding which is where the building can rise or fall, when the actual building is there. So you need a concrete experience to an interpretation.

Keeping the client company on what they are expressing is the best way to avoid dead end discussions.

When the therapist is with what the client is struggling to convey then there is a little bit more space, as what is can be seen and heard. The client needs to check internally to see if the therapist has understood what they are struggling with.

If there is a sensed connection, an inward sense that something has been heard, then this is what should be stayed with  as it is from here that change will happen.

There needs to be an experiential effect in therapy for change to happen, so that when you talk  you need to pay attention to whether there is an experiential effect, if there isn’t then what you say counts for nothing.

Unchanging feelings

Clients have strong concreted and repeated feelings. Dead end feelings are such as they don’t feel like they have an edge to them, something to be explored, a client says I’m anxious but I don’t know why, I don’t know all of it. Every bit of human experience is not complete, it has another movement implicit in it.

Experience is not an assemblage of past experience, in the same way with maths that 10 is 5+5, i.e. the whole is created from units. Analytic truth.

One type of explanation is to break the whole down into bits. When we see change we do this and see there is a rearrangement of the things that haven’t changed then we have an explanation.

Another type of explanation is context, to see things in terms of a larger picture, so that behaviour makes sense in terms of this context.

Experience isn’t fixed you can break it up into many different ways, to get many different inferences.

You can slice up experience to give one logical conclusion, or slice another way to give another. This is interpretation.

When changed happens, the past that engenders them seems different to how it was at the time, the past changes.  Present experiencing changes the way the past can be for the present.

Conclusion

Every experience and event has implicit movement in it, to get this you need to find the edge of the experience, where things are unclear.  Change comes from these edges.

Change rarely comes in one step, in comes in many steps, often small steps, occasionally large ones.

 

Chapter 3 Experiential process steps

What is the view from inside the client when change happens?

Internal events happen: dreams, emotions, thoughts, behaviours, all can just pop up. You can sense into the source of them, you can have direct awareness of the border zone between the conscious and unconscious where these events arise.

An image pops up, it can be accompanied by a physical sensation, there can also be an inward understanding that is ineffable.  When you are talking there is the place where you are talking from and sometimes you can get a direct sense of that. This place where words come from, this experience when you have direct sense of this, this is the implicit. It is richer than words as it affords multiple interpretation.

The implicit=>what has emerged for the client=>you can only add interpretations to this

The implicit=>direct access=>find out what’s next

The initial lack of clarity

The direct sense of the implicit source always at first lacks clarity, vague, fuzzy and unclear. The direct sense is unique, and therefore definite, it could not be something else.

A person talks about their problem, says everything that can be said, and then feels there is nothing more but yet there is still something uncomfortable about the problem, this is the edge

People can miss the edge of experience by talking too quickly. It can be anxiety provoking to be quiet. Likewise, they can berate themselves, talk to themselves in a critical voice and therefore stay outside of themselves.  They ignore the edges but repeat the main packaging.

Felt sense

A direct sense occurs in the body, in the viscera usually. It is not the preconscious, something that could be brought into consciousness, e.g. where I put my keys, the name of my forgotten friends. So, our memory is preconscious. The direct sense is that which is between unconscious and preconscious, what is likely to come up next

The felt sense is the whole of the problem but it isn’t the addition of all of the parts, e.g. emotion, bodily feeling etc. Rather it’s that which comes with or under or around the emotion, bodily sense etc.

A characteristic of this felt sense is that it is felt as an intricate whole.  The felt sense is something that you have, not something that you are.

A step changes comes out of the felt sense, it has a direction, but you cannot predict it.

Nothing is more important than the inner person inside the client in therapy, to see that stir, move or come alive is the aim. So paraphrasing things that are unique to the person, that they love, or the positive things a client may say about themselves can do this.

The felt sense has a growth direction, this is neither good nor bad. Optimism is an insult to those who suffer, pessimism and insult to life. Life has its own direction, it may be bad, but followed this can turn into something else.                

You can only understand progress retrospectively, once it has happened you can see what the steps were to get there, but you can’t tell in advance.

 

 

1.       A felt sense forms at the border zone between conscious and unconscious.

2.        The felt sense has at first only an unclear quality (although unique and unmistakable). The felt sense is experienced bodily.

3.        The felt sense is experienced as a whole, a single datum that is internally complex.

4.       The felt sense moves through steps; it shifts and opens step by step.

5.       A step brings one closer to being that self which is not any content.

6.       The process step has its own growth direction.

7.       Theoretical explanations of a step can be devised only retrospectively.

 

Chapter 4 What the client does to enable an experiential step to come

 

Freshly coined phrases often represent concrete experience, e.g. I pull back.

Focusing spending time with the bodily sensed but unclear.

When general words do not express something then you might tell  a little story,  or maybe use a metaphor.

Irrational behaviour always has sense for why it behaves as it does.

So can you imagine the x feeling for you, what does it feel like to you? If you tap it lightly what turns up? Lets be friendly to this part of you, what do you think makes it so x?

Whilst there can be direct concrete experience with a felt sense and meaning and a step come out, this isn’t definitive, this isn’t the truth if you like as  more sense can derive from this, or if this is acted on, more sense can come out of this.

 

The vocabulary of parts of a person must trick you into thinking they are fixed, they are dynamic.

When a felt sense opens and feelings come it is not that the feelings were there, but rather they were not felt and when they were they came forward . in other words the felt sense developed, moved forward and in the moving forward the emotions were felt.               

A negative package, i.e. it is withdrawal, cannot develop into anything else, it is fixed.

A felt sense however can develop, and once developed, can develop again, it is an intricate complex.

Notice how the parts of the client are related to, rejected, denied etc and how that will affect the development of that part of them, when blamed I deny, when rejected I withdraw.

 

Helping a client to a felt sense:

Imagine the problem situation, notice the sensation in you, give it room to move, let it be, let it speak to us, what would it say? Lets hear from the opposition. What does that feel like, sense a bit longer.

In therapy, people spend hours talking to themselves from the outside, berating themselves, criticising themselves for this inner obstacle.

 

You can get many interpretations of a problem, but they are distant from the problem. They are your mind which is distant from the feeling of the problem.

Sensing from the inside is quite different from surmising from the outside.

 

Chapter 5 What a therapist can do to engender an experiential step

So firstly the therapist can offer words for the whole of it, the client can then agree or not.  When the whole of it has a label then you can sense into that.  When something comes up, ask the client to be friendly to it, to welcome the feeling, and to want to talk to it, then maybe ask a direct question.

In reflecting you want to reflect back the experience the client has.  The therapist wont grasp what was said the first time, so they will check via reflecting and then the client will correct.

When the client says and they feel the therapist has heard then it has space and doesn’t need to be said anymore.

To engender engagement with a concrete experience trying pointing to it, “so there’s something similar between these two situations” “there’s something in you that pulls back”.

There are many theories that could fit with an event, to choose one is to lose all the others.

Staying with the unclear can be useful, it reflects the clients process, you are with the place where clarity can come, you don’t force an interpretation in there to get rid of the unclear, you couldn’t focus for an hour in therapy it would be too intense.

 

Handle

A handle word helps pick up all of the experience with it.

 

Felt sense

Another way to get a felt sense is to ask a client to imagine vividly doing the thing that relates to the felt sense, and then to notice what the thing is that gets in the way. If you ask them to look into their viscera then that can backfire, they get discouraged if it doesn’t work.

Content depends on the manner of experiencing, so if a therapist welcomes everything warmly, then the client can see the good in what they do, they can form a relationship with it.

The relationship to the thing defines its content, if the inner relation is negative, or blocked that will affect the content, be denied, be furtive. 

You cannot get people to shift attention. They first need to acknowledge where their attention is, to focus on and listen to what is there for them, when that is heard and acknowledged then they can take other things in.

If you are pushed, if you push yourself, ten you turn compliant, passive.

Stay with your client, if you are trying to do something own it, when a client is attended to then they can take the choice if they would like to do the thing that you are offering.

Sometimes with focusing there is disassociation, this is an indicator not to go further at this point,

It is difficult to be with an unclear sense, it might appear then vanish again.

Identifying with a part you, is when you say I want to, I feel etc, as opposed to part of me feels.

With the unclear then wait, tap it, touch it, sit by it and see if it opens.

We are wrongly accustomed to dividing human experience up into discrete entities, the fear, the boredom but experience doesn’t consist of separable things.  When things are separable they are fully known, there is nothing to be curious about.

Fear and what is feared are not two things, fear names the whole thing, the implicit complexity has a fear quality.

Emotions come with a broader unclear bodily quality. At first we experience them as discrete, that’s all they are, here is anxiety, or fear.

Being friendly to unpleasant feelings, we don’t attack the messenger or we hear no more from it, we give it space.

Welcome the positives, the negatives are only attended to in so far as they are a block to moving forward.

 

Chapter 6 The crucial bodily attention

Felt sense versus emotion

Emotions come of their own will, you remember a sad event you may feel sad. We can expect emotions , but they come unbidden, they are relatively autonomous. The main difference with a felt sense is that an emotion is recognizable, with felt senses we have them but we don’t know what they are.  A felt sense has its own meaning but it is intricate.   A felt sense is intricate, like a Persian rug with things fused together but it can point t o a single step forward.

Certain phrases carry forward a felt sense, allow it to open and move forward.

An emotion is less reliable than reason, a felt sense more reliable. So when angry we can act on that basis but later regret it as there was much about the situation we missed.  However with a felt sense then we can sense more than we can with reason about the situation, there is this part of it, the that part of it.

You need rationality and felt sense, sometimes the next steps of felt senses can be quite wacky and you need rationality to guide freedom , choice and responsibility.

Felt sense action can be irrational, but you don’t have to act on them straight away, sometimes the felt sense step will be sensible when other things happen

A felt sense contains more reactions to a situation that we currently know, an emotions contains les s  reactions to a situation than we currently know.

Emotion	Felt sense
Clear	Unclear
Narrow: an emotion occupies my attention and makes accessing other of a situation hard,	Broad, within a felt sense there is more about the situation that I can know, I can find things out
Single cue: it’s a response to a single event	There are many strands of it, what is expected, avoided, what somethings consequences might be.
Emotions can come from the past, and recreate an emotion now	The felt sense is always present, since it is unique and always changing
Internally uniform: what is inside the emotion, say anger is more emotion	Internally complex, there are many strands of it
Universal triggers, I expected to feel like this, others would	Unique meanings, I find meanings within them, they emerge
Named with a single word or phrase	Hard to name
Stays the same or increases in intensity	If I stay with the felt sense it changes
Hard to get rid of, takes attention	Not intense you have to pay attention or you lose it

 

Both

·         Come in a bodily way

·         We can’t create them, but can wish they came

·         Both form in the same bodily areas, the viscera mainly

The felt sense may contain emotions, thoughts, physical feelings, words, but they are not like things in a box, rather they are implicit and will emerge as the felt sense opens, as it is carried forward.

Emotions do not change through staying with them, they can get weaker or stronger. A felt sense however changes into something different.

The felt sense has al that has led up to your emotion for instance, how it involves you, your feelings about the emotion.

The felt sense is a multiplicity sensed as one. It has a focal point and a sense of what next.

 

When you act on emotion you act on less information than you could have, as your attention is biased, when you act on a felt sense you act on more information than you could have, the implicit multiplicity.

We used to think the intellect could give psychological healing with Freud, then we moved to catharsis, but in catharsis the emotion is generated each time there is catharsis, so we practice the emotion, we keep it going. It can be a relief to feel a blocked or repressed emotion, but once felt there is no help in repeatedly feeling it.

With an emotion there is a fixed sense of I know why and anyone else would but within that why do you feel this emotion what else is there for you, why do you feel it in the way that you do? Asking these questions can take you deeper into the emotions, your past, your future, what the event means to you.

If we attend to the physical quality of the whole situation we will find an intricacy.

A felt sense is physical but not merely physical, it is the physical sense of the whole of something, of meaning. It’s a bodily sense of something. Sometimes its difficult to tell the difference between a felt sense and a physical sense but if you imagine the situation resolving or needing to be dealt with now and the pain goes, increases etc then you can see.

Bodily sensations are usually at the periphery of the body, felt senses are in the middle of the body, abdomen, chest, throat, solar plexus.

You can relax too deeply for a felt sense to come, you drift away from the body, the body is silenced.

Meditators can have an elevator that goes all the way down, the felt sense forms half way down.

Focusing is deliberately paying attention to the place where activity rises, one seeks the whole sense of what is wrong at the moment.

Gendlin has ecstatic temporality, the implicit past\future of the present, the meaning made, the hope and expectation. If you are reliving a past experience or fearing a future one then you cannot attend to the present but when you do you experience the implicit past and future. The past changes out of the present, when an event happens it can be supported by a change, a reinterpretation of the past.

 

Chapter 7 Focusing

Sensing in the body

Can you sense the inside of your stomach and chest? What do you sense there? Take a minute or two ... Is it something like a sense of woolly comfort, is it fluttery, tense, or how? It need not have a verbal description, so long as you can say, yes, that quality is there. Take a minute or two ... Did your attention succeed in getting in there? Many people are helped by beginning at the bottom. Try this: Put your attention into your right toe inside your shoe. Can you do it? If not, move the toe, then it is easy to sense inside it. Then hold it still. Now you are sensing inside your toe. Do the same with the knee and then the chair pressing on you from below. Then come into your stomach and chest. What quality of body feeling do you find in your stomach?

 

Clearing a space

1.       Clearing a Space Begin by taking a minute to just rest and be friendly with yourself inside.

a.       See what stands between you and feeling fine. Each one of us carries several problems at a time and it is usually a mix of these. It helps to sort them out in the following way:

2.       Put your attention in your stomach or chest, and (knowing it probably is not so) say something like, “My life is going just fine these days. I feel totally fine about it.”

a.        Then attend to the middle of your body and see what comes there.

                                                               i.      Your mind may quickly answer this question before you manage to put your attention in your body. If that just happened, begin again. Did a not-so-good overall body feeling come, as if to say, “No, I’m not totally fine, rather, something like this ... ”?

b.        Whatever actually comes, say, “Hello, yes, that’s there,” and get ready to sort it out.

                                                               i.      Usually the not-so-good feeling has to do with more than one thing

c.       Ask, “What is one thing, one part of my life, that is in this mix?”

                                                               i.       If you can find one part of your life that the overall sense is about, promise it that we will come back and work on it later. Right now, for a little while you want it to wait—a little distance away—so you can take an inventory of the rest of what is here.

d.       Now attend again in your body. Except for that one problem, do you feel okay about how life is going?

                                                               i.      You should find that the overall sense that comes now is somewhat relieved compared to the way it was before. If it is not different, then ask more forcefully, “What would come in my body, if that problem (somehow, magically) came to be all OK?” Then wait and see what actually comes in your body. Then see again, except for this thing, can you say you feel all fine about how life is going? Wait. A lighter sense should come, leading to more things to place at the right distance.

e.       As you put things to one side  a lighter sense should come, if not ask more forcefully, if problem x was magically fixed, how would I feel and check in your body.

3.        

Getting a handle on it

Find a word, or 2 word phrase that fits

Resonating the handle

Check with the felt sense if the word\phrase fits

Asking

Ask the felt sense what it is so much about the problem that fits the handle

Receiving

Welcome what comes, you don’t need to believe it, it’s just a first step, give it a little space and welcome it. Other steps may follow.

 

Chapter 8 Excerpts from teaching focusing

So when there’s a feeling described, check in the body and see if that’s the best description. Ask your bodily feeling if that’s the best description.

When there’s a visceral description of something, then ask, can you just go inside your body and notice what you are feeling. Alost to get felt senses ask what’s the worst of this, i.e. the all of it.  Wait for your body to stir is a great question.

Asking somatic words\emotional\descriptive visceral words can be an invitation to drop into experiencing.

One way to get a felt sense when it doesn’t come is to ask for or offer a handle to the implicit whole.

With an emotion the self gets smaller, if we identify and act on it, then later we realise other things.

With a felt sense the self gets bigger, the implicit whole is something we don’t understand and there is more in it than we know, we can engage with parts of it, and there is movement.

The felt sense is  a part of me, and it has direction. An emotion is part of a part.

 

Dead end feelings

I just feel angry=> is that how it really feels now, is that pretty much all it feels like, is that the crux of all of it, let your body sense the all of it, and see if anger covers it.

When the body stirs, you can get emotion\bodily feeling\thought\image…etc

As something cognitive occurs thought\image check it out if it resonates with the feeling in the body.

One way to manage dead end feelings is just to check if the description of the dead-end feeling really matches the feeling for the whole, that then puts a thing that we are describing, sets us in relation to a something. Puts a something to be checked against.

When an image comes, and possibly when a belief comes check the bodily feeling that comes with it.

 

Too much to work with

That’s a whole lot, when you talk about x and y and z.  So summarise when you think about x, ten there are some other problems with it (the list) which you are trying to work out. So just leave it there, and be here and let it come to you, let the all of it come and see what the feeling of the whole of it is for you. If a word comes, then check is that all of it?

Without going through a list, without forcing words on it, just let yourself sit with the whole feeling, with all the bits you mentioned.

Single word mentioned to describe the feeling, is there something deeper here, something underneath that feeling

When you are working with a felt sense, pay attention to the steps of change and highlight them, so they can be sensed again. Notice the mutation in description.

Getting steps via, can you go into that, do you notice what’s beneath that?          

An interpretation may be correct but there needs to be an experiential shift, this comes with the implicit whole in the body that contains the interpretation.

 

Ask what’s the worst about that, this gives a whole question, then wait to see what happens in your body, see if it stirs. If an image comes then does the image fit the feeling that you have of the worst about it, if words come do the words fit the feeling.

If a client gets to caught up in a feeling then you can get them to put it to one side, put it outside themselves and notice how they would be fine without this feeling. Not putting it so far that it can be sensed, not so close that they identify with it, but rather at a distance where they can see the all o fit.  Notice that you want to care for that part of you that you put outside yourself.

Setting a problem outside of yourself allows you to process it as a whole.

Asking what’s so bad , focus on the whole of the problem, then asking the problem as a whole what it needs is asking for the next step.

If an emotion repeats several times, then put it to one side, put it away from yourself so that you can engage with it as a whole.

You can check with what the body says it needs by getting the client to image that happening, what happens to the felt sense, is there relief? Yes then the body has spoken, if no then ask again.

You need to attend to felt sense shifts, they can come and be small, clients can criticize them, doubt them,  what you need to do is to stay with it for a minute or so, to see what then comes.

 

Chapter 9 Problems of teaching focusing

You don’t want to spend to much time teaching, that sets an active\passive relationship, and gets the client to engage externally. Offer things tentatively, so that you find your way, acknowledge when you get things wrong.

If the therapist needs the instructions to work, the client might find it hard to tell them when it doesn’t.

Psychological change comes from the inside, the client needs to learn to drive, to listen to themselves.  Therapists can offer ideas, interpretation etc, but they must attend to the clients reaction to it.

Teach focusing in small incremental steps, don’t drive the car.

Clients can run roughshod over their feelings like being a pushy therapist . It can help then for the therapist to help them make some space for their feelings.

If the therapist is impatient, then the client may feel that focusing is just of interest to the therapist.

Great formality of therapy leads to an antiseptic quality, that has more pitfalls than what the formality is trying to achieve.

If a client pushes back on an instruction, its like standing on someone’s toes, you say I didn’t mean to, step off, don’t step back on, but don’t go home, or cry so profusely to show that you can’t stand it.

It is not the mistake that is important it is how it is responded to after wards. Being mistreated is common in life, a person wanting to understand it and rectify it afterwards is rare.

Chapter 10 Excerpts from one persons psychotherapy

If youre not feeling so good, you can ask where has your good energy gone, as it will be inside you somewhere, held back by a part of you.

Sometimes images are just that some times they are felt senses, you can check this out with a tentative invitation, you can feel a heavy wall in front of you (as opposed to see), which gets the image to be resonated with the felt sense.                

If a client has a desire: I want to run, make it a thing, step back and be next to it, this wanting.

If you have conflicting emotions, or emotions that want to get rid of parts of you, then make space for those emotions so they don’t push the other parts away.

The parts of self need not continually refer to an actual part or being. We can have multiple parts without having multiple selves.  To make an internal conceptual map can take you out of processing.

To ease something make some space for it, I’m crumbling, stand back so we can see he part of you that wants to crumble.

If a client has an uncomfortable feeling, try to move them to a comfortable vantage point to see it, if they feel insecure try to move them to a secure vantage point to view it.

Key focusing attitude of being gentle.

When very sensitive feelings come up my first response is go gently now.

Neither push nor avoid.

Have no interest in being right or wrong, have interest in the client finding out.

There’s something about staying with a clients process, as opposed to getting you to understand its getting them to understand, therefore they don’t need to explain to you, they just need to work it out for themselves.

Sometimes the felt sense is too painful to go into directly.

Tap the pain, then put it down again. You are neither fully identifying with it, nor ignoring it, just engaging with it for a bit.

Restlessness as a response to losing contact with the felt sense.

Neither bully the problem nor put it down.

A clients process is unique, you don’t know what to push into, you don’t know the order, so you should be led by them, so horizontalization.

Clearing a space

Take the painful thing, put it away from you, at a certain distance that feels right, not so far that you can’t see it, not so close that’s all you can see. Maybe you could move closer to it and pick it up for a little bit then put it down and move away from it.

The concrete living process is always more than content, it’s a doing, its developing and changing it’s a becoming. To define content is to stop the dynamism and say that’s what it is.

Process

The process of breathing: how are you breathing. Content can remain the same but process can change and therefore there is change.

Whenever someone says I’m x, then the focusing response is to refer to it as a thing, a part of you. So youre noticing some anxiety inside you, some anxiety has come into you, part of you is anxious. Somewhere in you anxiety has come in

 

Allow space and time for the client to make contact with their felt sense.

Can be useful to have check is something from the past, does it have a from then aspect, maybe also to check out what its like having the memory now.

 

Chapter 11 A Unified View of the Field through Focusing and the Experiential Method

A lot of common methods between modalities, however how the methods are used varies greatly and people can find great commonality with practitioners of different modalities.

Modalities have different types of procedures, or avenues, e.g. imagery or behavioural etc. Learning two or three approach in each avenue can help with know how to do that avenue. Each avenue affects the other, so if you are working in a certain way with the client using images, that may affect your behavioural work with them.

You can work with anything to end up with the felt sense, so each avenue can be worked wit experientially

Its best to use as many avenues as possible as they are all combined in your client.

The connection between the avenues is intricate, it is the felt sense. We can look at behaviour and thought and emotions separately but are they. They are connected in an intricate mesh.  Indeed for every avenue, for every event or experience there is a felt sense that you can drop down into, how that thought is experienced.

A felt sense opens, moves forward, but only if you pay attention to it.

Clients can move from emotions to thoughts to different emotions but without a felt sense nothing changes, the experience is the same.

Each avenue joins others, at their edge they are a mesh of experience, the felt sense.

We can get to know the source from where behaviour comes from, which I guess is the experience, the felt sense out of which emerges behaviour.

The way a felt sense opens and carries forward is different in different avenues, how if you are working emotionally, or with images, then how the felt sense would open would be different.

Each avenue will affect the other, so as you do emotional , or cognitive work, so they may affect the behavioural avenue.

All theories generate hypothesis, its only when a hypothesis opens a felt sense and carries it forward that it is useful

 

Chapter 12 Working with the body

You can only think a few things at the same time  your body co-ordinates a total situation and responds appropriately, when playing tennis your body moves to the right place, assumes the right position at the right time , using the muscles correctly to hit the ball.

A felt sense, a life situation, is what is generating a physical sensation. The felt sense if felt in the middle of the body. So if there’s a pain in your head, see what you feel about your pain in the middle of your body, or see if the pain in your head will move into the middle of your body.

To move from physical sensation to felt sense then try the place next to or before the sensation.

 

With a body sensation anywhere but the centre of the body we ask, “What would come in the middle, about that pain?”

You can move sensation around your body, the stomach ache, becomes a foot tapping, becomes a headache.

Move your facial expression into your middle .

 

Can you let that new good thing come into your body. Therapeutic change effects the very tissues of the body.  You can say let that come through a bit, you don’t need to mention the body (some will say I don’t feel anything)

If you have a new energy that comes, ask the client if it can come again.

Some times clients mimic what they think therapeutic change should look like, sound like etc.

Some clients aren’t grounded, ask them to imagine lying on the grass and see what comes.

Sitting forward in your chair can indicate a new start.

Therapy is stuck, you were working on x. Imagine x was the way it should have been, see what comes in your body.               

 

Chapter 13 Roleplay

Role play can get clients experiencing new aspects of their experience or emotion.

Role play has the ability to change the direction of a clients energy.  IN role play you may act your passive feeling, thus be more active with it, own it etc. Act your sluggishness. You move from being the victim of the energy to the actor of it. You may see some of the attractiveness, or  you may having ownership have the option to take different choices. You can get to understand more about it through how it behaves, you can integrate the two parts of it the active and passive part in one experience.

Two chair work. I am the victim of x. Imagine you in that chair now be x to yourself, be active with it. Now imagine sitting in the chair after you have been x to yourself

Role play works by having both sides integrated, the active and passive parts of your integrated. It works when it is spontaneous and you listen to the body to direct how to behave. In role play you do not want imagining or inventing, rather you want to emerge from the sense of the unpleasant active part how this will act.

Role play essential for dreams: be that part of your  dream. People get stage fright about how they will look from the outside but that isn’t the point or important rather its about letting the energy flow from the inside. So role play instructions, imagine the plays next week, and you must over act, there are big hats and big villains and heroes.

 

Role play instructions

Right now you don’t need to do anything I can see. Just feel your way into the role. Put your attention in your body. Sit forward a little [I demonstrate this]. Loosen your body. Now, imagine being this figure. Wait till your body wants to say or do something. How would you come on stage? Would you walk, jump, sneak, or how? How would you stand? You need not do it now. Just inside you, see how it comes to you to do it—next week. Don’t make it up. Put your attention in the middle of your body, and—wait.”

It is welcome if the client does wish to act the role outwardly. Some clients do stand up to move and act, but no outward activity is necessary. They do need to loosen their body, as I have already explained. Then, when a new bodily energy comes in the client’s body the client’s colour and appearance change. When this happens we can nearly always see it. It will also usually be accompanied by a laugh.

If nothing comes up ask the client to over act.  If playing the role is too painful, e.g. the abuser, then play next to them, so play opposite him in my play, what would you need to do to him? Sit him in the chair.

Contra indicators

1.       Role playing a characteristic that they act out involuntary

Obstacles

Client doesn’t want to as it touches something in them that they want to disown, so emphasise the enjoyment of playing  this role. Also demonstrate.

Energy must be distinguished from action, harm no others, but an imagined murder a day can keep the psychoanalyst away

Energy wants to move forward, you don’t need to behave it in real life to do this, you can imagine it, role play etc

Role play can also connect with disowned feelings, as much as exploring a different aspect of a feeling, the active side.

 Instructions

So you suffer from your emotion, you feel passive in the face of it. To understand it more we can understand it from its side, being active towards you.

So what I want you to do is imagine you are going to put on a pantomime for children with exaggerated characters, really good, really bad characters.

Now take another chair and imagine you sitting there.

Notice inside your body and sense how you would want to create that emotion in your imagined self, what comes up for you, how you would act in this play, walk, talk, behaviour etc. How would you make yourself feel this emotion. You may want to act this or you may want to feel this. Just let this experience emerge in you. If you don’t move then sit forward in your chair.

What did you learn?

Now sit in the other chair, what was it like experiencing the other part of you trying to create anxiety in you?      

 

Chapter 14 Experiential dream interpretation

What comes up in a dream can be processed, so if something hasn’t come up in every day but has n a dream then you can work on it

What comes up in a dream, comes up in an image with some energy attached to it, that will enable a way forward.

There’s something about  a clints process that brings up he dream content. If we forced something to come up from the unconscious it would be disorganizing, a dream is a natural part of a process so content makes sense               

 

Experience does not consist of fixed facts that can be “dug up” separately. There are no separate contents. Experience is a mesh. Any one memory, event, or feeling is part of an experiencing process that implicitly contains many others.

Steps come at the edge of clients process, and should come in their own order.  

Gendlin, Eugene T.. Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy (The Practicing Professional) (Kindle Locations 2819-2820). Guilford Publications. Kindle Edition.

 

Freud: dream as wish fulfilment: Gendlin an energy that wants to move forward

Jung life as opposites, a tear in a cloth as two sides, a dream as an unresolved issue

To experientialise the dream we can experience ither the wish or the conflict, but whichever the energy that is contained within the dream and its direction

Preparatory procedure

Clients can find dreams bizarre and scary, you can help them love their dreams by admiring the creativity\intricacy in them.

It is more important to have a good relation with a dream as opposed to the interpretation you use.

Relate parts of the dream to parts of clients life, does that remind you of anything? Check the felt sense of parts of your life.

The dreams essential contribution is that it turns the clients problem into an image.

IN a dream some parts of it represent the problem, some parts represent how to approach the problem

To look for help in the dream, i.e. anything that provides fresh energy, then just notice how parts of the dream are felt in the body, feel the quality of the object

Reversing unnatural negatives

Sometimes there are things that should be a help but are the opposite. Your generally helpful mother is doing something unhelpful in the dream. Ask then what it would be like if the unhelpful was helpful, notice the feeling in your body. Could this feeling in your body be that which will help you with this problem? So what’s gone on here is the dream has been treated in itself, there was a problem in the dream, imagine it being dealt with , that feeling then in the body can be that which will be needed to address the actual problem that the dream symbolizes. The dream symbolizes the problem, then that which is symbolized as the solution can be it.

There can be a split between dream and dreamer, where there can be a suggestion in the dream that the dreamer thinks is a bad idea.  How experientially the conflict will be resolved is unclear.

Dreamers always want to bring their usual bias to a dream. They miss in the dream what they tend to miss in real life .

I don’t like x, why not, I just don’t. Here the felt sense is not being accessed.

When there is a step with positive energy in a dream its time to stop, a dream is inexhaustible and there will be many more dreams.

Chapter 15 Imagery

You can see a sequence of images move through like watching a movie with no change in client experience. An image is more than a picture, it is representative of a felt sense, which if you drop into that can open up a next step . Its almost the same thing with words, you can have beliefs that come from felt senses and you can argue with them yourself but they are just words and represent felt senses, they aren’t felt senses in themselves.

When there is an image you need to check that it represents the felt sense that you have.

Cancer treatments: see cancer cells, imagine a shark eating the cells=> focusing experience the energy of the shark eating the cells.

To help get a felt sense, then start with the toes and allow a feeling to come up in the middle of the body.  With images, then imagine a picture of the shark, now let that guide your body to have a feeling of being the shark. If there’s a blocking sense, then work with that, otherwise maybe role play the shark to get the felt sense.

Images come when you are relaxed, you can become too relaxed when the body doesn’t talk back

 

To get people seeing images, eyes open, imagine your bed, imagine walking to your bed through the house, ok, now in that space put the new image.

Active day dreaming in a focusing manner, says let the image form from the felt sense

In therapy, does an image come from that, does a bodily sense come from that?

Every living body implies its next step, if it cannot\isn’t taken then it repeats itself, like hunger until the next step is taken

Images are projects which allow us to carry forward things that are not possible. So you get reality, dream, image, day dream, fantasy, imagination.

A focusing step to solve a problem can fist come as an image.       X

Images can help us move forward as they come with a felt sense, an experience, which in turn can lead to another step.

Keeping the parts of you company, making no demands on them. Just accepting them as they are.  Keeping company can also be a protecting.

A warm receptive attitude is vital working with any part of you otherwise the felt sense wont open.

It is not enough to say be warm to the child, as they will be alone, it will just be the child being warm to the child, as it was. We will be there for her, we will be warm to her.

Chapter 16 Emotional Catharsis, Reliving

Catharsis=feel the emotions and express them that were blocked at the time. If this discharge is new it can be valuable, if it is repeated then it is a dead end feeling.

A cathartic expression can last a few minutes, interrupting it can be bad as it says this is so awful, and this could have got so much worse.

To receive cathartic expression can feel bad if you are inexperienced, to give it can feel good, a release.

In traumatic childhood events there is often a double trauma, the event, and then not being able to express yourself.

However catharsis lacks the present sense of the past, which allow us to take fresh steps now.

You can work with a past experience as a past experience, as a memory, but that wont change how things are for you now.

Intense emotion causes a narrowing of experience. The felt sense is wider than experience.

If clients are afraid of their anger from the past, they may need to do little steps to be able to stand beside it.  Then they can touch their anger.

Welcome whatever comes.  Let the process move. Children are taught don’t cry, therapy clients are taught you must cry, both are artificial. Rather just leave a message within side yourself to allow tears when then they comes.

The felt sense can be slight, emotion can be intense

People might not recognize a felt sense as they are used to the intensity and drama of long pent up emotion.

Intensity is not a sign of effectiveness.

Almonds, coriander, crème fraiche

When focusing you don’t want a client to get too relaxed or nothing will come, you likewise  so mobilizing energy can be useful, sit on front of chair, be looser. Its like the window of tolerance.

Chapter 17 Action steps

Aristotle said that people only change by practicing the right action

You need both inner and outer change. Inner is hard to complete, outer is what you want. Outer change without inner would seem to be inauthentic, unowned. Inner change without outer would seem to be insincere and “just words”.

Harmless change: A client may have a bit thing that they are stuck with due to fear, but there are a series of related, preparatory actions that could help move them closer to this thing, that could unstick their fear about it, that they could do

If you get a shift in felt sense then you could ask what action can be taken to consolidate this sift.  Doing something for practice strengthens and consolidates a change.

The easiest action steps to plan\take are the ones that you only depends on yourself for their completion, you are the impediment. If you think of the action as practice then you can’t fail, you will remember that things done for the first time may be hard.          

Bodily energy implies interaction with the environment=>felt sense shift leads to action. If an energy is new it hasn’t led into interaction, so you need small patterns, small actions to lead it into interaction.

Blocked energy creates non interactional circular energy.

Blocked energy creates non interactional circular energy, clients don’t think of practicing a desired transformation in a small safe place, they take too larger step and fail and go back to blocked energy.

What is required though is movement of the energy, not necessarily behavioural movement, so imaginal work, or pure internal shifting work can do it,

Small steps and reward for the step whatever happens. Doing things by will power produce large counter forces, just one failure means will power generated regimes can fail.  If you fail on a small step then you lose a small step, if you lose on will power you lose everything. Its almost as you do a step you want to hear the energy move, congratulations on doing the step. Don’t move up until you feel a change in energy, on the basis of I know I can do that.

Operant behaviour therapy

Record what happens=>reward recording

Psychological paradox, in treatment clients pick goals in early therapy but they pick the goals which are an instance of the things they most (will) need to change.

One positive reinforcement would be self -praise for each step taken. So as you set up the steps then set up the positive self praise by imagination, get a felt sense of this. Clients have a tendency to criticize themselves and you could see that in the imaginal exercise.

You can check each step by saying check and sense that step, would you actually do it.

Loneliness: where do people that you would like go? How many people would you have to meet to find a suitable one? 50? How long does it take to check out a person to see if you like them? 5 Mins?

If you suggest something, listen to the response and welcome all, does the client feel imposed on, or overly grateful, complicit?           

The inner and outer aspects of humans are two sides of the same process: psyche and action.

Action based people may think that changing how they feel isn’t going to change how they act.

Introspective based people may think that changing how the act is artificial and isn’t going to change how they feel.

But a change in action can change how you feel, as you change how you feel you will act differently, but how does that work with clients?

Chapter 18 Cognitive Therapy

Some concepts change the experience of a situation, so seeing something as practice or a challenge…

If one concept\technique works with one person , there’s no reason to believe it works with another person, so you need to see the effects.

Reframing from the therapist’s perspective allows the idea to emerge without imposing. I guess Socratic dialogue does the same but you can be asking questions to produce an answer in the other, which is getting them to suggest it to themselves.

Our bodies and interactions are organized by many more aspects than cognitive.

So there are relational, behavioural,

To not think experientially then you take one thought and then have another, this is intellectualizing. Sometimes thinking can enhance the experience.

You can check your thinking back with the experience where it comes from, to check its validity.

Beliefs are embedded in experience but may take many steps before they can be thought of differently.

How we think about an experience can change it.

Whilst experience can change by how we think about it, it only accepts some reinterpretations and not others.

Some times reframing can block experience. Reframing’s though can take an experience forward.

An effective reframing has a directly sensed effect, there is a new bodily energy

You can’t work out if a cognition is helpful or unhelpful using cognition only, you have to use the felt sense, experience to guide you.

What is the experiential effect of a thought?

To think freshly you have to continually pull back to the experiential effect, and ask does that get it, does that open it up, does that move it forward.  This is thinking at the edge.

To think at the edge is difficult, as it requires us to think in new ways, to stay with the unclear to let new concepts form.

 

Chapter 19 The superego

Superego attacks are one of the main targets of cognitive therapy.  If the superego was a person you would naturally defend a client against their attacks.

Sometimes it can be helpful to return to the pre attack, something attacks you calls you stupid, but before that you were saying. This allows contact with what has come rather than getting caught up with the superego.

The inner criticóthe superegoó the bad parent

Although the superego has something of the bad parent in it, it is worse than they ever were. Freud=the superego dips into the id, it is crazy and contains the aggression and violence that we reject.

The less aggression a person lives out the more aggressive their superego may be.

Superego messages are standardly wrong, they take one fact of a situation not the whole situation.

CT works by changing should to prefer, and challenges the beliefs, my value is based on what others say, perfection is possible, you should be able to control events.  

What is powerful about the superego is not the message that is delivered but how that message is delivered. You can replace your parental values, but if you still allow your new values to be used in superego attacks then you are in problems.

Superego is experienced as coming at me, not from me.

We do not want therapy that is teaching or arguing as that makes the client a passive figure

Superego attacks come at rather than from the client, they make it harder for the client to do what they need to.

The superegos content may be plausible, but its tone is very destructive, and aggressive.

Super ego attacks are not based on the facts, they can attack you one way, then another way, they just like attacking you. I suppose anger is a similar thing

It does make you wonder though, superego as unjustified attack on self in part related to levels of unexpressed violence and aggression, then what part of anger towards others is the same? I guess there are no objective answers to this and you would have to speak to the person involved.

The superego blocks the situation, blocks the client from engaging with the felt sense of it.           

Superego attacks are simplistic and miss the intricacy of a situation. The superego is repetitious.

The superego doesn’t appear moral. If you hurt someone, the superego hurts you, so whilst there is an aspect of morality mixed in with the superego, it isn’t driven by morality. You are neither concerned with the person you hurt or concerned with hurting yourself. It is only when the superego calms down that you are concerned.

You can get superego feelings, whenever I feel anger (which I prohibit) then I feel a pain in my side.

A superego attack can be felt as a thud, a constriction  of energy in the body.  It will be a simple and repetitious message.

So whilst a felt sense is new , enlivening and intricate, superego attacks are simple, repetitious and come with a heavy thud. Superego attacks restrict felt senses.

You get feelings in the superego attack, anger\fear

Do not believe the message of the superego, tune into the felt sense instead.

Humour helps: come back and talk to me when you have something useful to say.

No one is helpful who talks to me in that tone.

Superego attacks disrupts someone’s attention, what was happening before the attack.

One should not spend too much time arguing with the superego, as it nags, it repeats, and it gets it worth in the process, diverting you from where you were.

The superegos energy is your own turned back on yourself. So working with it, the aim is to get this energy back.  You can do a role reversal to shift some of this energy, the superego is attitude, belief, way of acting, tone etc. A lot of fear and insecurity seemingly lie beneath the aggressiveness of the superego.

Superego like a person in group therapy who just judges, criticizes, puts down other people but doesn’t open up themselves. When they are asked to they break down and cry.

When you work with the superego, then you work with the wizard of oz, small person behind the screen, the scared part.

The superego is a protector of the perceived vulnerability, the perceived weakness in you

So what would the other part be the passive worrier part that is a protector. Superego criticizes self, the other part worries about self and world, they both function the same, simple messages, repeated.

If you notice a superego attack, ask what were you doing before the attack, what did the superego stop

Outward Anger may be a defence against super ego attacks we can’t see.  So what happened before the anger.

The main procedure is to move the superego out of the way of the process. The simplest way is to restore and respond to what the client was feeling just before the superego attack.

Chapter 20 The life forward direction

A stirring, from what was numb and dead now has some vitality, so say what we feared, to feel what we couldn’t feel, to do what we wanted to but couldn’t. So there’s an unblocking, a discovering.

A life forward step may be implicit or shy but should be acknowledged and welcomed.

Sometimes clients can punish a little shift, as its not enough. But then it never becomes enough as it was squashed at birth. I guess you can notice it by seeing in the belly energy.

To define or identify a pathology is not the point of therapy, the “pathology” is what is in the way. The same step isn’t right for everyone one, some need more self assertion, some need less, it depends what is getting in the way of their vitality.

Chapter 21 Values

Some therapist believe that the goal of therapy is to reorient a client to the values. Likewise some believe that values come from the outside, post Freud and internality is nothing but chaotic drives. Something is lost when a client gives themselves over to the therapist, clients are drivers of their lives.  We should be looking to strengthen this.

A clients inward arising life forward direction is more precise than any generalized value like friendliness.

As clients talk about obstacles or problems they talk about what gets in the way. What is it that it gets in the way of? There is life and vitality.

People think what happens must be right, that they have a relationship with god and if it happens it must be gods will .

An organism has an innate sense of rightness

You can’t know what a generalized value statement has on someone without checking their experience of it.

We cannot know what a belief means to another without entering into the experiential effect.

The sense of rightness is the experiential turn, that there is a feel of what is right and wrong. It is not known conceptually or in advance.

Specific situations are opportunities to develop specific strengths.

a great change comes from imagining the end of one’s life and then returning from there. It can let one recognize the few things that feel important in one’s life.

 

Gendlin, Eugene T.. Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy (The Practicing Professional) (Kindle Locations 4274-4275). Guilford Publications. Kindle Edition.      

Political, spiritual, and psychological vocabularies seem to cover very different topics, but if taken experientially they are all one implicitly. Each is opposed to oppression, but the different vocabularies give one different leverage with it.

 

Chapter 22 It fills itself in

Unfinished business can be completed. Processes can be stopped in childhood, and their effects manifest now. As a child part shows itself, we the adults can protect it and keep it company, of course, we don’t know what it wants and wouldn’t want to push our attitudes upon it.

To engage with the process, say being scared by your dad as you go about your life, then we need to engage with the experience of that process, not your feelings not about the fact that this happened to you.

So ask what was needed then, and ask it to be here right now (get the energy moving)

Being grounded, being held, supported, a large weight under you. Some people never feel grounded.

We are born with a body and knowledge of how it works, we have legs and a knowing of how to walk and crawl. We are born with a mouth and we know about the breast and suckling. We are born with a body and have a knowledge about attachment.

The baby is born with an implied sense of the mother and the world.

Dreams both contain the general, archetypes, things that all humans face, and a subjective intricacy that no amount of interpretation can exhaust.

 

Chapter 23 The client therapist relationship

The interpersonal interaction avenue is the most important avenue as all other avenues happen within this.

There are two aspects of this the implicit, there is always a relationship and an effect, and the explicit when there are strong feelings and process between client and therapist.

Layers of communication

1.       Semantic Content

2.       Process effect of speaking

3.       Experience in body of speaking

4.       Experience in body of listening

5.       Relational ground between me and listener, that dictates how I may speak\listen

6.       General ground prior to speaking\listening, that dictates how I may speak\listen

The experienced relationship is not what is said about the relationship it is bodily and it is concrete.

What is the concrete actions between me and the client, telling, interrogating, teaching, advising? How does the client respond to the  process, defensively, accommodatingly, do they engage with their experience.  We shouldn’t repeat the standard childhood reality of authority.

Avoid as the therapist being who you want your client to be, curious, thoughtful, energized, etc.

 

If you are stuck in an argument then

“Now I want to grasp what you really mean. Let me see now, you were saying ...”

Problems do not get resolved in the kind of interactions that generated the problem.

When a client is expect put aside your personal concerns and your theoretical ideas, so the space in front of you is free for the other person.

No matter what is happening there always a person in there, struggling to live.

Whilst people are their characteristics and their roles, they are also the person in there struggling to live.

When a client reports themselves as dead, then Gendlin says I know that there is a you under there and I wont stop until I find it.

When we are merged we experience the other as our view of them. When that expectation is broken contact increases.

Personal feelings and interpretations shouldn’t build up so that you end up dumping them on the client.

When there is a relational problem there are 4 aspects of it, the present and past of client and therapist.

Reflection is a way of not re-playing the past, not just re-experiencing it as it is concretely here and now. Reflection should have an effect, should be felt concretely by the other, the other should be experienced.

Without reflecting bit by bit neither the therapist nor the client can establish what is happening, what is really meant and felt.

Chapter 24 Should we call it therapy