American philosopher Eugene Gendlin had a thesis about where new “meaning” comes from. The book based on that thesis is called Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning. Gendlin wanted to try out his thesis on psychotherapy as he figured that successful psychotherapy involved altering current meaning construction. He worked with a research group at the U. of Chicago centered around Carl Rogers who was developing what became client-centered psychotherapy. What the group at Chicago found was that college freshmen could learn to identify who would have a successful experience in psychotherapy after 2 sessions. They discovered that success didn’t correlate with the therapist or the theory behind the therapy; rather it correlated with a kind of skill, something some clients already knew how to do when they entered therapy. Gendlin wanted to know if you could teach that skill to people who didn’t already know how to do it - the crux was that they seemed to be validating their words against some kind of internal “experience”.
Focusing is the result of that effort to try to teach that skill that successful psychotherapy clients already seemed to know how to do. It was designed to give therapy away for free. Focusing is a (1.) Scaffold for learning how to do this - Gendlin’s 6 steps; (2.) An accumulated wisdom of helps and hindrances in doing this. (3.) A skill/resource you can call on as needed and that becomes more skillful with practice.
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AuthorI am Andy Hoover. I was first exposed to what would later become focusing as a college freshman in 1972. I can't say that I understood then what it was about. About a decade later, when I came across the Focusing book, I was researching "right-brain" practices as the key to religious experience. Focusing was a perfect fit. I became a Quaker because I came across Quaker writings that sounded a lot like Focusing. Archives
May 2019
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