Theory and practice of focusing-oriented psychotherapy: Beyond the talking cure

When there is no change in the interactional field around us or in us, our normal complexity breaks down. We enter the structure-bound pattern completely. Repetition and stereotypical reactions occur in many different areas. The stopped parts of us cannot cannot respond to fresh and new inputs any more, symbols do not…

To follow or encourage a growth direction is very different from promoting a set of values... Good and bad must be rethought just as all notions of content must be rethought. Gendlin is careful to protect an unfolding experience from being dumped upon by something "positive". he does not want a predefined "good" or "bad"…

Some cultures, like America, value the positive affect that seems to signal internal happiness; (...) While we cannot assume that the "positive" experience is a censored, controlled, or less true event, the cultural reinforcement of "positive" demands that each insight gets a pink bow before it can be accepted as true.…

(...) concept of being-in-the-world. The hyphens in this term are meant to indicate that one being, one event, is both the person and the situations in which the person lives. Human beings are encounterings in the world and with others... (...) an emotion such as sadness is not a feeling inside, but a situation. Humans…

(...) personality is a theory of how people live, rather than what they are and do. People are their living, not the products, not the facts and the concepts they make... The existential view denies that any theory can render what a human person is, since that is always in the making by living, and thus radically open.

"Theory does not ground life," Gendlin writes. Truly most of what we do in our daily lives are not "based on" any theory. I love listening to jazz, but that is not "based on" any theory, for example. Yet theoretical concepts point to phenomena, they enable us to see things in ways that otherwise would be difficult or…

(...) theory of the development of psychopathology (...) in which disruptions to attachment bonds in childhood, whether through absence, neglect, withdrawal of love, or abuse, when not followed by sufficient repair, are experienced as literal threats to the organism's survival. These experiences leave a lasting effect on…

Felt senses are not to be confused with somatic experience, mere emotion or thinking. Rather, the felt sense is a multivocal feel we have of this moment prior to symbolization. Emotions, words, gestures, and the like are already "cut"--symbolized--from the more basic level of our ongoing experience of this moment. (...) A…

Weiser Cornell outlines five simple reasons why so many have not yet heard of Focusing: it isn't flashy, it's too general, the original steps are frozen as they were when Focusing was first published (1978), it is too radical, and it appears on a person's life somewhat mysteriously, "when needed", not as a "tool" or skill.

Focusing-Oriented Therapy, an inner experiential process, centers its attention on the inwardly felt body that knows how life should be lived. Its essence therefore largely beyond the talking cure. (...) [It] incorporates pre-linguistic or non-linguistic factors that facilitate the client's carrying-forward process. (...)…