Focusing

Focusing grew out of research by philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin and his colleagues beginning in the 1950s. They wanted to understand a fundamental question:

What happens differently in therapy among clients who actually improve?

What emerged was a difference in how clients related to their own experience.

This eventually led to the Experiencing Scale, a seven-level measure of depth of experiential processing. At the lower levels, people talk about events, explain themselves intellectually, or report emotions. At higher levels, attention turns inward: clients stay with immediate felt experience, explore what is not yet fully understood, and allow new meanings to emerge from it.

And the finding has held up. A 2017 meta-analysis of 10 studies and 406 clients found that higher levels of experiencing predicted better psychotherapy outcomes across different therapeutic approaches. The authors concluded that experiencing is a probable common factor in psychotherapy.

Gendlin developed Focusing as a way of cultivating this capacity.

At its center is the felt sense: a bodily sense of the whole of a situation that contains more than we consciously know.

We pause and turn inward. We allow something vague to form, then look for a word, phrase, image, gesture, or metaphor that captures it.

A knot.

A heavy stone.

Something trapped behind glass.

We then check it against the body: does this fit?

When it does, there is often a bodily recognition. Something previously vague has found a form, and from there, the experience can begin to unfold and reveal more.

This movement from talking about our experience to attending directly to it became foundational to the experiential tradition in psychotherapy.