What is it that people are reaching for when they call us, perhaps after months or years of deliberation, sometimes with a number crumpled in a pocket almost forgotten until that daring call? What are they seeking when they summon all their courage to ring the bell of a stranger, taking the chance to entrust us with their struggles, thwarted aspirations, stifling confusion, irresolvable conflict, worry and perhaps shame - to invest themselves in something called “THERAPEUTIC CHANGE?”
What is this relationship, this process, that promises to meaningfully engage hope in as little as one or two hours a week? When that call comes and the doorbell rings, what do us as therapists have to offer? How do we take the risk of holding these tendrils of potential new direction and this elusive promise of “therapeutic change?”
As focusing oriented relational psychotherapists, we put our hopes in two interwoven processes – new relational experience, and connecting to and speaking from implicit knowing. These two processes work together. They are like two sides of the same priceless coin.
On the one side, the therapy relationship is a central change agent - a partnership in which we therapists become full participants in an interactional dance of “becoming.” We see ourselves and our clients not as encapsulated separate beings that need “solving” or “fixing,” but as mysteriously complex, open-ended, always becoming, selves poised on the brink of possible steps of new development. The therapist and patient find and become a new living, and out of this “new us,” new self experience emerges.
On the other side of the coin, we look to the deep implicit river of life that runs under and through individual experience with its own directionality and meanings that propel the process forward. Our hope resides in our ability to recognize this undercurrent and to help our clients to tap into its resources - to find where it is damned-up or diverted and follow its natural flow. We have and are so much more than can be grasped by our conscious awareness. The ability to touch into and trust the implicit dimension, to lift it out through language and to harness its resources is what we call focusing.
We give careful and skilled attention to how “the new” – the sought for “therapeutic change” – is emerging. We look to how we are interacting with it and can help it to coalesce right now in the very moment of the session. We also track how the therapy partnership is developing over time, open for the inevitable, unpredictable twists and turns of direction along the way. We want to stay grounded in our connection to the implicit meanings and strivings of inevitable relational clashes, disappointments and seemingly unsolvable dilemmas as well as the hopeful satisfying surprises. We know that these bumps in the road hold unforeseen possibilities for new ways of experiencing self and other that make up what we call “therapeutic change.”
by Lynn Preston
The Concept of Focusing
The process of focusing entails touching into the implicit intricacy of body knowing that is alive within us beneath the surface. It is a palpable felt sense that we can access.
We know we have found this implicit knowing when it brings an experience of release, a “ring of truth.” It comes with fresh language, image and metaphor. The focusing process seems paradoxical as it simultaneously produces a feeling of discovery and of creation.
Focusing has a sense of directionality, a forward movement. It moves our lives forward by helping us to process obstacles to change and listen to a wise and authentic part of ourselves. It brings both subtle and transformative steps of growth. For me, focusing offers a lifetime path — a practice, in addition to my meditation practice, as part of my ongoing spiritual and psychological journey.
by Eli Dickson