DRMacIver's Notebook
Speaking from the heart
Speaking from the heart
“Focusing” is the name for a basic therapy skill coined by Eugene Gendlin.
The story goesI believe that this story is apocryphal and Gendlin already knew the conclusion he wanted to reach and then used this as a sort of post hoc justification for it. But it seems both plausible to me that this is what you observe and also I think the method works, so it’s a useful illustration regardless. that Gendlin and his students wanted to figure out what caused some people to improve in therapy and others not, so they looked at transcripts of lots of therapy patients and analysed them for what made the difference. Eventually they realised that the biggest impact was not from anything the therapists did, but whether the patients said “Um” a lot.
The explanation for this observation is this: If you’re speaking effortlessly and fluently about your experiences, you probably aren’t paying attention to how you’re feeling, and in particular you’re not checking in with whether what you’re saying actually feels like. If you imagine someone saying “Yup everything is absolutely great, I’m doing fine” while their face calls them a liar, that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. Frequently people will do this not because they’re lying, but because they don’t even notice that they’re not telling the truth.
When progress happens, they instead say “Yup everything is absolutely great, I’m doing fine. Um. Except…” and then start talking about the actually important thing.
Gendlin describes the process of realising what you said wasn’t true and noticing the feeling you get about it as paying attention to it as noticing the felt sense of the problem. This example comes from an exercise he suggests somewhereThis might have been in his book, Focusing, but I think I remember this as a suggestion from a friend reporting on Gendlin, so it might also be something else. is to say out loud “Everything in my life is completely fine.”, notice how that feels, and then start saying “Except…” until you run out of things to list.
Anyway this is the core of Focusing as I’ve understood it to date: It’s a fundamentally corrective process, where you say things, then you find out the ways in which they’re not true, and you use the felt sense to correct them. I’m pretty good at this part.Thus granting me a good grade in therapy, a thing that is both normal to want and possible to achieve.
But there’s another part to it that I’ve never been very good at, which is where you let the felt sense “speak directly”.
One problem with the speaking first and correcting it is that thoughts are fast and feelings are slow, and it’s very easy for whatever part of you that is feeling the thing to get overwhelmed, even when you’re trying your best to be helpful. I was trying to explain this to Lisa the other day and the analogy I used was imagine talking to a shy child who isn’t very good at speaking yet. Even if you correctly anticipate what it’s trying to say to you, the mere act of anticipating it can make it less willing to talk.
What you (or at least I) have to do instead is say some words, slowly, and then if it’s not actually clear to you what the next words to come out be that would feel right are… pause, and wait for them to come. Sit there, just letting there be a long gap in your sentence, until the next words come out.
The frustrating thing about this is that it works much much better if there’s someone listening, and that someone has to sit patiently with you and wait. This is hard.
I mentioned I was explaining this to Lisa the other day. This was a very good conversation in which I was trying to express some things I was feeling sad about, and part of it lead to a very good meta conversation about how to have such conversations. One thing that came up is that Lisa and I have very different internal experiences when we’re clearly struggling with words, and that in the ones that Lisa has and thus was expecting I was also having, trying to help complete the other party’s sentences is actually very helpful.
I think there are roughly three things I experience that lead to this sort of halting speech:
- This thing of waiting for a felt sense to express itself properly.
- “Tip of my tongue” style aphasia where I know the word but I’m struggling to find it.
- Situations where I know what I want to say but feel paralysed from saying it, out of fear or similar.
In the second two, completing a sentence correctly is quite useful. It either tells you there’s nothing to be afraid of because they already know what you’re going to say, or it gets you out of the aphasia.I actually don’t like it when people help me out when I’m having aphasia, but that’s a different and much less important issue.
Even in the classic “corrective” sense of Focusing, where you’re trying to express a sentence that feels true, completing the sentence is quite helpful, because it gives you something concrete to check against.
But… when trying to express myself around something deeply felt and poorly understood, I think completing the sentence doesn’t help even when the completion is right, because much of the point is not just to say the true thing, but to experience the feeling fully, and if you skip to the end you don’t get to do that, and the whole process is left incomplete.
The result though is that you need patience when talking to someone doing this, even when that someone is yourself. It’s very easy to return to the lightning quick world of words and race ahead, but sometimes you just have to sit with the feeling until it’s ready to talk.