What is Focusing?
Focusing is a way of doing therapy and it is all about experiencing. The idea was discovered by Eugene Gendlin and Carl Rogers, that the “aha” moments that client have, when they have revelations, relate to a shift in their experience.
Experience is a very everyday thing, it’s how we feel inside. So, for instance if you think of someone you know well, and think of all of them rather than part of them, you might get a sense inside you. This sense might be a combination of a vague feeling in your body, some thoughts, images, that relate to the whole sense of the person. Almost the outcome of a whole symphony of parts.
This is one of the key parts of focusing, that it focuses on the whole sense of something, and your experience of that.
Its base theory is that our experience of things, precedes our concepts of things and there is always more that we experience that we conceive. It also thinks that human problems are often very complex and that the way to engage with them is via this sense of the whole problem, rather than breaking it down into parts, as doing that, loses the sense of the problem.
So how focusing gets used in therapy, is to drop into your sense, your experience of what we are talking about. We give that experience some space, and some company and allow yourself to feel it. In doing this, you may well notice things that you haven’t done before. There may be vague or complex experiences and that in putting a name to it, might give you a new sense of a way forward with this experience.
This is another part of the theory that our experience is a process, like digestion it moves towards somewhere, like our hunger moves towards food, for instance. So, listening to our experience we can notice where it is pointing which can often be helpful for us.
The final part of theory for focusing is it looks to deeply listen with all of your being, so it encourages and offers you a whole body listening, where the vague, the complex, the simple, the difficult are all welcomed.
