Very simple and a prerequisite to a bunch of other things. Basically the ability to notice feelings in your body, give them labels that fit, and notice a shift/update/insight. Gendlin describes Focusing as the thing that differentiates people who have success in talk therapy vs those that don’t (as some will notice when something feels off in their body, investigate and update, and others just remain in narrative land for the entire session and never update)
From the intro section of the book by Gendlin
- At the University of Chicago and elsewhere in the past fifteen years, a group of colleagues and I have been studying some questions that most psychotherapists don’t like to ask out loud. Why doesn’t therapy succeed more often? Why does it so often fail to make a real difference in people’s lives? In the rarer cases when it does succeed, what is it that those patients and therapists do? What is it that the majority fail to do?
- Seeking answers, we studied many forms of therapy from classical approaches to recent ones. We analyzed literally thousands of therapist–patient sessions recorded on tape. Our series of studies has led to several findings, some very different from what we and most other professional therapists expected.
- First, we found that the successful patient—the one who shows real and tangible change on psychological tests and in life—can be picked out fairly easily from recorded therapy sessions. What these rare patients do in their therapy hours is different from the others. The difference is so easy to spot that, once we had defined it, we were able to explain it to inexperienced young undergraduates, and they too were able to sort out the successful patients from the others.
- What is this crucial difference? We found that it is not the therapist’s technique—differences in methods of therapy seem to mean surprisingly little. Nor does the difference lie in what the patients talk about. The difference is in how they talk. And that is only an outward sign of the real difference: what the successful patients do inside themselves.
- The purpose of this book is to tell you what they do and how you can do it. For this uncommon skill, this internal act, not only is useful in a psychotherapist’s office, it is a way of approaching any problem or situation.
- We have taught this skill to large numbers of people not in therapy in subsequent years. Now that it seems anyone can learn it, I also want this book to be readable by anyone. The book is addressed to professionals, but not only to them. Therefore I am writing it simply and not in the technical manner of my philosophical and scientific publications.
- The skill we have observed and defined is not only for problems. Among those who know it, it becomes an internal source that is consulted many times every day. I am using it right now, in the process of writing this book.
- The skill I am about to teach you is called focusing.
- It will enable you to find and change where your life is stuck, cramped, hemmed in, slowed down. And it will enable you to change—to live from a deeper place than just your thoughts and feelings.
Visual notes
- Hideous visual note I made back in 2022 when I was brand new 👇
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