Focusing is a way of Being-with Greg Madison, PhD
By: Greg Madison Ph.D.
Click here to contact Greg and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile
Eugene Gendlin is an existential philosopher who wants to point us back to our lived
experience. He invites us to stand in our experience and then to ask from there, ‘What kind of
world is this?’ ‘What is a human being if this kind of experience is possible?’ He wants to
return the human being to a central place in our various ways of understanding life. Since the
1950s, Gendlin’s interests have lead him from the writings of Dilthey, Heidegger, Merleau-
Ponty, etc. into collaboration with imminent psychotherapists and psychological researchers. Gendlin saw therapy as a unique place where the process of symbolising experience could be explored.
According to Gendlin,A person struggles with and finds words and other expressions for unclear
– but lived – experience…What was felt but undefined by the client was
thought to be unmeasurable and incomprehensible and it made people
uncomfortable to talk about such a variable… When it correlated with
success in therapy while other variables did not, people began to try to
understand it more seriously (personal communication, c.f. Friedman,
2000:47).
This ability to stay with an unclear (but clearly felt) bodily experience constitutes a natural
form of self-reflection called ‘Focusing1’. Gendlin and others found that they could help
people re-gain and value this awareness of how we experience our life situations. Focusing is
a way of paying attention to one’s being-in-the-world, one’s interaction as it is experienced
through the individual (but not separate) body. A felt sense is a temporary wave from the sea
of being – it is understood as on-going process, not ‘internal content’. The psychotherapeutic
usefulness of Gendlin’s philosophy is that it is ‘methodologically individualised’. But, he is
concerned that this might be ‘…misunderstood as individual rather than social or historical.
The historical process is individual when we think further. History moves through individuals
because only individuals think and speak’ (c.f. Levin,1997,p.95). So, according to Gendlin,
our experience is not ‘subjective’ or ‘intrapsychic’ but interactional.
Life is not pasted together out of unrelated bits of perception, inherited concepts, or isolated
internal objects. ‘We humans live from bodies that are self-conscious of situations. Notice the
‘odd’ phrase ‘self-conscious of situations’. ‘Conscious’, ‘self’, and ‘situations’ are not three
objects with separate logical definitions’ (Gendlin, 1999,p.233).
Felt sensing often occurs in the middle area of the body, where we typically feel things;
throat, chest, stomach, abdomen. Thinking and speaking while in contact with felt sensing is
exact and not arbitrary. For example, I cannot convince a ‘tight clouded’ feeling in my chest
to be something other than what it is. And if out of that feeling comes the word ‘terrified’, and
there’s a sense that word really ‘fits’, then I can’t just make it something else. I am not free to
just change it, to mould it into something nicer or more acceptable, or more consistent with
my view of myself as a courageous person. Focusing entails acknowledging the reality of
‘what is’, and then ‘being with’ it, rather than ‘doing to’ it.
At times, my client and I can pay attention to this level of awareness explicitly so that we are
together in a way that keeps us in contact with the felt experience of our being together. This
includes being open to a flow of real-time movement, the said and unsayable, that exceeds
and may contradict our own ideas about therapy/psychology/philosophy. ‘Such sensitive
1 This initially unclear bodily feeling is referred to as the ‘felt sense’. It is physically felt, more than clearly
defined emotion, and incorporates a whole constellation of this and other situations, now and other
times, self and others, elaborated by language. By staying with a felt sense, a shift in meaning may
eventually occur that brings a physically felt relief in the way the body holds that issue. The term
‘Focusing’ is confusing in that it refers both to this natural level of awareness and to the simple method
of re-learning this.
phenomenological attention to an implicit speech which is “not yet formed” is precisely what
is precluded by standard conceptual thinking about the body’ (Wallulis, in Levin, 1997, p.277-
8). It is a radical hermeneutics where nothing is ever ‘understood’ for long. Psychotherapy is
much more than just Focusing, but learning to make explicit the implicit and vague (but
clearly felt) process of experience, can free us from forms of therapy that repeatedly obsess
over the content of the client’s narrative.
Focusing is the opposite of forcing received wisdom onto our experience (even if it’s received
from esteemed philosophers or teachers, including Focusing teachers). It is the opposite of
saying ‘tell me what to do’ or of imposing the inner dialogue of social ‘shoulds’ before we
even know what we actually feel about something. It is a philosophically-grounded practice
that is useful in therapy as well as our own daily living.
©Copyright 2008 by Greg Madison. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry.
Click here to contact Greg and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile