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We offer coaching and training
on systemic changework, quality relationships, nonverbal
communication and changing limiting beliefs.
Focusing on Emotions & Unconscious Communication
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Clinical explanations of why you are upset are
unlikely to help you, and cognitive problem solving rarely resolves
emotional states. Endlessly pondering a trauma or unpleasant
relationship experience is unlikely to help you
and may worsen the consequences.
Focusing provides an effective way by
which you can communicate with your unconscious mind (body-mind) through
your feelings. A coach can use focusing during coaching sessions to find,
stabilize and communicate with inner experiences.
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Eugene Gendlin wrote about inner communication in a
book titled Focusing. Gendlin's focusing
can be sorted into six steps:
- Identify your concerns
- Feel (a felt sense)
- Handle
- Resonate
- Ask
- Experience a felt shift of the
felt sense
Focusing is one way to improve inner
communication, and you can find many more ways in our Systemic
Coaching. Why not add focusing to other methods that you find
useful? Let your results guide you about what works best for you.
If any step feels wrong in your body, stop and back up
until you sense what is wrong. This keeps you safe. Focusing may not
work for you exactly as we describe, but it is not likely to hurt you.
If you sense something that does not feel right, stay with it until the
information unfolds into consciousness.
Yoga of Relationships .
Meaning of Life
. Mentorship & Integrity
Are you Damaged?
If nothing happens at all during focusing - it may be
that your unconscious body-mind will not communicate with you. This may
be a result of trauma or PTSD, or
it may follow therapist abuse or
toxic training. Your own mind
may have good reason to distrust you and your decisions.
If you trusted and opened yourself to
someone, for example a therapist, a cult leader or a trainer, and
later you felt badly hurt or abused by that person or
philosophy, your body-mind may not allow you deep access until you remedy
that harm to your sense of life. We call this mentor damage.
Worse, you may become unable to recognize
healthy mentorship and your body may be unwilling to communicate
feelings about "What makes sense in life?" Our coaching includes solutions for the consequences of trauma,
therapist abuse, cult membership,
trainer damage and toxic mentorship.
Focusing
The goal of focusing is to experience an internal awareness
called a felt sense. This is a physical experience, not mental nor
emotional. Examples are the vague, general senses (men talk about gut feelings
and women about female intuitions) you may have about
some situations, events or people.
Gendlin wrote that these felt
senses can indicate psychological and emotional problems, and
allow them to be corrected. A change towards awareness or a solution, is
accompanied by a detectable "felt shift ". Your body seems to
know what makes sense and offer an easing or loosening up.
Focusing Steps
Focusing can be described as six general steps,
although if you practice focusing, you may experience a smooth
transition from a question to an experience of revelation. If you
want to try focusing, take each step slowly and gently. If you
find difficulty, don't push, just gently wait and then move on.
Step 0. Reality check
Is this moment an appropriate time to do this?
Are you likely to be distracted or disturbed?
Step 1. Find your concerns
Be silent, relax ... and pay attention inwardly, in
your body, especially in your chest and abdomen. Ask inside, "How is
my life generally? What makes sense right now?" and feel whatever
comes. Just focus on feelings within your body. Let
answers come slowly from your sensing.
When some feeling comes, mentally give it space.
Say "Yes, that�s there. I can feel that, there."
Then ask yourself what else you feel. Wait again, and sense. You
may find several things.
Step 2. Feel
From among whatever came, select one feeling. Just
notice which part of the body. If there are many parts to
the one thing you have chosen � and you can feel all of these parts
together. Pay attention there where you usually feel things,
and in there you can get a sense of what all of this feels like. Let
yourself feel the unclear sense of all of that - the felt sense.
Step 3. Handle
What word might describe the quality of this unclear
felt sense? Let a
word, a phrase, or an image come up from the felt sense. It might
be a quality-word, like sticky, scary, stuck, heavy, or a
phrase, or a mental image. Stay with the experience describing the
felt sense till something fits it just right.
Step 4. Resonate
Go back and forth between the felt sense and the word
(or phrase, or image). Check how they resonate with each other. Check
if there is a body signal that indicates resonance. To do
it, feel the felt sense again, and remember the signal.
Allow the felt sense and the word or picture to change, if they do,
until they feel just right in symbolizing the quality of the felt sense.
Step 5. Ask
Ask inside: what is it, about this whole situation,
that makes this quality (which you have named or pictured)? Find the
felt sense again, fresh and vivid (not just remembered).
When you sense it again, feel it and ask inside,
"What makes this problem so ___?" or, "What is
within this sense?"
If you get a quick answer without a shift in the felt
sense, just let that kind of answer go. Return your attention to your
body and freshly feel the felt sense again. Then ask again.
Stay with the felt sense until something happens with
a small shift or a slight release.
Step 6. Receive
Accept whatever comes and stay with
it. If you simply accept whatever comes, more will come. Now you can experience
an open, non-judging attention to something which you have not yet verbalized,
which can help you feel clear on what you want. This is set apart from most
other methods of inner awareness by the felt sense and an engaged
accepting attention.
Coaching & Focusing
If you experience a felt sense, then you have
focused. The felt sense and shift may provide important
information about your sense of life and what impedes
it. The location of the feelings in your body
may offer information about the relationship type to which
the feeling is relevant. See
Yoga of Relationships.
Recovering Lost Resources
Freud first used hypnosis to uncover unconscious conflicts, and then
developed free association. For nearly 100 years, psychoanalysts
asked people to lie on a couch
and talk about whatever came into their mind. As psychoanalysis
may take
300 - 500 hours, few people will now pay for free association.
We offer faster, more elegant solutions. |
Click HERE for Focusing Plagiarism is theft. Copyright � Martyn Carruthers 2000-2011
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