Focusing in Clinical Practice: The Essence of Change

Disidentification is not dissociation, and it is not even distance. It is company.

Human beings, including you and me, are ongoing interaction. We don’t exist separately from our environment and then start interacting with it. We are interaction between body and environment, so we (like all living things) are both body and environment.

a felt sense is an experienced sense of a whole situation.

“Focusing is this very deliberate thing where an ‘I’ is attending to an ‘it’” (Gendlin, 1990, p. 222). “The client and I, we are going to keep it, in there, company” (p. 216).

This is not a muscle-held memory—though of course it relates to the past, since this body wasn’t born in this moment. The felt sense has formed freshly, now.

Once a distinction is made between “I” or “self” and “this” or “it,” this opens the way to the possibility of an inner relational dialogue in which the “I” listens to what the “it” is revealing. But in Focusing, the “it” is not considered an entity. It is an emergent process and may change to the point of dissolution without fighting for “its” iden

Often a felt sense is unclear at first, hard to articulate, requiring fresh metaphors and possibly images or gestures to capture its quality.

none of them seemed to engage with the obvious fact that meanings can be present before the words that describe them.

A felt sense is a fresh, immediate, here-and-now experience that is actually the organism forming its next step in the situation the person is living in.